#most of the time I did benign things that they didn’t agree with | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

just-a-sleepy-idiot · 2 months

Text

Vivarium Martin Drabble: Changing his mind on trapping you

Ok so fun fact he is played by the actor who plays Anderson in BBC Sherlock, and he has that neurodiverse rizz so. If you don’t know him but would like to, I highly highly recommend you watch the movie. If you don’t mind spoilers and want to read this now go watch this clip of him!! He’s so cute like-

Content/Warnings: Gender neutral Reader, Height difference, Spoilers for the movie

Martin was good enough at being human, at least his understanding of their behavior was sufficient to lure couples like the Thompsons into their assigned housing units. It was important to coax them into a house viewing, it took practice to say the right words and often enough the humans had left beforehand, promising they would come back another time. He had smiled, drumming his fingers on the desk in anticipation of their visit but found himself confused when they didn’t return. Why didn’t they return?

The quicker they agreed to come along and view the house the better it was, he found. Because he didn’t spend much time with them, but it was apparently enough for them to start finding him ‚off putting‘. He heard them well enough when they went to look at the back yard, and that phrase was like an echo to him like the seemingly indistinguishable houses all around them. Off putting. Off was wrong, wasn’t it? ‚Your sock is off Martin‘. ‚Fuck off kiddo‘. ‚She ran off.‘

He doesn’t have a deep understanding of the things they said to him back then, they talk differently from his species. But they have the same facial structure and that makes him understand what it meant when they furrowed their brows at him. Or when they grimaced and shouted.

Martin tries to do his job right and he feels like he is getting better at it. Being a Salesman seems to work better than being perceived as a person, they accept it much more than citizen-him when he closes the shop. Every shop closes at some hour so they have to do that too.

Never before since he took over the office did only one person come in. They always came in two. Yet there you came in without a partner who looked with you.

You looked around a bit, he watched you from his seat for a moment longer than he usually did before approaching the clients. You were young and you didn’t wear a ring. Most who came here wore a ring in different variations, but always on the same finger. Your hands were empty though except for a shopping bag.

„Hello!“ He exclaimed after a few moments and stood up to walk around the desk. Your head turned to meet his eyes and you replied with a enthusiastic hello of your own. Your pupils widened, he recalled possible reasons for this in his head such as benign episodic unilateral mydriasis, migraines or attraction.

„Do you have a migraine?“ You slightly tilted your head to the side and raised your brows in wonder, „No, but the heat outside might honestly work up to one. Do you?“ You answered, to which he nodded thoughtfully. „No.“ He seamlessly transitioned to offer you his hand for a handshake, „Lovely to meet you!“ You laughed and took his hand, „Lovely to meet you too, I‘m Y/n.“ He noticed how easily his hand engulfed yours. You were a shorter one. At least much shorter than him.

You squinted your eyes when you laughed and slightly opened your lips. Unlike other animals this was the opposite of a threat in humans, smiling so broadly that the other person could see their teeth was a sign of real friendliness.

Martin introduced himself as well. He used the last name of the family who fostered him, Bailey. His Nametag didn’t say so, but he liked to introduce himself as such regardless.

„This neighborhood is really something special, we already sold most of the houses to some lovely couples.“ He recited. „We are hoping to build a strong diverse community.“

You approached one of the miniature houses, you didn’t have to bend down as much to look into them. There was something hard to read in the way you looked at it. It was one emotion distilled clearly into this moment, one that he had seen before, but blurred by other things. This thing his parents had in their eyes when they said they wanted to go home. But you did not look sad or angry. Just that.. third thing, that he couldn’t name.

He came to stand next to you and eyed the miniature. „I grew up in a home like this.“ He went to houses like the one he was fostered a lot but it was not his. It started to drizzle outside, the humid air tearing from the rain. He didn’t know why he told you that. You looked up to him again. „You grew up in a house from this company?“ Well, that was technically correct. What you didn’t know was that it was this exact setup too in front of you, because nothing ever really differed from the design. „Yes.“ You hummed and looked at the miniature again. „Was it nice?“ Was it nice? He wanted to repeat but managed to hold it back. When he was in the presence of humans it was hard not to do it.

„I don’t know.“ He said truthfully, for once, because neither did he know what would be appropriate to answer to specifics about his personal experience nor did he even really know what he felt about it to begin with. When he took over this office he looked up human data on the word as well, the variety of definitions were confusing but nonetheless enlightening. Because Hotels were also supposed to make you feel ‚at home‘ even though you didn’t permanently lived there. Apparently it was about being welcomed and being around like minded people. He did not have that experience there, so did Home still qualify for it?

„I understand. It’s not as easy as perfect or awful, a home is always kinda both.“ You said and nodded at him. Martin blinked. He didn’t even have to scramble for words to explain it any better, you seemingly understood what he meant just like that.

His species mimicked their words and behavior, but expressions were something that he genuinely seemed to share with them in a way. It was clumsy and sometimes less attuned, but it overlapped to an extent were it wasn’t just mimicry. So he felt a smile further tug at his salesperson-friendly-welcoming-human-attitude, something from inside, when you send him an understanding smile.

Your eyes caught sight of the rain, and turned slightly to look outside. It was really starting to pour now. „Oh finally, look how lovely.“ You exhaled with relief. „The rain is lovely?“ He asked, because when someone came in while it rained they would usually very verbally complain about it. They didn’t like to get wet except for cleaning.

„Yes! It makes everything much cozier, and it smells so flowery in the spring.“ You explained. „I used to work in a small shop like this too, not real estate, but it was always nice when we had a rainy day. It gives you more privacy, you can make yourself a coffee and just watch people walk past.“ He watched you intently as you talked about it, it seemed to be something that makes you happy. „You used to work in a small shop like this too.“ He repeated, „We have that in common.“ He noticed, because truly everything else about him wasn’t alike anyone, it was just copied off everyone- except this thing right here. „That’s true.“ You said, and you didn’t even seem weirded out by the way he recited your words.

Martin found it interesting that you also watched people go by. He knew why he did it, but he didn’t know why actual humans wanted to observe each other. Yet there you were, also observing him back when you looked back up at him. „What do you like to do on the job?“ You wanted to know, and it felt like you were more on a common place now. Because you weren’t asking the representative of this company in front of you, you asked Martin the Person who was also in sales like you.

He genuinely needed to think about that. „I like learning new things about people.“ New phrases, new gestures, it was exciting. He especially appreciated this thing he saw the other day, where two people walked and they unnecessarily entangled their arms with each other. Why did they do it if it meant that they could only use one arm now? It was funny. „Thats true, coming by so many different customers every day is really interesting!“

He looked outside as well now, hearing the rain drum against the glass. The clouds darkened the sky so much that the contrast to the light inside became stronger. It never rained where he grew up, there was no weather at all. Seeing Humans enjoy different kinds of weather was unknown to him. „We could drive to Yonder right now if you’d like! It’s only half an hour drive away.” He offered now, eyeing you from the side. “Do you have a car?” You shook your head, “I don’t have a car, would you mind if I come along in yours?” “Certainly, let me get my keys.” He went to the back for a moment and you took out a small umbrella from your bag. When he came back he really only got his keys, no bag, no jacket or umbrella of his own. When you both stepped outside you unfolded the umbrella while he locked the door, turning a sign that said that he’d be right back.

Then Martin found himself in yet another unexpected moment, because you shuffled close to him and held the umbrella over both of your heads. He blinked down at you, you were ducking your head towards him so you wouldn’t get hit by the rain. The umbrella was quite small and probably only meant to fit one person, but you tried to make it fit anyway. You were trying to protect him from the rain too? “Ok, lead the way.” You said, and smiled up at him.

Martin didn’t say anything as he was still surprised by this gesture, and first he walked way too fast, but as you paced up as well he understood that he needed to be patient and match your smaller steps. He curiously looked at you from the corner of his eye, your arms were touching. When you stood so close it was even more obvious that you were shorter than him, you even struggled to extend your arm to make sure you didn’t accidentally hit his head. And then you.. did that thing, your hand came up to gently loop itself under his arm, holding onto him. “May I?” You asked, making sure he was comfortable with you getting a bit closer in the moment. It was.. restricting, but somehow comfortable? Like the compression of a hug but on a smaller scale.

He smiled slightly and nodded yes, eyes flickering to your hand on his lower arm for a moment. He felt your warmth through the fabric of his dress shirt, it was strong against the cold from the rain. “May I?” He repeated now, offering to the take the umbrella from you and you nodded with a smile. Martin took the handle from you, hands slightly brushing against each other as he did so.

You walked like that together for a while until you reached the car. He opened the door for you to get in before going around, quickly figuring out how to close this thing before getting into the driver’s seat next to you. When he looked over you were smiling, looking out of the front window at the rain. „We should listen to some music.“ You said, „Let’s turn on the radio!“

He obliged, this one took more calibrating, but eventually some tunes came out as the engine came to life and he exited the parking spot. It was a soft melody, and you seemed to recognize it because you started to sing along the words. Martin hummed along, trying to mimic the melody as well, because he didn’t know how to sing. You drove through the street and he couldn’t help but enjoy the way you were both mimicking the music. And you smiled widely and glanced at him while doing it, squinting your eyes once more in this disarming way.

He never thought he could do these things with a human.

You kept on listening to music for a while, traffic was holding you up quite a bit. You yawned a bit and snuggled yourself further into your coat, but to no effect. The cold from outside was still crawling into the car the longer the traffic jam continued. You closed your eyes and laid your head back. „I hope I‘ll like it there. I hope there are people I can sing in cars with too.“ You said, just like it was a sidenote, but it made Martin look at your tired form. He didn’t really know how this made him feel. But the fact that there was something he felt about it to begin with was making him insecure in a way. You yawned again without opening your eyes, „When we drive back you gotta show me the music you like too.“

He gripped the steering wheel harder. You were so casually.. everything that he never had before. Humans were cautious not to show that they didn’t care, he was mostly being tolerated to some extent by every one of them up to now. He was only aware of a lacking because he saw them interact with one another, how much more authenticity there was to their relationships. How did everything you said to him feel so fully different from the way they interacted with him before?

Martin didn’t do anything different, no matter how hard he tried to discern the reason why someone would actually like him now this time. He had only told you something about him, the fact that he grew up in a house like that, because you were also candid towards him. You evoked him to differ from the script, but was it all that more significant than what he did before?

He didn’t say anything for a while and neither did you, and at some point he found that you had fallen asleep. Martin glanced over at you and blinked, his eyes then drifted to the backseat. If he remembered correctly.. and he most certainly did then- he pulled a blanket out of the stuff that was crammed in the back from the previous owners of this car. When he stopped at a red light he carefully placed it over you. It would help with the cold. During sleeping periods the body temperature of humans became even lower and you already seemed to be shivering before.

He remembered how his foster parents tucked him in even though it wasn’t cold there. It was neither particularly warm or cold, there was no weather to shelter from but they insisted to do that with him and themselves as well. It was one of the many rituals they participated in even though there was no outlying reason for it. So he did this to you as well, and he was careful to put the fluffy fabric over your shoulder so it wouldn’t fall. You let put a small sigh but did not awake, and his eyes flickered over your face. You looked.. nice. You looked as nice as you were as a person.

Martin turned towards the steering wheel again and drove further, but when he saw the sign for Yonder he stopped the car. He did not enter the neighborhood.

He didn’t want you too live and die in there, never to be seen again. He didn’t want to drive someone else to the house that you had died in. He wanted to drive back with you now and show you the music he liked like you said.

And he let you go, would he be able to see you again at all?

He heard shuffling from the blanket and looked to the side, seeing how you sleepily opened your eyes again. When you caught sight of him you smiled, even though there was no social prompt for you to do so. You just did. „I fell asleep goodness..“ you mumbled and straightened yourself again. „Are we there?“

Martin looked at you, his eyebrow twitched and he breathed in before closing his mouth for another moment. „Yes. But. I was called just now which is why I stopped the car. And the agency informed me that another real estate agent has just sold the house that I was going to show you. And unfortunately the other ones are already reserved.“

You slightly weighed your head to the side, „Oh.“ you slightly bit your lip, disappointed. „Well, I was too slow then I guess. But.. well this was still fun enough don’t you think?“ He raised his brows, you chuckled. „Singing along to music with someone I just met and taking a nap in a real estate’s company’s car isn’t an ordinary experience, I like it.“ You explained, amused despite the rejection of a viewing.

Martin couldn’t help but smile himself too. The way you were, how you acted and spoke and were so forward and positive towards the things around you was something he didn’t want to disappear and be covered up by the trap that was this neighborhood. It was something he wanted to be around more, not just observing but partaking in as a person. Because you saw him as such.

The rain drummed loudly on the windshield. He swallowed as there were no specifics for him on what he was trying to say now. „Would you like to drink coffee and watch people together when we come back?“

Your smile grew wider. „Yes! I‘d love to.“

I hope you liked it! Idk if this will get any notes or comments because thats one if the mist niche characters I‘ve ever written for but I still really wanted to write this. I‘m so endeared with this guy

#gender neutral reader #vivarium movie #vivarium martin #vivarium martin x reader #jonathan aris

8 notes · View notes

tkblythofficial · 7 months

Note

Claps all around for library of zeglyth anonymous. I guess this day was bound to come, and I guess it has finally arrived. Now let me add my three Andrew Jacksons to the pile and be on my way.

About zeglyth: I think this one is tricky because it depends in why you came to the fandom in the first place. An anonymous post sent a few weeks ago did point out how prior to the movie adaptation, a large portion of THG fanbase did dislike the Snow prequel. They were supposedly expecting a Finnick or Haymitch prequel, which is further backed up by the reviews pre 2021 but it was the chemistry between Rach and T that truly propelled the novel's reexamining.

People who hated the book suddenly found themselves coming around to liking it more, which is a testament to acting and skill, and the two actors should be at least proud.

Now the controversial part: it also led to some people 'shipping' them. A rather normal and benign part of any fandom, if you’ve been in any fandom for any period of time. Several Anonymous’ have already provided countless examples. I do not need to reiterate. This shipping didn’t just come out of nowhere but was very much built on the connection, no matter how tenuous it actually is between Lucy Gray and Coriolanus Snow in the novel. However, I’m also not going to deny that some people wanted Rachel to be with Tom but that contingent was/is rather small. Over all, from what I’ve observed most fans just liked their visual profile and emotional bond. Now you can argue that it was manufactured by Lionsgate and maybe it was.

Several posts did make pains to say it was indeed a studio marketing thing and at this stage I’m inclined to wave the white flag and agree. Maybe it was. Those who loved zeglyth fell for the Hollywood trick. Welcome to the real world. But Ill caveat this: you can still like the Tom and Rachel, you just have to remember, it’s a Hollywood snow job.

About J: I think the outstanding attention we've been giving dude doesn’t match his online or offline presence. At the end of the day, he’s the bf, a partner. Our feelings notwithstanding, there is nothing we can do about it. He exists. She exists. Leave it as is. If she wants to make endless posts about him, it’s her prerogative. You don’t need to engage.

This blog: I’ll say this, the anonymous who runs this place has been very generous in allowing a variety of opinions, even opinions that many might disagree with. It’s what makes the place lively and keeps conversation flowing. And as library said, it can’t be easy keeping on top of anything. But I’ll end it here with Nick Caraway quote, there is no repeating the past. What ever happened then has happened and maybe this is all a new beginning but if you are a zeglyth shipper, you can mourn and do what mourners do: move on.

I know I will, but not from Tom and Rachel’s careers. I’m curious where they’ll land in the future, and maybe that’s a good thing to hold onto.

Thank you for saying this! I agree :) @libraryofzeglyth is the best!

#my answers #off topic

3 notes · View notes

byunmyeon · 3 years

Text

Saudade

↳ pairing: lee suho x reader

↳ synopsis: this is the third installment following philophobia and metanoia. after years of being away from your soulmate, you finally begin to believe that you have a chance at a normal life. but you learn that fate is never that simple or kind.

↳ warnings: language, alcohol consumption (nothing too crazy), ANGST you guys know what it is, a pinch of fluff

— note: sorry this took so long! i hope you guys enjoy the final part!

Fate was something you would never be able to truly understand. It was something so complex, yet at the same time so astoundingly simple.

When you were younger, you always believed fate to be a benign concept that could only lead to happiness. The day you lost sight of your string, you belatedly realized that all your preconceived notions were nothing more than delusions born from the idealized world the people around you had constructed.

Perhaps the cognizance would’ve been easier to deal with had you not been forced to move to a city that was constantly embraced by a daunting aura, one that didn’t allow you to properly heal from your internal wounds. Looking back on it, the trepidation might’ve had something to do with the fact that Seoul was the city where you would be forced to confront your destiny—the same fate that had disappointed you time and time again.

And therein lied the reason why being back felt like a surreal dream.

Every memory that came with walking down the busy streets overwhelmed you. After all this time, you still found yourself powerless to the retention of the time in your life where you felt the most miserable. Years had passed since then, but being back at the start of it all had you faltering in a way you thought would be impossible after your treatment.

There was a sudden heaviness in your chest and feet as you neared your destination. You allowed yourself to stare at the large building with muted dejection. This was the last place you were willing to revisit, but you were aware that never returning wasn’t a viable option. Not after you agreed to work through your condition without any restraint.

You instinctually forced yourself to shove all of your unwanted emotions into the dark place of your mind that was rarely visited before heading into the large building. By this point, you’ve become overly familiar with the place; a token of your dedication to get better. In spite of the fact that you were no stranger to the setting, an unbearable feeling of discomfort overcame you in that moment. You were undeterred by this sudden shift in your emotions and forced your feet to carry you to the elevator.

You pressed the button to the top floor, briefly recalling the days when you only had to go to the fifth floor. How time flies.

The second you stepped off the elevator, you noticed a young woman waiting to greet you. She led you to the large office, knocking once before letting her boss know you had arrived. You heard a familiar voice urging her to let you in.

The doctor’s new office was twice the size of his old one—a luxury he never would’ve had without your help. Being in his office reminded you of the point in time when you were adamant about not helping him with his research. Now, helping Dr. Kwon study the enigmatic soulmate bond was the very thing you had dedicated your life to. A true irony, really.

“Y/N.” Your name was spoken fondly and with a friendly smile. “It’s been a long time since we’ve met like this. How does it feel to be back in Seoul?”

Dr. Kwon’s words made you think about how long it had been despite the fact that it felt like you left the city only yesterday. You hadn’t been able to visit him personally since you left the rehabilitation center and started working with other patients to further his research, but you never imagined that being in front of him after all this time would feel as harrowing as it did. Deep down, you knew it was only because of the torturous memories you subconsciously associated with him. Luckily for you, those memories no longer forced you into a debilitating state—a development you had worked hard to achieve.

With that thought in mind, you set the report on the doctor’s desk while murmuring a noncommittal response to his inquiry. “There aren’t any new side effects.”

Your distant response made Dr. Kwon frown. Many years had passed since you two met, yet that did nothing to help erase the line you drew all those years ago. It wasn’t unusual for his patients (you, in particular) to unconsciously project their internalized trauma onto the people in their lives, but he couldn’t help but be slightly disappointed with your behavior.

“Tell me about what’s been going on with you.” Dr. Kwon prodded gently. “Have you been seeing anyone?”

The doctor’s biggest hope was to successfully help you get past your philophobia so you could finally start living normally. However, even after all these years you still didn’t allow yourself to get close to anyone romantically in spite of knowing no one could ever hurt you as badly as your soulmate had.

“I’ve lessened my dose like you suggested.” You told him even though you knew he would read it in the report after you left.

“That…” Dr. Kwon’s smile faltered, but only for a second. “That’s great. If you aren’t experiencing any side effects or withdrawal-like symptoms, I think we can start drafting a plan for you to stop taking the suppressants altogether.”

Those words caught your interest. To be able to live normally without the help of the suppressants was something you had longed for since you started your treatment back when you were a teenager.

“Will I really be able to?”

Dr. Kwon didn’t miss the spark in your eyes as you gazed at him. It made him confident that he could potentially help you live happily like you always wanted. He would never give up his mission to help you get better, and this was the first step to achieve that goal.

“If you don’t mind staying in Seoul a bit longer.” He said simply. “This way, I’ll be able to monitor you more closely and decide how soon you can stop taking the suppressants.”

You had no intentions of extending your stay, but you would do anything to be free from the chains that came in the form of medicine. And so, you eagerly agreed.

Often times, you were thrown into situations before you realized it.

When you coincidentally ran into Soo-ah, you didn’t expect her to invite you to come out with her and a handful of your former classmates. You had meant to politely decline her invitation, but instead you found yourself asking her who would be in attendance before you could stop yourself. She listed off names you could vaguely recall, but just barely. There was no mention of him.

And so, you ended up drinking with people who you didn’t know that well and vice versa. You weren’t uncomfortable per se, but there was a pressure building in your chest that you couldn’t make sense of. Luckily, the alcohol helped you forget about the foreign sensation as well as the other strident thoughts that had been on your mind.

It wasn’t until you stumbled out of the place that the real trouble began.

You had taken all of two steps, but came to an abrupt stop after you heard a quiet yet forceful call of your name. Han Seojun was walking toward you with a strange look in his eyes. In that instant, you knew that whatever was coming next wouldn’t be pleasant.

“How long are you planning on staying in Seoul?”

His question threw you off. Seojun was someone you could hardly call a friend, and you were certain that wouldn’t change with time. Despite not liking the premonition that came along with his words, you answered him anyway.

“Not long.” You told him truthfully. “I have some work related things to take care of, then I’m leaving.”

Seojun remained silent as if in deep thought, and you assumed he was done with the conversation. But as you turned on your heel to walk away, he called out to you again. This time, the tension in his tone made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

“About Lee Suho…”

You tensed instantly. Just the simple mention of his name awoke feelings in you that you thought you’d gotten rid of a long time ago. Instead of reacting in a way that would give away your true emotions, you turned your head slightly to look at him. Seojun could only see half of your face, but it was enough for him to hope that you might still care about his friend.

“He’s missed you. Even though he’s living abroad right now, he still—”

“I have to go.” You interrupted him, unwilling to hear the rest of his tirade. “I’ll see you around.”

Back then, you had no idea it was only the beginning of fate’s cruel plan.

People often said fate was something that you made yourself—something that wasn’t predetermined but something that was subject to change depending on the course of action taken. You weren’t so sure if that was true because more often than not, you found that the course of your life was filled with trials and tribulations that were completely out of your control. These painful events (as your mother and countless therapists said) were meant to build character. In your case, they just hurt.

However, now that you were older, you were starting to understand what people meant.

After all, it was you who decided to remove yourself from the situation and distance yourself from your soulmate. It was you who made the effort to get better and build a new life for yourself. That had to count for something.

You had come this far, and that in itself was a notable achievement. Soon enough, you would no longer be dependent on the supplements Dr. Kwon developed soon after you came into his care. It wouldn’t be long before you would be free to live your life without any restraints.

That thought alone made you appreciate the view that much more. Snow was falling lightly, but it didn’t take away from the calmness you felt. Nothing could kill the high you were on. Finally, everything seemed to be falling into place. The peaceful life you always yearned for was within your reach, ready to be taken.

“Y/N.”

There was a sudden heaviness in your chest and feet after you heard your name. Every single hair on your body stood up at the sound of an eerily familiar voice calling your name, a voice that you wouldn’t be able to forget in a million years. Hesitantly and very slowly, you turned around only to come face-to-face with the one person you hoped to never see again.

The mere sight of him evoked a jagged feeling from your chest that you were very familiar with. It was no longer as intense as it once was—a curtesy of the supplements you were taking. However, you weren’t numb to the dull ache seeing your soulmate caused.

Suho’s face crumpled instantly at the sight of your watery eyes. The glistening tears in your eyes could’ve easily been mistaken for previous crystals from how brightly they were shining. He reached forward and cupped your frozen face, barely able to contain the emotions swirling in his chest.

You flinched away from his touch, realizing that all the effort you made up until this point was in vain. The ache in your pounding heart reminded you that no drug in the world could be strong enough to completely detach you from all the emotions your soulmate provoked.

“I’ve missed you.”

There was a sincerity to his words that might’ve moved you at one point in time, but now his words only left a sick feeling in your stomach. This could have been due to the suppressants, or perhaps the result of being away from him for so long. Either way, the affection Suho was displaying was something you no longer wanted or needed.

“Why?” Your voice was quiet as a single tear fell from your eye. “You rejected me.”

Unlike before, Suho’s expressions were completely transparent. His wounded eyes almost had you regretting your blunt words. Almost.

Not being able to withstand the sight of his pained expression any longer, you turned around and ran.

It was a well-known fact that the string of fate pulled soulmates closer and closer until the two souls were eventually brought together. Trying to resist the tug was practically impossible and, in most cases, futile. You were no exception to this natural contingency despite taking every possible measure you could to fight it. Eventually, you learned that fate wasn’t something that could actively or easily be avoided.

That’s why it wasn’t too surprising when you crossed paths with Suho so soon after you saw him the other night at the bridge. Whether it was coincidental or not, the strength of the bond was enough to soothe the initial irritation you felt at seeing your soulmate. Perhaps the power of the pull was what made you accept the invitation to have a meal with him, or maybe it was out of the need to prove to yourself that Suho could no longer affect you in the intense way that he used to.

The restaurant wasn’t anything grand, but they did serve alcohol which was perfect for you because you weren’t sure you could sit through a meal with the person who broke your heart while being completely sober. You didn’t hesitate to start drinking before the waiter brought your food out.

“So,” Suho cleared his throat as he saw you down a shot with concern. “How have you been?”

It was a loaded question that almost made you angry because how did he think you had been? Undergoing treatment wasn’t anything easy, and it definitely wasn’t pleasant. But you couldn’t bring yourself to spit out your poisonous thoughts. If you agreed to join him it was because you were better now (and to potentially expand on your research). You couldn’t let all your hard work go to waste because of his sudden reappearance and your petty need to make him feel the same way you had all those years ago.

Suho saw you hesitate, and for a moment he was worried that the resentment you seemed to feel for him would keep him from getting closer to you. He felt extremely relieved when you answered him politely, seemingly not too caught up with rehashing the past.

“You actually worked with the Dr. Kwon?” Suho was in awe.

“I still do.” You told with a nod. “I’m the one who helped him develop the suppressant for the soulmate bond.”

Your comment wasn’t malicious, but Suho felt his chest tighten uncomfortably. The drug you helped develop was worldwide famous as it was the first of its kind. He had read about all of its effects and how it was life changing for people who had been rejected by their soulmates. People like you.

When you saw the look on Suho’s face, you let out a dry, humorless laugh. “I’m taking them, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

There was an awkward pause, and you weren’t sure why everything had become so tense all of a sudden. Suho should’ve guessed that you were taking the suppressants because of the fact that you were still alive. Without those drugs, you would’ve died a long time ago. It would’ve been easy enough to tell him that, but something restrained you from doing so.

“So… you don’t feel anything now that you’re with me?”

That wasn’t exactly true. A suppressant was different from a blocker, and even modern medicine wasn’t advanced enough to stop all the effects caused by the soulmate bond. However, you didn’t tell Suho any of that. It was petty, but there was still that part of you that was unwilling to let him off so easily.

“Not really. I feel the like I’m spending time with any other person.” You lied.

Suho felt a sharp pain strike his chest. The throbbing was painful, but all he could focus on was your cold expression. There was no trace of resentment or love or anything. Just a blank canvas that he was unable to fill.

After a beat of silence, you spoke up, unable to stand the discomfort that suddenly consumed you. “I’m sorry about your dad. It must’ve been hard for you.”

Your words caught Suho by surprise. He wasn’t sure how you knew that his dad had been in the hospital while he was abroad, but it hardly mattered. The knot in his chest loosened when he saw your earnest expression. Your empathy was just that, but to Suho it meant the world. It touched him deeply that despite all the pain he had put you through, you didn’t hate him enough to rejoice in his misfortune.

“He’s better now. That’s part of the reason why I came back.”

You didn’t need to hear the other part because you knew what it was, and you weren’t ready for him to vocalize it. Dr. Kwon would be proud.

Suho seemed to realize you were uncomfortable and quickly changed the subject. “How has it been helping Dr. Kwon with his research?”

“Healing.” You told him without thinking. “It helped me get better, and now I’m one step closer to living a normal life like everyone else.”

A sudden pain struck Suho in the chest. Your smiling face managed to soothe some of the sting, but not fully. He would never be able to truly forgive himself for what he did to you. It was his fault you hadn’t been able to finish off high school like everyone else. He was the reason you hadn’t been able to live like any other person who found their soulmate. But somehow Suho pushed down those feelings of painful regret and smiled back at you.

“That’s great, Y/N.” He managed to say through the pain he felt. “I’m… I’m really happy for you.”

Seeing Suho was starting to become a regular occurrence. He was insistent on spending time with you even though you weren’t always welcoming of his company. Recently, he had started to walk you to work. There were times where his actions moved you and times where his actions irritated you. It was usually the latter, but this time you couldn’t be angry or annoyed. Not when it was clear that something was wrong. The moment you laid eyes on Suho, an uncomfortable feeling pinched at your stomach only for it to die down and completely disappear within the next second.

“Hey, are you okay?” You asked, unable to hide the worry in your voice.

Suho caught the emotion in your tone and faintly smiled. “Are you worried about me?”

The contrast in his behavior always threw you off. He wasn’t acting like the person you remembered, and you never knew what to make of his perplexing behavior. Was this really the person you met back in high school? It didn’t seem like it. There was a subtle jerk in your chest, almost as if the emotions being repressed by your medicine were clawing to get out. You frowned at the feeling.

“Have you looked in the mirror today?” You ignored his question. “You don’t look okay.”

Suho shrugged off your words. Instead he told you to have a good day and to not overwork yourself. That was another thing you couldn’t understand. Suho followed you everywhere, except your workplace. You weren’t sure why he had an apparent aversion to the building you currently worked in, but you didn’t dwell on it. Having a place you were able to escape to made you forget all about his abnormal behavior. Well, not entirely.

It was difficult not to think about the situation you had found yourself in. You didn’t know exactly what to call this… relationship between you two, but it felt like you were in a sort of limbo state. It was alarming and potentially problematic because recovery was something that was well within your grasp, and you weren’t sure if Suho was hindering you from finally grabbing what you worked so hard to achieve.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Perhaps not telling Dr. Kwon that your soulmate was back and regularly seeing you wasn’t the wisest decision, but you were sure he would have canceled his plan to take you off the suppressants if you had told him the truth. You kept your cool expression in tact, not willing to give yourself away.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dr. Kwon frowned. You hadn’t so much as looked up from the paperwork in front of you, but he wouldn’t let you get away from his question so easily. Not when it was about life or death.

“I’m talking about the fact that a man named Han Seojun came in here asking about a consultation for his friend, Lee Suho.”

The shift in your eyes was immediate. You couldn’t hide the emotion on your face as you looked over at Dr. Kwon. He was looking at you with a somber expression, waiting for your explanation. But you couldn’t be concerned with that because there was a sinking feeling in your stomach that wasn’t allowing you to think straight.

“Han Seojun managed to get him in here for a check up.” The doctor continued after realizing that you weren’t going to provide him with the answers he was looking for. “I’ve haven’t seen so much strain on a heart in a long time. His results look almost like yours did all those years ago.”

Blood rushed to your ears, partially muting all the noise in the room. The feel of your heart pounding painfully against your chest was foreign now, yet familiar all at the same time. It was almost entirely painful, but not quite. No. This couldn’t be happening. There had to be some sort of mistake. But you knew there wasn’t. The signs had been there, and you had purposely ignored them because you hadn’t wanted to entertain the possibility of Suho going through what you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

“You’re rejecting the soulmate bond.” Dr. Kwon said simply, not knowing he was voicing your greatest fear. “If he doesn’t undergo treatment soon, he will die.”

There was a moment where you could only hear your heartbeat. It’s unsteady rhythm was the only thing you could focus on in order to hold back your tears. It was true that you didn’t want Suho in your life, but to think he was experiencing the same pain you had made you feel sick to your stomach. No one, not even Suho, deserved to experience that type of pain. You could only press your lips together, afraid that a sob might break through at any moment.

“Y/N?”

You lifted your distant eyes, as if snapping out of some sort of trance. “Sharing a person’s medical information is a crime.”

Dr. Kwon frowned, but wasn’t all that fazed by your threatening reminder because he was aware that your reaction was nothing more than a byproduct of the trauma caused by your soulmate. Still, he had expected more from you. The treatment you received at the facility he founded was meant to help you (which it had—physically), but it had also inadvertently morphed your philophobia into something more grave that didn’t allow you to be emotionally vulnerable.

The doctor let out a deep sigh. “Y/N—”

“If you’re going to treat him, then do it.” You said as you put down the paperwork. “Just don’t expect me to care about what happens to him.”

With that cold statement, you stood up and grabbed your things. You hurried to the door, not willing to be in the office any longer. Just as you reached the door, you were stopped by the doctor’s voice.

“He won’t take the supplements.” Dr. Kwon said. “I don’t know why, but he’s unwilling to undergo any sort of treatment.”

You swallowed thickly, unable to keep the tears in your eyes. It was difficult, but you swallowed the lump in your throat and walked out of the large office without looking back.

Suho never thought you would ask to see him first. It was something that went beyond his all of his wildest dreams, and for the first time he felt the pressure in his chest loosen. You had asked to meet him at the bridge where he first encountered you after returning, and he didn’t hesitate to clear his schedule in order to meet you. He didn’t have time to think about why you wanted to see him. It didn’t matter, either. Not when you willingly wanted to see him and spend time with him.

Suho made it to the bridge in record time. His eyes immediately spotted you, able to distinguish you almost immediately. Even from afar you looked as stunning as ever. The bright city lights managed to give you an ethereal glow that took his breath away. Not wanting to keep you wait any longer, Suho was quick to go over to where you were standing.

“Y/N.”

You turned around, expression as blank as usual. It was a bit disappointing, but Suho wouldn’t let that deter his mood. When he finally got close enough, he could see traces of concern in your eyes. It made him wonder what was wrong while thinking of ways he could ease your discomfort.

“Suho.”

He hadn’t heard you say his name in years despite all the time you two had spent together. It was like music to his ears, and it made him hopeful that you two were finally moving in the right direction. Maybe earning your forgiveness wouldn’t be impossible like he originally thought.

“You’re dying.” You said shakily. “Because of me.”

Suho felt his heart sink into his stomach. He didn’t have any time to think about how you found out, but he couldn’t stand to see at the wounded look in your eyes. The last thing he had wanted to do was hurt you, yet that was the very thing he did.

His silence made the sickening feeling amplify. It was true. You had known it was since Dr. Kwon had told you, but part of you had hoped it was a mistake or a flat out lie. To think that you were doing the same thing Suho did to you was reprehensible. All your years of helping people and your own recovery didn’t seem to mean anything because it felt like you were right back at where you started. Except now it was you who was causing the pain.

You swallowed thickly, not believing this was happening. “Why… Why wouldn’t you agree to take the suppressants?”

The stoic expression that was imprinted in your mind made an appearance for the first time since you two met again. It made you feel sick and like you were trapped in the middle of a bizarre nightmare.

“Don’t you realize what you’re doing?” Your voice rose slightly. “How could you be reckless enough to disregard your own health?”

Suho’s eyes gleamed with regret and something else you couldn’t identify. “You did the same thing back then. You risked your life for my happiness.”

The suppressants weren’t perfect, and still left room for error. Often times, the emotions people didn’t want to feel passed through and consumed them. But now it felt like you weren’t taking the medicine at all because in the next instant, you were bursting with emotions, the most prominent one being anger. How could he compare your situations? How could he think that this was what you wanted?

There was a tense pause, one that didn’t last very long but felt like an eternity.

“Don’t act like you’re doing some selfless deed.” You hissed, feeling angry tears pinch the back of your eyes. “What I did back when we met isn’t the same as what you’re doing now, and you fucking know it.”

For a moment, you two only stared at each other fiercely. Similar emotions were building inside both of you, ready to burst at the seams. Neither of you were willing to speak the truth, but expected the other to understand.

“You chose to do that for me back then.” Suho forced himself to say. “It was your choice, and what I’m doing now is mine.”

And it was his choice. Suho would never forgive himself for everything he did to you, and he was certain there was nothing he could ever do to make it up to you. Except this. Only going through the same pain would he be able to truly repent his mistakes. The only problem was that you didn’t take his words in the way he meant them.

“It was never my choice!” You yelled angrily, feeling like you could explode from the rage. “Why would I ever choose to feel the pain you put me through?”

Everything was happening too quickly, but it was too late to backtrack. The misunderstandings and the misuse of words didn’t matter anymore because you were finally letting your true feelings spill out of you like a waterfall.

“You were the one who rejected the bond that we have without caring about how it would effect me!”

The sight of your tears came as another blow to Suho’s chest, one that was much stronger than all the others. Everything was falling apart so quickly. Too quickly to stop it. Suho took a step toward you but you stepped back. The anger and pain you were feeling was evident now.

“When are you going to stop hurting me?”

Suho sucked in a sharp breath. Your words made him feel as terrible as he did when he found out you couldn’t see your string. A single tear slid down his face as he looked at your pain-filled expression. The bond between you was completely damaged, and for the first time he could feel it.

“Wasn’t it enough for you when you almost killed me because you loved Lim Jugyeong?” You wondered, feeling like your throat was closing in on itself. “I didn’t know about our bond, but you willingly ignored it. When I found out, you didn’t hesitate to tell me you didn’t want me as your soulmate. I accepted all of that, so why… why do you keep doing this to me?”

Subconsciously rejecting or accepting the soulmate bond was something every human did as soon as they recognized their soulmate, and it had a stronger effect than most people would ever understand. It might’ve occurred to you that this is exactly what you were doing, but thinking logically wasn’t possible with all the emotions that were overpowering your thoughts. It no longer mattered that you never intended for any of this to happen because it had. Because it was fate.

Suho couldn’t stand it anymore. All the pain he caused you was suffocating, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. He reached for you, only to be stopped by the blinding pain his chest. Tiny black dots clouded his vision before they completely engulfed it.

You could only watch in horror as Suho collapsed on the ground just as you had all those years ago.

At times, you wondered if your entire life was nothing more than a terrible dream. Some of the things that happened to you felt too surreal and distorted to be an actual part of reality. However, there was always certain moments that managed to remind you that your life was far from a dream. Seeing Suho’s pale form laying in a hospital bed was one of those moments.

You watched him carefully, gasping quietly when his eyes slowly opened.

When Suho saw you by his bedside, it immediately eased some of the pain he was feeling. You tearfully whispered his name, no longer hiding behind the stoic mask he had grown used to. It almost made him feel like all the pain was worth it.

“I’ll go get the doctor.”

You stood to leave, but Suho immediately caught you by your wrist. He gently caressed it, looking like he might cry. “Stay. Please.”

And you did. You slowly sat back down, feeling the enigmatic pull take over your actions. You hadn’t felt it in years, and you wondered if it would be a good idea to take more of the suppressants before your feelings became too intense to control.

“I’m sorry.” You apologized through the tears. “I shouldn’t have said all those things to you knowing that your health is in a delicate state.”

Your apology meant the world to Suho, but it also managed to make him feel horrible. Just like back then, you were putting his feelings before your own, and he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t deserve the consideration you gave him back then, and he definitely didn’t deserve it now.

Suho shook his head. “Everything you said is the truth. I deserve that and much more.”

You pressed your lips together before letting out a shaky sigh. None of that mattered anymore. The only thing you were concerned about was helping him get better. “Take the suppressants.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” You demanded, feeling your heart clench painfully. “The pain is only going to get worse.”

“It’s nothing compared to what I did to you.”

His words made your heart ache. At one point in your life you wanted him to suffer in the same way you had, but now it was the last thing you wanted. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but Suho didn’t seem to realize that. Seeing him in this state wasn’t what you wanted at all. Didn’t he understand that?

“If you don’t agree to undergo the treatment, you’ll die.” You told him, your voice was an apparent mixture of fear and guilt. “How could you think that would make me happy?”

“You haven’t forgiven me for what I did, and neither have I.” Suho said. The tears in his eyes spilled over as he looked at you. “I don’t deserve it either.”

You couldn’t stop your tears own from falling. He had it all wrong, and you weren’t sure that you could ease his pain despite having done it so many times before.

“It’s not that I don’t forgive you.” You whimpered as you took ahold of his hand.

This next part was going to be difficult for you to express, but it needed to be done. It was the only way you were going to be able to truly heal from all the pain that you went through.

“It’s that I don’t forgive myself.” Your confession came out in a shaky sigh. “I didn’t love myself enough to put my health first. Even back then, I had the option to get treated before the pain became unbearable, but I didn’t because I loved you more than I loved myself.”

You let out a quiet sob. “And I’ve never been able to forgive myself for that.”

If anyone understood that feeling, it was Suho. He didn’t hesitate to pull you into his arms, caging you against him. It felt warm and comforting—an unexpected safe place. It made you feel completely protected, like nothing and no one could ever hurt you.

“It’s not your fault.” He whispered. “None of it.”

Suho couldn’t have known it, but his words set you free. Finally, you accepted that your father’s death wasn’t you fault, neither was the resentment your mother felt, not even the fact that Suho had rejected you. None of it was your fault. You were only a victim of the circumstances.

The road to recovery wouldn’t be an easy path, but it was one that you were both willing to take.

Fate was a strange concept, indeed.

Even now, you couldn’t tell if destiny was something that was predetermined or something that could be made, but it didn’t matter. You walked the path that you were meant to take despite not being ready for it. In the end, it had led you to the place that you were meant to be at.

“Y/N!”

You looked over your shoulder with a smile, seeing Suho excitedly wave at you from the other end of the street. He jogged over to you with a giant grin on his face before engulfing you in a tight hug. His warm embrace gave you a sense of security that you had grown to love.

“Did you have fun with Seojun?” You asked, feeling like you were in the middle of a blissful trance.

“The guy thinks he’s all that because he’s famous now.” Suho said jokingly, emitting a laugh from you.

An entire year had passed since that day in the hospital, and now you could proudly say that you had successfully worked past your philophobia. It hadn’t been easy, but with help from Dr. Kwon and even Suho you managed to overcome all the trauma you had been unconsciously clinging on to. Now, you were living happily without the help of suppressants.

Suho pulled back, looking at you with shining eyes. He cupped your face before he swooped down and pressed his lips against your own. You melted into the kiss instantly, feeling a fiery passion consume you. The movement of his lips was sweet yet strong. It managed to make your head swim with euphoria. Suho gently caressed your cheek before he slowly drew back.

“I love you.”

You couldn’t contain your smile. “I love you, too.”

Suho let you go and swiftly grabbed your hand. He swung it happily as you two walked down the street. “Where should we go?”

“There’s a new comic store that opened down the street.” You told him with a grin. “Let’s check it out.”

Suho gave you another smile and gave your hand a gentle squeeze. The sheer joy you felt in that moment seemed unreal. It was hard to believe that you managed to get to this point where happiness was a regular part of your life. You never imagined that it would be a part of fate’s plan for you. There was only one thing that made you realize it was all real and not part of some blissful dream.

You looked down at your intertwined hands, smiling wider when you saw the red thread wrapped around your index finger.

#lee suho x reader #lee suho x you #cha eunwoo x reader #cha eunwoo x you #true beauty fanfic #suho x reader #lee suho imagine #cha eunwoo imagine #cha eunwoo #lee suho #true beauty #lee suho fanfic #cha eunwoo fanfic #astro fanfic #true beauty tvn

1K notes · View notes

cowboyjen68 · 2 years

Note

Hi Jen, I’m looking into queer history but it’s difficult to find specific things so I thought I’d ask you something I can’t find!

I want to know if the word lesbian to mean gay woman was something women chose to do and pushed for or if it caught on for another reason.

I realized I didn’t know the roots outside of the Sappho story so I have no idea what happened between then and now that made lesbian catch on. It’s driving me crazy!!

If you don’t know that’s okay but I figured I’d ask just in case! :D

I am no historian of Lesbian culture. I have been to lectures and certainly listened to older lesbians and lesbian scholars sitting around endless potlucks and camp fires.

I will link a video below that sort of sums it up. But you are on the right track. "Lesbian" did come to mean "homosexual female" because of Sappho and where she lived. She was the only MAJOR woman poet to come out of ancient Greece. Here writings are held up to the same relevance as Plato (who called her the 10th muse) and Homer.

Sadly, many of her poems were destroyed by the church after her death because of the erotic (between women) nature. Those that survived were either accidently (or purposely?) translated to be heterosexual OR because other major writers quoted or noted her poems in their praise of her.

Long story short, Her poems became associated with love between females and she was a Lesbian, as in, from the Isle of Lesbos. She was not the first lesbian, just the first one of notoriety and fame within a culture that was large enough and with communication between locations that she was known beyond the borders of her homeland. She expressed same sex love is such detail and with such passion that she was one of the most popular writer of her time with both men and women,

It was natural progression of a word associated with her that slowly changed the definition of Lesbian (a person from Lesbos ) to a homosexual woman (lesbian). Although Lesbians are still the people of Lesbos as well. Dual meaning. The word also once meant something like “deviant” or “sexually odd” which may be a mistranslation or a purposeful connection between a woman who is same sex attracted and someone who is a sexually weird or disgusting by societal standards.

In ancient Greece, as now, homosexual men were thought of as gross and bad but homosexual women were more thought of as benign, playful or just misguided. The Greeks more likely had bigger problems with Sapphos detailed descriptions of sexual encounters that were passionate and powerful. Two things women were not supposed to be.

I think, and the video link can give you more information, that Western Culture did not pick up on lesbian to be the agreed word for homosexual females until into fairly modern times. In the last 200 years.

It is the oldest word to define a sexuality that is still used and understood fairly universally today. (so that is cool).

https://youtu.be/TvImeedXFbI

#lesbian #sappho #ancient greek #ameteur history

38 notes · View notes

radiosandrecordings · 4 years

Text

Seeing fan interpretations of Jon change over the last two years has been such a weird thing to witness, but especially in regards to his hair. Like when I got into the show, there was not a long haired Jon to be seen. It was all just a series of Generic Professional Man Haircuts, and half the time people didn’t remember his hair has grey in it (or, they went the opposite and his hair was entirely grey)

Then season 4 started and we realised he’d been in a coma for six months, and some genius went ‘well, he probably has some pretty long hair after that’ and it just became a Thing from there on, starting first not because we thought it fit him, but because it made logical sense. There’s since been debates about whether his hair would even grow if his body was dead, if nurses would have kept it the same length, or if they’d just shave it off entirely/he’d lose it in the explosion, but Hair Gets Long In Coma was the generally accepted thing because it’s just the more interesting one, to most people.

And then from there it really started to work backwards. We had our new archivist design with beautiful flowy hair and people started to look back at their old designs, for seasons two and three. There came a general realisation that, well, between the murder accusations and the paranoia and the kidnappings, he probably didn’t have the time/trust to get his hair cut. So people gave him short hair in season one and let it lengthen from there.

People still tended to agree that in AUs, Jon would have short hair, because he’s a Serious Professional and wouldn’t have long flowy hair if canon hadn’t forced him into it. But as season four progressed, we became more and more aware that season one Jon... was kind of false. We knew it from the start, really but seeing this vulnerable and upset and kind side to him in season four really recontextualised him as a character, especially as more new people were coming into the show as it grew in popularity. Suddenly we had to question if canon was stripped away and he was left to live a normal life, would he default to that season one persona? Or be more like he was in season four, who he seemed to be at his core with all defences taken down?... and what did this mean for his beautiful hair?

So AUs started also predominantly featuring long hair. This probably was also because of the fact that all the new people who had joined had gotten use to a long haired Jon common in fandom, and knew no other idea of him when the time came to make their own content. Also, long hair is just much more fun to make content about than short. You can write about Martin braiding it! You can draw it in cute styles! It also helped to perpetuate/play into a lot of the GNC/nonbinary Jon content that was also becoming popular in mid-late season four.

Is there any real point to this? Not really. I just wanted to recount my way through a bit of fandom history on a really benign topic, but one I personally find interesting. I think it says something about people’s perceptions of characters, especially ones we have no visual reference for, when we try and distill their personality into a design and that design ends up changing as we learn more about that personality, how a false personality will change how we present them physically. This kind of thing could never happen in something that wasn’t an audio medium. What if we found out one day that Jon had long hair in season one, and cut it and kept it short after the worm incident? What would that change about our readings of him as a character? How does physical appearance, even when invented by the consumer, change their perception of a character? How does it change our perception of real world people?

TL;DR: man with long hair very pretty hhgrng love when they put it up 💕💕 But What About The Meta Implications, And Also The Human Anthropology Ones

#My Post #This is garbage ignore me I just had some thoughts #The Magnus Archives #Jonathan Sims #Essay Post #Fandom History

2K notes · View notes

loquaciousquark · 3 years

Text

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E136 & 137 (May 11, 2021)

Good evening and good night, everyone! Tonight on Talks are Laura Bailey & Sam Riegel. I was seriously hoping for Travis after the oh-so-spooky ending to last week's episode, but we'll make do! Tonight, Sam joins us while exercising on his Peloton (apparently in a full workout program led by Peloton teacher Tunde(?)) in front of a green screen. Boy, this is gonna be a thing, huh?

We're not even to the first question and Sam has already been photoshopped into a carwash. Oh, brother.

How is everyone feeling diving into the Cognouza ward? Laura doesn't want to be there at all. She knew Liam desperately wanted to see it, but she didn't. Neither did Sam: it's like being in someone else's gross bathroom where you really don't want to touch anything. Isn't the whole city a body? Is there an earwax room, Sam wonders?

Dani called that Sprinkle was Artagan waaaay back when. She thought it was either a Hollowed One or the Traveler. Travis and Laura were joking about it at home a while back as well, but she didn't think it was real. Sam assumed Matt just didn't want to retcon Sprinkle dying after various adventures & never expected him to tie a plot point to it.

Sam thinks the campaign is winding down & he's trying to get Veth one-on-one time for everyone. Laura is his favorite due to Jester's & Nott's relationship. Laura very much wants to open a real detective agency in game if they both survive this fight.

Laura can't believe Sam is committing to the Peloton bit. "I just had no idea that you were going to do this the whole time. I genuinely thought you were choosing to wear a sleeveless shirt." Sam: "I like that we're at that part in our relationship where you're like, 'well, this is a mistake for him but I'm not even gonna bring it up.'"

If Jester wasn't in a relationship with Fjord, she'd have wink-wink'd at Charlie.

Veth on Devexian: she's very drawn to confidence and sexy voices. There are no men in the M9 who check those boxes. Jester: "Fjord is very tall, dark, and handsome!" Sam: "Yeah, but he's got those little stick arms!" Brian points out that Yasha is the most tall, dark, and handsome of the group, and Sam laments that he already tried that too. She's not going to sleep with the robot, but she can appreciate beauty.

Laura starts to tell us about the Shape of Water while talking about Devexian's functionality and makes THAT GESTURE, YOU KNOW. She then collapses with laughter at being shy about it. She tells Sam Jester isn't shy at all and draws all sorts of humanoid species dicks.

They both agree the powers Caleb & Beau have right now are awesome but will 100% come back to bite them. Sam thinks the 3/9 eyes means there's a 1/3 chance Molly can control them.

Once Molly takes them over, they both agree Beau must be killed first. "She could kill all of us in a heartbeat."

Cosplay of the Week: kairiceleste on Instagram with an amazing Caleb. Great fire photoshop as well! Brian pulls the digital CR gift card off a genuine Bafta. These kids, I tell you what.

Jester still wishes they had access to the Wild Magic chaos since it seemed perfectly harmless and only funny. Laura, on the other hand, knows it's a good thing they've left it behind since not all of them are so benign.

Both Sam & Laura are delightedly astonished to remember Veth is still like a foot tall. Sam says he would have been doing an even higher-pitched voice had he known.

Laura feels great about her Parent Trap success. She likes that it was grounded and not fanciful. It was very bittersweet to leave them behind, choosing not to say goodbye. It almost felt like Jester has accepted whatever fate has in store and if something happens to her, she knows that at least someone will take care of Marion.

Right now, Jester feels a stronger purpose than anything to stop the city. It's so hard to marry that serious & driven purpose to Caleb's desire, for example, to explore a room and pick up a piece of paper. She really thinks she did see that vision of the eye that Matt mentioned last episode, contrary to what Matt thinks.

It wasn't as satisfying as Sam had hoped to kill Otis. He wanted to face off in a fair duel and win via superior cunning & scrappiness. "Who knows, maybe Otis will come back to life!" Maybe they can Speak with Dead and Veth can rub it in.

Laura desperately wants to go back and explore the city. It felt like a video game level with a time limit; it killed her that she couldn't take as much time as she wanted to explore. "There was so much loot!"

Sam wasn't expecting the Somnovem to have distinct personalities. Dani has a theory about them being heightened emotions. Sam: "Like Inside Out??" Laura: "Inside Out in the flesh city." There has to be a way to sweet-talk them into helping. Laura never expected that they'd actually land in the city at all.

The only thing that is stopping them now is that Lucien hasn't placed his threshold crest yet. Laura thinks that if he does, the city will go back immediately and--she suspects--the nine Somnovem will rise again in power like gods, and drive the city to destroy Exandria.

Fanart of the Week: gazedraws with a lovely Devexian. Great gold work on the neck and face! Sam: "It would take a while to put a hickey on that, but I could do it."

Brian's entirely imagined neon sign dropping from the ceiling with the gift card is powered (apparently) by Sam's Peloton. Laura complains that the light isn't bright enough because he isn't pedaling fast enough. I can't believe how intricate this has become.

It makes perfect sense for Jester that there is power that comes from belief. She's coming to terms with the idea that the Traveler isn't a god.

All three of them forward-nostalgize about sitting on a couch together. Soon, friends!

They're dying to know about the weapon Veth found. They need time for Caleb to identify it.

Lucien's visible reaction to being called Circus Man has to be a clue from Matt that Molly's still in there. Both Sam & Laura are convinced that they can reach Molly somehow if they can just say the right thing. They are determined to try to get Molly back before Travis just kills Lucien. Laura wonders if they're going to encounter the consciousnesses of Yussa and Molly somewhere in the city.

Sam and Laura think they have good odds against Cree, even with legendary actions. Sam's sure there will be some wrinkle to either make the fight harder or delay them in the fight against Lucien. Laura suggests splitting the party. Brian: "You should be careful splitting the party; without Caduceus, there's no healing!" Laura: "...that's true." Sam thinks that Cree will be able to control Beau or Caleb (or other party members) with the blood vials she took so long ago.

Sam has gone 14.1 miles on the Peloton. What a nice workout!

And that is that is that! Is it Thursday yet?

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts

199 notes · View notes

egcdeath · 3 years

Text

checkmate

summary: you’ve always refused to lose, and love was no exception. (gone girl-ish au)

pairing(s): ransom drysdale x dark!reader, a special mystery guest ;)

word count: 3.7k

warnings: 18+ because of heavy themes! faked death, framing of crimes, manipulation, alluding to sex, alluding to cheating, terrible relationship dynamic, very loose usage of the word crazy/psychotic, implied mention of self harm, brief choking & slapping (in a non sexual way lol), pregnancy trapping (idk if thats the right term), the reader is a very bad human being, overuse of italics *please let me know if i’m missing any warnings!

author’s note: this is my 2nd submission for @stargazingfangirl18’s 5k soft dark challenge, i decided to make the reader dark >:) but ransom is also not a good person. I used these prompts: “I’ve waited a long time for this, sweetheart.” & The town golden *girl isn’t as sweet as everyone thinks.

this is definitely the most unhinged thing i’ve ever written, but blame @literate-lamb for making me write this because when i pitched this to her and said that i’d probably never write it, she enabled me.

okay that's enough from me. join my taglist if you want :D

“I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I've always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch.” Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Your whole life, you’d considered yourself a competitive person. Constantly overcompensating for one thing or another, whether it was the chronic desire to achieve perfection that had been installed in you since you were a little girl, or your persistent internalized sense of inadequacy. You realized early on that it was much better for you to win than for you to lose, no matter the physical, emotional, or mental cost of the prize of perfection.

For the most part, this mindset worked out for you. You graduated as Valedictorian from your high school, neared the top of your graduating class at Harvard. God knew you earned it, all those tears you shed into overpriced textbooks, all the popping of unprescribed Adderall, and robbing yourself of the parties and social events that the rest of your peers gladly indulged in.

You were just different, which was why you gained a job nearly immediately after your exit from school, quickly climbing to the top at the Blood Like Wine publishing company after only a few years of being there.

And one night, at the party celebrating the release of A Thousand Knives when you laid your eyes on Hugh Ransom Drysdale, the grandson of your boss, you knew that you needed to have him. Rich, hot, a bit of an asshole. You deserved to finally complete your image, and that socialite flavored eye candy seemed to fit the part perfectly. Luckily for you, he was desperate. It only took a few tugs on your dress’ V-line, and a number of knowing smirks to find yourself being finger-banged in his family manor’s bathroom.

From there, you wormed your way into his life. Leaving belongings at his place as an excuse to come back, and offering booty calls in the middle of the night. Ransom must’ve been much more desperate than you originally thought, as it really only seemed to take one night of stroking his hair while he vented about his family to make him want to be with you. Men with mommy issues were always so easy.

Except, he wasn’t that easy. The longer you got to know Ransom, the more fucked up you realized he really was. He had no boundaries at all, became jealous and enraged at the drop of a pin, and occasionally told you things that made the hairs on your arms rise.

This of course all came to a head after the night of Harlan’s 85th birthday party. When the news broke of his tragic death, you’d immediately known it was the works of your Hugh. If your intuition wasn’t enough, his confession in the shower, where he’d demanded you take off your clothes to display that you were without a bug, certainly was.

You were completely devastated. The man that you’d invested so much into for years had thrown both his and your reputations down the drain in just a matter of hours. Of course, you felt bad for Harlan too. He was a good guy (when he wasn’t instigating a family fight).

Still, you showed up during the funeral in your best mourning clothes and dawning your biggest crocodile tears. You rubbed Linda’s back while she mourned the loss of her father, and the new truth about her husband. You played dumb when interrogated by some Southern private investigator, even giving Ransom an airtight alibi. You testified on his behalf in court with enough conviction to grant you an Emmy.

You’d gotten so far, devoted so much energy into him, that you simply refused to lose now.

To your friends, you’d seemed to lead a near perfect life. Dream job, dreamy boyfriend, dream bank account, but it wasn’t enough. You wanted more, you just didn’t know what.

It dawned on you while sipping mimosas at the country club, Ransom playing tennis with his friends just a few yards away from you while Danielle showed off her brand new engagement ring, a .59 Carat Asscher Diamond, that if you heard her speak of again, would probably make you lose your shit.

You zoned out as she droned on and on about the shape, and how Matt proposed to her in their own private room in one of the most exclusive Parisian restaurants, instead focusing on how you could find yourself in the same position as that airhead next to you. In all honesty, you couldn’t stand the idea that someone was doing better than you, let alone someone in your own social circle. Dani got all the bragging rights of being engaged to the heir of some tech giant, being the first in your friend group to get eloped, and worst of all, Matt wasn’t even making her sign a prenup.

You blankly watched Ransom from afar, taking occasional sips from your sweet drink, while you thought of how you deserved all of that and more, and you were going to get it one way or another.

——

It didn’t take much to come up with something, your first and most obvious plan being to simply ask Ransom when he was going to propose to you. Of course, this wasn’t the first time you’d tried to approach him about this subject, you just wondered if maybe this time things would be different.

Panting heavily after a rather rough night in bed, you rolled off of your boyfriend’s chest and gave him a messy, yet sincere kiss. You knew your man well, and if there was any time to pop the question, it was in his post-nut haze.

“Baby,” you said breathily, “I wanna ask you something.”

“Shoot,” he responded casually, glancing over at you.

“When’re you gonna propose to me?” you hummed.

Ransom groaned and shook his head, rolling his eyes, “this is about Matt and Dani, huh?” he tutted, then extended a hand out to your warm cheeks so he could gently caress one with his thumb. “Thought we agreed marriage is just a piece of paper and it’s stupid.”

You huffed in response.

Of fucking course.

“I never said that,” you muttered, setting a hand on his broad chest. “Besides, it’ll be good if you get pissed and decide to like, kill your dad or something. Y’know, spouses don’t have to testify against each other in court.”

Ransom chuckled as if this whole thing was funny, like your feelings were some kind of sick joke to him. “You know my lawyers, babe. They could prove that bees don’t make honey. That bears don’t shit in the forest. I appreciate your attempt, though. This has been some really nice pillow talk.”

“Whatever,” you muttered, pinching his nipple in retaliation before turning your back to him and yanking the blanket onto your side.

You weren’t sure why you were so surprised that he was being stubborn, most of the time you felt like you were pulling teeth from the man. But that’s why you had a backup plan! You always had a backup plan. That’s what separated you from your boyfriend. Where Ransom was extemporized and impulsive, you were calculating and prudent.

Although you devised your plan that very afternoon while watching your partner backhand small green balls, you were going to need some time to get everything in order, to prove Murphy and his stupid law wrong in making sure that everything that could go wrong wouldn’t.

After all, love was a game. And you sure as hell weren’t losing to Hugh Drysdale.

——

You sacrificed too much to have your plans ruined by some trust fund baby with impulsivity issues. You deserved your dream marriage, the stability you wished you had as a child. You wanted the white picket fence, and everything that came along with it. Your desire to be the best, to be perfect was what drove you to poke holes in every condom in the box, what led you to draw liters of your own blood in hopes of staging a fake crime scene, to buy a cheap getaway car and burner phone off of Craigslist, and reach out to a high school boyfriend who you knew was in a position as desperate as you.

You planted seeds of doubt in your friends throughout the following weeks, feeding them lies about Ransom’s behavior, how you were afraid of telling him that you did in fact see two faint red lines on that damn plastic stick– only half of the statement truly being false–, telling them that he was behaving erratically lately.

It all was going without a hitch. Ransom didn’t seem to notice anything was off, despite your frequent visits to the bathroom and newfound affinity for true crime documentaries.

You almost felt guilty, knowing the world of pain you were about to throw the man into. Granted, he deserved the pain. You were in a relationship with a genuinely terrible person, and that person had made a conscious effort not to commit to you. You tried to make this easy for him, give him a chance to say a few words to you and slide a ring on your finger, but no, he always seemed to take the hard route.

You slept like a baby the night before you were setting your plan in action. You made sure to uphold the facade of everything being fine, making Ransom a nice breakfast before sending him halfway across town to the hardware store with an oddly incriminating list.

Once he was out of the house, you hurried off to the fridge in the garage where you’d been keeping a small stash of your own blood. It wasn’t pretty, but it had to be done. You poured the blood throughout the kitchen, splattering bits of it on the counters and cupboards. You poorly cleaned the mess, just as he would.

You put your next move in motion, falsifying a home invasion. You tossed over a table and some chairs, throwing books and photos onto the floor, but left some aspects slightly untouched, like an upright picture frame to give yet another hint that things were not exactly what they appeared.

You left a tiny blue post-it note on the nightstand of Ransom’s side of the bed, a quick and simple doodle of a ring along with the first initial of your name inked onto the tiny piece of paper.

With that, you were off. Technically missing, soon-to-be presumed dead.

----

The days following your disappearance had gone even better than you’d initially planned. Local news coverage had been all over you, search and rescue groups were assiduously looking for you, your parents had opened a tip line, and begged for you to get home safe on news segments. But the best part of it all was that Ransom had been briefly found himself in police custody, only to be released shortly thereafter. His past of an accused murder quickly made your disappearance even more of a national story, and you watched the whole thing unravel from the safety and comfort of your high school boyfriend, Andy Barber’s Newton home.

Of course, you fed him the same lies you’d given to your friends, and seeing the rather lonely position he was in, he gladly let you stay with him. You were absolutely having a hay-day with it all, dedicating hours of your day to watching Ransom slowly unravel. Maybe it was a bit sadistic of you to enjoy torturing your partner so much, but he needed to learn his lesson. You deserved better. You needed Ransom to rise up to your level, allowing you to finally complete your image. To let you two appear to be the perfect couple. Really, this was all on him.

Andy, for the most part, had been a good host. He was gone for the majority of the day, dedicating himself to his work while you lounged around on his dangerously cozy couch. Around two weeks into your stay, you were sharing a box of pizza in the living room with your old lover when something interesting on the television caught your eye.

Ransom, broadcasted on CBS, being interviewed on your disappearance.

You watched with wide eyes as Ransom begged for your return on national television. It was one thing seeing your mother plead for you to come back, the same woman who had installed such toxic behavior in you sob for your return, but Ransom. You’d never loved him more than in that moment.

“Hugh, if you could tell Y/N one thing, what would it be?” the interviewer asked.

Ransom turned, looking straight at the camera, directly into your soul, “Y/N, I love you so much. More than you’ll ever know. I need you to come back safely, to see you, to hold you again. I’d give anything in the world for that right now,” he looked down, a tear falling down his cheek. “I can’t live without you in my life, I-”

His sentence was cut off by Andy grabbing the remote, and turning off the TV. You turned your head and frowned deeply at him.

“Why’d you do that?” you asked with a bit of a pout.

“I just couldn’t stand listening to him talk about you like he hasn’t treated you like shit for the past few years. C’mon, let’s get ready for bed.”

Your blood boiled. Andy was once a means to an end, but now he was interfering. He was clearly much too selfish to see that you and Ransom were quite obviously soulmates. A match made in hell.

You followed him to bed regardless, curling up on what had been your side of the bed for the past few days, and staring at the wall until Andy’s breaths moved from a soft and rhythmic pattern to loud snores. God, those snores were obnoxious.

You slipped out of bed and to his dresser, grabbing two soft ties from the drawer, and daintily tying his wrists to each side of the bedpost.

“What‘re you doing?” he mumbled, instinctively yanking both of his wrists as he awoke.

“I’m going back home,” you whispered.

“You can’t be serious,” Andy huffed, tugging on the restraint attached to the headboard.

You shook your head, “I am.”

“I should’ve known. Why would you do something like this? Do you know how much trouble you’ll be in with the law?”

“Do you know how much trouble you’ll be in when the world finds out that you kidnapped me?” you retorted.

This threat seemed to wake him up right away, “what about this was kidnapping? I gave you a nice home, fed you, I didn’t even make a pass at you. I didn’t do shit to you,” he hissed. “You think I can’t prove that? I’m a lawyer, for god's sake!”

You nearly laughed, “Okay, Andy,” you paused for a moment, “As a lawyer, who do you think everyone’ll believe? Someone who the world was on a wild goose chase for in the last two weeks? Or the man with a family history of violence? Must I remind you that your father and your son have killed people?”

Andy shook his head, face pinched in sorrow at the mention of his deceased son, clearly a low blow. “You’re insane,” he muttered.

“Swear to god that you won’t tell a soul what happened here,” you leaned over him, getting right in his face. “Or I promise, Andrew Barber, I will ruin you. You’ll spend the rest of your life behind bars, or disbarred, or whatever the hell I decide to do with you. So keep your goddamn lips shut.”

You pulled away and he solemnly nodded, not bothering to put up a fight. You loosened the fabric around his left wrist and walked out of the room. You picked up the keys to Andy’s Audi on your way out, checking the time as you adjusted the driver's seat.

9:45 PM. Fatherhood really changed the man.

You pushed that thought aside and began your drive home, which turned out to be a surprisingly short trip. When you pulled up in front of your home, you were met with a slew of reporters outside of the house, along with a police car that seemed to be permanently camped there.

As you slowly got out of the car, a gasp, followed by a loud silence fell across the crowd. You limped for dramatic effect up the driveway as cameras followed you, and glanced back at them pathetically. From your peripheral view, you noticed the officers get out of their vehicle.

You finally got to your door, ringing the doorbell and waiting. You blinked harshly a few times, conjuring up the tears you needed to really make a spectacle of the event. After a few minutes, Ransom opened the door, eyes widening as he looked at you. He stepped out, and you wrapped him in as big of a hug as you could manage, genuinely missing his embrace. It was possible that you even let out a few real tears in the moment.

Your emotional embrace was interrupted by the man you recognized as Lieutenant Elliott, the same officer who’d been assigned to Harlan’s case.

“Ma’am,” he began, only to be shut down by you.

“Please, just let me be with my boyfriend,” you pleaded, crocodile tears streaming down your face as you spoke with the officer. You still needed time to get your story straight.

“Just give us the night, Lieutenant. We’ll come in first thing tomorrow morning,” Ransom added, furrowing his brows at the officer that he’d come into contact with far too many times.

He looked to his partner, who shrugged, then to you, “enjoy your night.”

Cameras flashed around you as civilians, journalists, and newscasters alike attempted to catch your attention. You grabbed Ransom’s hand and dramatically pulled him inside, insincerely attempting to hide your face by ducking and covering half of your face with your arm.

As soon as you were in the privacy of your own home, Ransom threw you against a wall.

“Why. The fuck. Would you pull a stunt like that,” he hissed through gritted teeth, eyes wild, and a hand around your throat.

You whimpered as he tightened his grip, rage clearly flowing through his system uncontrollably.

“Do you know what you did to me? You almost had me thrown in fucking jail. Do you understand that?”

You nodded weakly, “Ran,” you whispered, “the baby,” you glanced down at your stomach.

He paused, dropping his grip on your neck and staring at you in awe, “no…”

You nodded again.

“How…? You told me you were on the pill… You- you made me use protection…”

“Surprise?” you said weakly.

“You’re a psychotic bitch.”

“I’m your psychotic bitch. And no child of mine will be born out of wedlock,” you taunted.

“That’s what this is about?” Ransom laughed manically. “You did this all because I won’t fucking marry you?”

You didn’t even have to respond.

“I should send you to the loony bin right fucking now.”

“What happened to all those things you said to me on TV?”

“You’re fucking delusional. I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can. And you will. I’ve had to put up with you and your stupid little antics for way too long. How do you think I felt when you killed your own grandfather?”

Ransom scoffed, throwing his hands up in exasperation, “you are so fucked up.”

“I’m the fucked up one? You killed your own blood in cold blood! You’re unhinged!”

“You faked your own death for attention, and got pregnant while doing it! Is that baby even mine?”

“The fuck are you trying to say, Hugh?”

“I asked if it’s even mine.”

“Really. You’re accusing me of cheating on you. That’s rich considering Mia, Layla, and whoever the fuck else. You’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m being ridiculous? You couldn’t have a normal adult conversation with me!”

“Are you kidding me? I asked you time after time to marry me and it was always some bullshit excuse!” you wagged a finger in his face as you spoke. “Oh, commitment scares me, oh, marriage is just a piece of paper, oh-“ you mocked his voice in a deeper tone before you were cut off by the sting of his hand against your cheek.

“Can you shut the hell up?” he growled at you as you held your own cheek, before you reached out and slapped him back, “I can’t believe that I’m stuck with such a deranged bitch for the rest of my life.”

“Maybe work on your vows a little, dear. I don’t think that those words are as charming to me as they’d be to the rest of our family and friends.”

“You can’t be serious,” he groaned.

“But I am,” you hummed, rubbing your cheek softly once again. “Look at how fast your life fell apart without me here. How quickly the public turned on you. Imagine how upset they’d be if you left me. I love you, Ran. I really do. You and I are perfect for each other, can’t you see that now?”

Ransom took a step away from you, pacing slowly in front of you. He ran a stressed hand through his hair, and took a long and drawn out breath, clearly at a loss for words.

“So when should we have the wedding? I’ve always wanted a Spring wedding, and I know it’s a little short notice, but I don’t want to be showing too much in my wedding dress,” you grabbed Ransom’s bicep gently, as if you were just having a regular old day with him, as if you hadn’t been choked and slapped moments ago. “But we can make it work. We always make it work, right?”

Your now fiancé stared vacantly at the wall ahead of him, giving you a slow, empty nod of agreement.

“It’s settled then,” you smirked. “I’ll start looking at venues. You find me a nice ring, okay Honey? One that puts all those other bitches’ rings to shame,” you sighed pleasantly to yourself, “I’ve waited a long time for this, sweetheart.”

You pressed a soft kiss to his cheek before hurrying up the stairs and into your bedroom. You heard a distant shriek of “fuck,” from Ransom, but you truly could not care less.

You hopped into bed, grabbing your laptop from its charger and promptly opening it. You couldn’t help but to smile at your own reflection on the empty black screen. This wasn’t how you imagined your engagement, but you did the impossible. You tied yourself down to Hugh Ransom Drysdale, he went down kicking in screaming, and you were likely in for a lifetime of cheating and resentment, but you did it nonetheless.

You finally won.

#ransom drysdale x reader #ransom drysdale x you #dark!reader #ransom drysdale x dark!reader #ransom thrombey x reader #ransom thrombey x you #knives out #knives out fanfic #siris5ksoftdarkchallenge

275 notes · View notes

goliath-de-senfina-sango · 3 years

Text

Home

Everyone needs a home, even if they’re not alive anymore ao3

The citizens of Amity Park, upon spotting their ghostly hero napping about all over town in odd places, concluded that he had no home in Amity. Whether it be because Danny’s original home was lost to the sands of time or he never had one or it was in another country varied from person to person but they all agreed. And so, it was collectively agreed upon by the various people who had been saved by Danny personally - or had their child saved by him or were part of one of the cults religions spawned by his time traveling and/or the societal upheaval caused by the revelation of proven life after death - that this should be fixed. The pool of funds to conduct such an endeavour was gathered almost suspiciously swiftly but no one quite questioned it aloud. Instead, a very nice apartment was bought for Danny Phantom and paid for by the Stars of the Judge, a fact that Danny elected to ignore when he was handed paperwork and a key when flagged down by a fan who had been running after him for a few blocks.

“Mr. Phantom,” she said between pants for breath. “I and the other citizens of Amity Park have seen that you don’t appear to have a home of your own, even while you keep our homes safe. So, a few of us got together and decided to provide you with one. Here, the address is on the paper.”

Danny blinked, accepting the papers and key more out of reflex from having things shoved into his hand than anything, and soon his cheeks were green as grass. “Ah, thanks! You didn’t have to uh do that at all, but thanks so much!”

“It’s our way of saying thank you for keeping us safe, Mister Phantom.” Before Danny could ask that she not call him that, she pulled out a hat and a gel pen, face growing a few shades darker when Danny floated back a step. “Also, can you pretty please sign my hat?”

When Danny told his friends, they both howled with laughter, falling all over each other on Tucker’s bed. “You’re tellin me,” Tucker wheezed, “that your fans bought you a house?”

“An apartment, not a house.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Tucker said, rolling his eyes. “Your fans bought you an apartment in an otherwise abandoned building, effectively giving you the run of the place? How did they even afford that?”

Wiping away a fake tear, Sam pulled herself together just enough to speak. “I bet the Stars of the Heavenly Judge did a fundraiser for it.” She snorted and Danny crossed his arms, face going red. “Ya know, Danny-”

“I am neither the nor a heavenly, divine, or godly judge Sam. They aren’t my cult.”

“They disagree,” she said, having no mercy on her good friend who gave her many hugs and jokes. “And you do sorta judge powerful spiritual beings, one of whom was deriving most of her power from the worship of her fans, and probably still is.”

“I fight those spiritual beings, Sam, that’s a bit more than judging them.”

“You fight some of them,” Tucker corrected. “You judge who is benign enough to be here and who needs to fuck off back to the world of spirits.”

“Commonly, gods, faeries, spirits, demons and the like are near indistinguishable from each other save for worship, whether they were prayed to or against, and what domains they held unearthly control over.” Sam paused to think and Danny prayed to the stars that she was done torturing him. “I’d say the scale of animosity plays a part but like I said, some gods are simply prayed against rather than to.”

“You are both terrible and I am going to find new friends.” Danny pouted, spinning around in Tucker’s gaming chair.

“Like I was saying, you should probably do something to like, convince the wealthier members of your worshipers to give homes to the homeless who are still alive, since they’re ok with providing a home to a ghost.”

“Not my cult,” Danny grumbled, “but I’ll mention it if I see one of them again. And does it really count as me being given a home if I already have a home? Like, I can make a chill place to hang out of it, since I feel like it’d be rude to just not use it now that I’ve accepted the key, but I’ve already got a home with my parents and Jazz.” rather than answer him, even with a joke, his friends were eerily silent, and Danny fidgetted with the end of his shirt. “Guys?”

“Well, a home away from home can be pretty useful,” Sam said. She didn’t ask if Danny truly thought a place where he never truly felt safe could be called a home, because she knew that Danny wasn’t ready for that conversation, and now wasn’t the time to have it. “We can even make it the team phantom base of operations.”

“When we grow up we can all rent separate or even the same apartment in the same building, so it’s less suspicious if we end up going in there all the time,” Tucker added.

“Huh, yeah. I guess those are good points.” Danny shrugged. “Plus, I guess Danny Phantom has never really had a home. Except for you guys.”

“Oh gross, that’s so sappy.” Sam laughed when Danny lunged to join the cuddle pile, and soon they were all tangled up in each other. “But hey, you’re our home too.”

“Home is people you love,” Tucker said, “and I’ve got my home right here in my arms.”

#Danny Phantom #Dannymay 2021 #Danny Fenton #Sam Manson #Tucker Foley #Fanfiction #Rexy Writes

115 notes · View notes

dee6000 · 3 years

Text

LoSlavery Is Not OUR "Original Sin" The thick lines show majority of African slaves went to Spain’s (they started trans-Atlantic slave trade) Latin American & Caribbean slave colonies, Muslim and African Countries. Few went to colony that became the US

How many times have you heard that slavery was “America’s original sin”? I’m not quite sure what that means, but I think the idea is that slavery was a uniquely horrible thing that defines the United States and will stain whites forever. It’s one of the few things Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama agree on. There are books about it. Here’s a college course at UC Davis called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin: Part 1."

The fact is, there has been slavery in every period of history, and just about everywhere. The Greeks and Romans had it, the ancient Egyptians had it, it’s all over the Bible, the Chinese and the pre-Columbian Indians had it, the Maoris in New Zealand had it, and the Muslims had it in spades. But I have never, ever heard of slavery being anyone else’s “original sin.”

About the only societies that never had slaves were primitivehunter-gatherers. As soon as people have some kind of formal social organization, they start taking slaves.

You’ve heard about slavery and mass human sacrifices of Central and South American Indians, but North American Indians were enslaving each other long before the white man showed up.

Tlingit and Haida Indians, who lived in the Pacific Northwest, went raiding for slaves as far South as California. About one quarter of the population were slaves, and the children of slaves were slaves. During potlatches, or huge ceremonial feasts, the Tlingit would sometimes burn property and kill slaves, just to show how rich they were. What’s a couple of slaves to a guy who lives in a house like this?

When we bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867, Indians were furious when we told them they had to give up their slaves. The Tlingit carved this image of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator, to try to shame the government into compensating them for slaves.

What were called the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Southeast happily bought black slaves. In 1860, there were 21,000 Cherokee, and they owned 4,000 slaves. And that was just the Cherokee. Many took their slaves with them when they were forced to move West.

Free blacks in the South owned slaves. The fact of having been slaves didn’t stop them from wanting to be slave masters themselves. In 1840, in South Carolina alone, there were 454 free blacks who owned a total of 2,357 slaves. Only about 20 percent of Southern households had even one slave, but 75 percent of the free-black households in South Carolina owned slaves.

Don’t believe me? It’s all in this book by the expert on the subject, Larry Koger of the University of South Carolina. And he demolishes the idea that most blacks bought slaves only to get family members out of slavery. Like whites, some were kind masters and some were mean, but, for the most part, they owned slaves for exactly the same reasons whites did.

There’s a whole book about this black guy, Andrew Durnford.

He had a plantation of 672 acres along the Mississippi in Louisiana, and close to 100 slaves. Another black slave owner in Louisiana, P.C. Richards, owned 152 slaves. Black slaveowners avidly supported the Confederacy. There are no accurate estimates of the number of slaves held by free blacks at the time of the Civil War, but they would have been tens of thousands.

If slavery is somebody’s Original Sin, it’s sure not ours. Take a look at this map of the slave trade, beginning in 1500.

[Source: SlaveVoyages.com, click to enlarge]

The thicknesses of the lines represent numbers of slaves. What became the United States imported just around 400,000 slaves—about 3 percent of all the slaves who crossed the Atlantic. Look at all the slaves who went to Brazil and to the Caribbean Islands.They needed millions because, unlike American slaveowners who raised slave families, they bought grown men and worked them to death. And let us not forget, virtually every slave on this map was caught by blacks or Arabs.

And look at all the slaves who ended up in North Africa and the Middle East.

That’s millions of them going to Muslim countries at exactly the same time slaves were crossing the Atlantic. And Arabs had been taking black slaves out of Africa, across the Sahara, for 900 years before America was even discovered—and a forced march across the desert was a lot worse than crossing the Atlantic. In this article about Africa’s first slavers—the Arabs—historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that over the centuries, Muslims took about 14 million blacks out of Africa [Recalling Africa’s harrowing tale of its first slavers – The Arabs – as UK Slave Trade Abolition is commemorated, March 27, 2018]. That is more than the 12 million who went to the New World.

And you might ask, where are the descendants of all those Middle Eastern slaves? America has millions of slave descendants. Why don’t you see lots of blacks in Saudi Arabia or Syria or Iraq? Arabs castrated black slaves so they wouldn’t have descendants.

Muslims were even more enthusiastic about enslaving white people. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, by Prof. Robert C. Davis is the best book on the subject. Remember the Barbary Pirates of North Africa? Between 1530 and 1780 they caught and enslaved more than a million white, European Christians. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Arabs took more white slaves south across the Mediterranean than there were blacks shipped across the Atlantic.

Mostly, Muslim pirates captured European ships and stole their crews. In just three years, from 1606 to 1609, the British navy admitted it had lost 466 British merchant ships to North African pirates [Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast Past & Present, August 2001]. Four hundred sixty-six ships in just three years. Arabs took American slaves. Between 1785 and 1793 Algerians captured 13 American ships in the Mediterranean and enslaved the crews. This is a 1804 battle between Arab pirates and the USS Enterprise.

It was only in 1815, after two wars, that the United States was finally free of the Barbary pirates.

Muslim pirates also organized huge, amphibious slave-catching assaults that practically depopulated the Italian coast. In 1544, Algerian raiders took 7,000 slaves in the Bay of Naples in a single raid. This drove the price of slaves so low it was said you could “swap a Christian for an onion.”

After a 1566 raid on Granada in Spain netted 4,000 men women, and children, it was said to be “raining Christians in Algiers.” Women were easier to catch than men, and were prized as sex slaves, so some coastal areas lost their entire child-bearing populations. One raid as far away as Iceland brought back 400 white slaves.

Prof. Davis notes that the trade in black Africans was strictly business, but Muslims had a jihad-like enthusiasm for stealing Christians. It was revenge for the Crusades and for the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs in 1492. When Muslim corsairs raided Europe, they made a point of desecrating churches and stealing church bells. The metal was valuable but stealing church bells silenced the voice of Christianity.

It was a tradition to parade newly captured Europeans through the streets so people could jeer at them, while children threw garbage at them. At the slave market, both men and women were stripped naked to evaluate their sexual value. In the North African capitals—Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli—there was a big demand for homosexual sex-slaves. Other Europeans were worked to death on farms or building projects.

Prof. Davis writes that unlike in North America, there were no limits on cruelty: “There was no countervailing force to protect the slave from his master’s violence: no local anti-cruelty laws, no benign public opinion, and rarely any effective pressure from foreign states.” Slaves were not just property, they were infidels, and deserved whatever suffering a master meted out.

For a man, there was a fate even worse than being a sex slave. Hundreds of thousands became galley slaves, often on slave-catching pirate ships. They were chained to their oars 24 hours a day, and could move only to the hole where the oar went through the hull—so they could relieve themselves. If the men were rowing, they fouled themselves. Galley slaves lived in a horrible stench, ate rotten food, were whipped by slave drivers and tormented by rats and lice. They could not lie down and had to sleep at their oars. Many never left their ships, even in port. Their job was to row until they died, and to be tossed overboard at the first sign of weakness.

Muslims have taken slaves for as long as there have been Muslims, which is about 1,400 years.

Mohammed himself was an enthusiastic slave trader. Muslims still take black slaves. As this article points out, Libya still has slave markets, Mauritanian Arabs take black slaves, and there is still slavery in Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan[Libya’s slave markets are a reminder that the exploitation of Africans never went away, by Martin Plaut, New Statesman, February 21, 2018].

And, of course, it was white people who abolished slavery, both in their own countries and, except for a few stubborn holdouts, the whole world. Africans, just like the Tlingit Indians, screamed about all the wealth we made them give up.

But slavery’s still our “original sin.” As Time magazine wrote just this month about slavery “Europeans and their colonial “descendants” in the United States engineered the most complete and enduring dehumanization of a people in history."[Facing America's History of Racism Requires Facing the Origins of 'Race' as a Concept, by Andrew Curran, July 10, 2020]

What a small minority of Americans did for 246 years—and in a relatively mild form—is worse than anything that was ever done anywhere by anyone.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of white privilege. I hope you are enjoying it. Watch this video:

youtube

#Youtube

50 notes · View notes

scrawnytreedemon · 3 years

Text

Can’t sleep, mind going precisely 56 miles an hour, so I think I’ll finally get around to writing this.

Couples days back, I went ahead and finally psyched myself up to do the Zant bossfight.

Because I’d picked up where I’d left off yesterday, which was just before the boss room, obviously I was taken back to the beginning of the area. This gave the whole ordeal a trek, if a short one, what with the Palace of Twilight’s laughable length, and me more time to think.

I didn’t want to do this.

It sounds stupid, but I really didn’t want to do this. I’d cried the day before trying to psych myself up and failing, and I’d cried then, before the boss door, stalling by sweeping away the crystal-fog as best I could-- A meagre attempt at housekeeping, and a futile one. Of course I couldn’t. This isn’t that sort of game. This isn’t a game for failed attempts at kindness, at least trying to clean this awful, awful place for an awful, awful man going through awful, awful things. I was supposed to be a hero.

Heroes don’t make beds.

They don’t wash dishes, or hang laundry, or hold a rival’s hand,

They kill.

The trek didn’t stop past the door, either.

We still had to walk up the stairs. To the throne.

To him.

And I was there, laugh-crying, wishing I didn’t have to. That I could skip this pathetic ordeal.

I tried to turn around and leave.

Despite it only looking like a larger one of the many, many doors we’ve passed through this awful, nonsensical, poorly-designed excuse for a palace that no one could ever live in, it didn’t budge. There wasn’t any turning back. I had to go forward, because this is an action game, and violence is key.

The game takes the reigns. Link walks up to the throne, sword drawn, despite my deliberate decision to sheathe it. The narrative begins again. Midna sneers, and throws a taunt at him.

Zant sits, and smiles. Smiles like he thinks he still has some form of control, or knows full well he’s lost it.

You know, when I was working through the Palace of Twilight, I’d come to the realisation that... Zant locked himself in the throneroom. From the outside. Logistically, despite the good laugh I had over this guy locking himself in from the fucking outside, where his opponents can grab the key, he could get out easily-- teleportation and all. But even that aside, it still spoke to a level of hasty panic, that he would even keep the key outside, behind a waterfall of yet more shitty fog-crytals in the hopes that would deter them. Deter us.

How long had the guy been here, alone in that room?

We all know what happens next. Despite this being my first playthrough, I’ve probably seen this cutscene a dozen times. Zant has what amounts to an overly-dramatised autistic meltdown expositing himself and his motivations. That he was upset and felt like everything he’d worked for had been taken away from him. That he was angry, angry and fed up of being relegated to a half-existence. Midna retorts, Zant wails some more.

What gets me is that, when Ganondorf visits him, engulfs him in this flaming ball of fucked-magical-fuckery, he just. Stares. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything. Ganondorf speaks as though he’s already decided that, yes, you will do, we will make a pact and rule Everything together; I will live on through you.

Did Zant even agree to this?

I think, subconsciously or not, he accepted it, but it begs the question of whether or not Zant was capable enough to partake in it.

Whatever the answer, he’s clearly not capable enough to partake in this. This fight.

It’s laughable, that I’m expected to find victory in this.

The fight was a fucking slog, 90% of the time. Some of these boss-battles I hadn’t played in nearly two years thanks to the impromptu hiatuses I’m so fond of taking, so I didn’t know what the fuck I was meant to be doing half the time-- And when I did, it lagged to shit everytime this poor bastard fired projectiles, because I was playing on the gamepad, because why on earth would I play this on the goddamn TV? It was a sad, pitiful encounter that I had to laugh my way through and also mumble “what the fuck“ on several occasions because I guess somebody at Nintendo ate cheese before bed and the dev team were so desperate to patch something together for this guy’s sudden crisis that they threw it in-- I’m obviously having a good laugh, but What The Fuck.

I knock the guy down in the last phase of the battle, the only one where he isn’t mimicking something else and dizzies himself spinning like a hyperactive child, and the game takes the reigns again. Midna prepares her hair. I look away-- I’ve seen it before, many times before, and it’s cartoonishly grotesque for a game that relies heavily on somber semi-realism. Midna has her own crisis-- And yeah, yeah bossbabe, I feel it.

It cuts back, and there’s a Heart Container on the guy’s throne.

I killed a guy, and now I’m collecting his lifeforce. I stormed into the bunged-up attempt of a fortress conjured up as a last defense by a man who’s fallen head-first into insanity, tore through any meagre security measure like butter, murder the guy when he’s having an episode, he dies a fucked up death, and then I collect his lifeforce.

Is that fucked up or what?

For all of Zelda’s endless violence, rarely do you actually kill “people.“ It’s the kind of stuff reserved for the end, for Ganondorf, or some other corrupted nigh-demigod on the brink of losing their humanity, or never having possessed it.

We kill Zant.

Zant barely puts up a fight, and we kill him. Zant gets summoned from the netherworld by Ganondorf in Hyrule Warriors; we put him there in the first place.

If we were to view this from a literal, like this shit actually happened and these characters are to be held accountable standpoint, then what we did was justified-- If not wholly, then mostly. Zant got power-hungry, committed what amounts to a bio-terroristic coup on the government, disfigured his rival, a woman notorious for her beauty, then proceeded to attempt the same thing with Hyrule, leading to the indirect death of at least the people who got transfigured into Shadow-Beasts in Kakariko, and attacks you first, then yeah, no biggie?

But I’ll be fucking real with you chief, I don’t find it... I don’t know, persuasive? Effective? Compelling, would be the best word, to think of it that way?

What Zant is, is a narrative tool. One that was set up to be this big, bad interloper who you need to Take Down and Save Everything, as per usual Zelda format. The justification for why we should hate him, if I’m going to be honest, feels contrived, most of the time. He does some bad thing off-screen, Midna gets pissed, Midna and everyone within a 12-mile radius explains why we should be pissed in a way that often feels borderline developer-hand-y-- And that’s. Well that’s how Zelda usually is.

It’s justification to commit violence.

--To be clear, I don’t say this in a political sense. I mean it in the very literal “hit/kill a guy“ sense. And in all honesty, that’s kinda inherent to the ethos of action games. We enjoy catharsis-- We enjoy taking down big things, it’s satisfying! I’ve played a little Hyrule Warriors-- Loved the feel of it. Violence is inherent to even the most benign of action games, and it is what it is.

Where it falls short for me, is that with Zant, I don’t feel like I’m taking down some great foe that I should justifiably hate.

I feel like I’m a clearly more equipped person breaking into a room, and bludgeoning a mentally ill person.

I’m autistic. I may slot in easier to NT society than most, but I am autistic, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to see something I’ve fucking gone through be used carelessly as flavour for a prelude to violence. I have meltdowns. They’re relatively rare, and mostly in my room, alone, but I’ve also experienced one out in public. It was only sobbing, but there’s a special kind of horror, of humilation in knowing other people, strangers, family, what have you, are seeing it, and all you can think is how much you failed.

I can’t fully articulate why I cried so much during this, quite frankly, menial ordeal. I’m half-embarrassed to even talk about it-- Because then that means caring too much, and I can’t care too much over a poorly-justified character that wasn’t even intended to be sympathised with and that most of the fandom laughs at. And I can’t say I blame them.

I guess at the end of the day it comes down to the ever-present pity; some strange, childish commiseration I’d indulged in ever since I was six and cooing over Bowser and how awful everything was for him, that despite my continuous efforts, I can’t ever seem to explain.

I didn’t like the Zant fight. It felt empty,

And all did was sweep cobwebs and try to turn back.

#scrawny rambles #scrawny speaks #tloz #twilight princess #zant #back at it again with anotherhgkjhgjkhgkhj #thoughts #i'm tired of how violence is used to handle everything i guess #i feel like i'm walking around with a hammer wanting to buils a little shed and maybe set it down and make soup and hand it out #but the game goes NO bludgeoning ONLY you MUST KILL ALL THE WRONGDOERS VIOLENCE IS THE ONLY WAY--#cAN WE MAYBE??? N O T?? FOR ONCE???#AGAIN to get onto another thing. fuckign. mnish cap. and how e/zlo i n s i s t s the only thing to do about v/aati is kill him #you know.#his child student. that HE TUTORED WHAT THE FU C K #AND EVERYONE??? THINKS IT'S F I N E??#(slashes employed so it doesn't show up in those tagshdjjhgjkhg)#BUT YEAH WHAT EVEN #i suppose another part of this is just how. violence is glorified so much even in everyday culture. even in progressive circles.#[especially in progressive circles.]#ugh. god i really am a soppy little lawful good pacifist aren't i???#hhgjhfjgjl #it's 12am forgive any typos

28 notes · View notes

thebestworstidea · 3 years

Text

The Green Knight’s Lady (4)

Sequel fic to “The Witch and the Green Knight” (on Ao3)

Warnings: undeserved redemption arc, graphic imagery and as of this chapter violence against minors.

Chapter 1: In which Rowan has Unexpected House Guests

Chapter 2: In Which They Try to Figure Out What the Hell is Going On

Chapter 3: In Which Remus and Rowan’s Stupidity Escalates to Treason (sort of)

>-<>-< ——————-<>——————- >-<>-<

Chapter 4: In Which Life is Difficult

>-<>-< ——————-<>——————- >-<>-<

The winter waned in a sloppy miserable way, kicking out with a few snowstorms like the flailing of a dying animal. Despite not really being bothered by the cold, D.N. practically hibernated, most often found in a window seat in the library, going through Rowan’s Mother’s books and being snarky about bad information about fairies. Rowan was fairly sure it was just a way to safely lash out. She dug out an old laptop and gave him access to the Netflix account. If nothing else it kept him distracted. Something Rowan had learned was that the fair folk did, as legend said, love stories.

And apparently, soap operas and romcoms.

Like herself, Remus seemed out of sorts in the late winter, though more in the way of someone who had woken up long before they wanted to. He’d gone into the woods and returned dressed in his more normal attire, also having brought back a few changes of clothing that was closer to D.N.’s size, and of a finer make than anything in the Baker house, despite Rowan’s sister’s cautious attempt to find a fabric the fae child would like. For the most part, the rest of Rowan’s family treated D.N. with cautious courtesy, and a certain level of ‘not be alone in a room with him’. Remus, by contrast, was treated more as a benign nuisance, though not without kindness. Frankly, that was more understandable than Rowan’s blase attitude. That didn’t stop a certain level of speculation as to why ‘Leif’ and his friend were staying with them.

“I’ve figured it out!”

Rowan balled a pair of socks and tossed it in her sister’s basket across the table. They were sorting the laundry by owner, and Rowan had made it her mission to find as many pairs of socks as she could.

“Figured what out?”

“What’s going on with Leif and the kid!”

“Have you now?” Rowan said dryly and a little nervously. Her sister nodded.

“It’s pretty obvious if you think about it. The kid is the spawn of the last fairy king.”

“What.”

“Look, it’s obvious that Leif served him, right? And we know he’s dead. So then Leif disappears for months and reappears with a kid? With scales? We know that Leif’s traveled outside Wickhills before- so clearly he knew where the kid was, maybe he was even the one who took him away, probably more of a Cronos eating his kids thing than a Arthur sent into hiding thing, and now he brought him back.” She pursed her lips. “You know, I bet Leif can change genders like a frog.”

Rowan started laughing.

“Leif might even be the mother-” she went on.

“Definitely not.” Rowan choked.

“But he is related. I’ve connected the dots.” she said smugly.

“You haven’t connected shit.” Rowan retorted throwing a pair of pants at her.

“I’ve connected them.”

As spring burgeoned forth, Remus agitated with the need to leave the house. It was clear he wasn’t used to staying in one place, even for a few weeks like this. Rowan could always tell when Remus had gone wandering in the night, because D.N. didn’t come down from the attic until he’d come back. It wasn’t as if D.N. was avoiding his so-called hosts, so much as he was totally avoiding the humans in the house as much as possible as if by pretending they weren’t there he could pretend none of this was happening.

When spring officially arrived Rowan made them clothing, a shirt of heavy green broadcloth for Remus, and a more delicate shirt of the finest white linen she had for D.N. The shirt he generally wore was made of undyed silk, and Rowan feared that the substance had come from the shroud- or rather bag- she’d sewn for the bones of the Serpent King. It was tricky to give them, as D.N. certainly wanted no gifts from her, and Remus wanted to gift her in return. But it was simply tradition, that for the first day of spring everyone had a new garment. So her green brother and erstwhile guest needed something new too, for luck. Honestly, Rowan thought he could probably use all the luck he could get.

It was a fine warm day in mid April, when leaves were finally starting to show, and only the most stubborn bits of snow were sticking around in the darkest shadows, when Rowan was working in her garden.

“Little tree! You’re wearing pants!”

The whippy rose vine Rowan had been arguing with slipped out of her hand as the twist tie sprang from her other, and she took the momentary break to glare at Remus, who had appeared in her personal bubble with no warning whatsoever.

“I wear pants all the time.” she retorted, giving him a half hearted shove.

“Yeah, but usually you have dresses over ‘em.” theatrically, he collapsed to the scrubby grass outside the garden and sprawled in the sun.

“Well, I learned that arguing with rose bushes in a dress doesn’t end well for the dress.” She grabbed hold again with her gloved hand, and pulled a fresh tie out of her apron pocket, lashing the thorny vine to the wrought iron trellis that kept most fae out of her garden. They could, in theory, pass under the iron arbor that faced the wood, wreathed as it was in plants, but until Remus it hadn’t been much of a problem. “How are you doing?” she asked quietly. He was looking better. He’d been kind of wan, a sickly sort of green rather than his normal healthy hue like a ripening acorn.

“Starting to feel my oats.” He responded, tipping his face into the sun. “It’s a good spring. I’d say that spring was happy about something.” in the distance, a door opened and closed.

“Seasons do seem to have emotions.” She agreed, and had to step delicately over him to get to the next bush, pulling clippers from her pocket and studying the bush thoughtfully, before pruning a few branches, and returning to tucking them in safely so they wouldn’t grab passers by too badly. That done she carried the trimmed branches away. D.N. emerged from the widdershins side of the house, having exited the front door and walked so he didn’t have to pass the rowan tree, even if he could do so under the protection of the porch. He glared down at Remus with frustration.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Having a kip?” Remus suggested, as Rowan stepped over him again to get back to the rose bushes.

“You should tell me as soon as you come back from the forest.” he said grouchily, not making eye contact.

“Well, not much is going on, so there’s nothing to tell you.” Remus shrugged.

“That’s good right?” Rowan asked.

“A secret unsaid is a secret kept.” D.N. muttered, not addressing Rowan at all. “What are you doing out there anyway?”

“Favors.” Remus sighed. “So many favors. I’m not exactly a favorite right now. People don’t want me to do favors for them, but I need the currency. Also fixing up my house.” he rubbed his hands over his face. “It’s kind of out of the way, so it might be safe enough. It’s nice enough to visit with my little tree, but…”

“We can’t stay here forever.” D.N. agreed. “It buzzes.”

“Yeah.” Remus nodded. “So I’ve got some improvements to make, and gotta reassert my territory. No one got near the tree, but I don’t have much around it.” he clicked his tongue “Fun and all, but I’m in a hurry.” he made a kissy face at them both. “But I’ll always hurry back to you.”

Rowan snorted, and D.N. rolled his eyes. He crossed his arms and cocked his hip, glaring down at the green-clad fae.

“I’m sure whatever you stay in is better than this.”

“Hey, owch. It’s a good house. We finally got the roof fixed last year.” Rowan glared, waving her clippers at him. D.N. leaned away.

“Well it’s hardly the hovel I’ve seen other witches live in,” he sneered at the Victorian style house. “But it isn’t anywhere I would choose to stay.”

“Sorry for not being a magical house.”

“Oh it’s full of magic alright. Human magic, thick and inelegant, like mud on the bottom of a pond.”

“I like mud.” Remus commented, popping up and bracing himself upright on his hands. Rowan noticed that his knuckles were reddened and split. Putting her clippers away again, she dug into her other pocket, coming up with a small, shallow clay pot, closed with a wide cork. She crouched down and grabbed one hand, dabbing the ointment onto the wounds. Remus obligingly offered his other hand when she was done.

“Why was this in your pocket?”

“It’s better to get the ointment on big jabs right away, and I’m doing lawn work.” she shrugged, and went back to her work.

After a while, Rowan finished her discussion with the rosebushes, and headed back inside without saying anything. Shortly after that, a car drove up hidden by the bulk of the house. Another short while later, it drove away again. Rowan returned to her garden, hooking her apron over her head again.

“Bloody busy-body is what she is.” Rowan grumbled to herself. “No need to come by every time, her tea hasn’t changed in over a year, if I wanted everyone coming by and bothering me all the time I’d start up a tea room in town and read palms and cards. It’s what I get for being helpful and offering to do a unique blend.”

“Can you tell the future?” Remus asked, popping up on the other side of the hedge wall of rose bushes, making Rowan yelp and clutch her rake.

“Like the weather.” She retorted. “Which is to say, not really worth anything.”

“You’re a useless kind of witch, aren’t you?” sniffed D.N. who had taken up a seat in an Adirondack style chair they had acquired somewhere, and everyone in the Baker family hated, which is why it wasn’t on the porch.

“Yeah, kind of.” she didn’t rise to the bait, and watched him stare at the woods. “You could go, you know.”

“What?”

“Nothing’s keeping you here if you wanted to leave.”

“Little tree-” Remus said, sounding hurt.

“Not you, you’re welcome any time. And for that matter, if he wants to go for a bit and come back, that’s fine.”

“I can’t actually. I have to ‘stay here’ until further notice.”

“Oh right. Fairy parole officer.” Rowan sighed. “Well you could probably get as far as the property line, or where our ‘official’ lot meets up with the woods.”

“It isn’t as if I’m desperate to wander in the woodlands, Witch, I just don’t want to be here. At all.”

“Boy, do I hear that.” she sighed deeply, pausing to look into the woods herself. The small leaves were misting the tips of the trees with color, and there was a smell of wet and rot in the air. It looked like a storm was building in the west. It would probably hit the before nightfall, gathering the dark in the clouds and making the night come that much faster in the growing spring day. Better to get her gardening done before it hit, so she’d only have to repair the damage it did, not do that and the maintenance. The plants were being especially springy this year, and she was tempted to put this down to Remus’s presence.

D.N. continued to watch her, as though she was some sort of reality TV show, while Remus sprawled in the scrubby grass next to his chair.

When the first cold wet gust hit, all three of them headed inside.

The storm was really having fun, so they were in Rowan’s room instead of the loft. Remus liked to hang out with both of them, so Rowan coming to work on whatever she was doing -some sort of project involving embroidery floss at the moment- and sit with Remus while Remus would root through her work basket, or bring out a pouch and do something himself- embroidery, or sharpening knives, occasionally woodcarving. Sometimes he’d sit behind Rowan and brush or play with her hair, braiding it into elaborate arrangements that she’d have to ask for help to undo.

Sometimes Danger Noodle would use Remus as a cushion or a backrest as if he was staking his claim. That night however, he’d pulled the beat up floral armchair Rowan kept next to one of her windows to a different window (further away from the dancing limbs of the rowan tree) and settled down with a book.

Rowan noticed that he would raise his hand and rub the back of his neck occasionally as if it were hurting. She nudged Remus’s leg and inclined her head at D.N. He shrugged.

“Are you in pain somehow?” Rowan asked, startling him into dropping his book.

“Kindly mind your own business.” Danger Noodle sneered.

“Are you cold?” Remus asked. “You do-” he rubbed the back of his neck “lots.”

D.N. growled under his breath, picking the book up.

“It isn’t important.” He told them.

“But it is a thing.”

“You never used to.”

He sighed, explosively. “Are you two going to leave me alone about this?”

“Well now I’m curious.” Rowan admitted tipping her head with a smile on her face that reminded D.N. far too much of Remus’s mischievous expression. If it weren’t for her obvious humanity, he would think they were siblings. “If you’re cold, I could get you a blanket, is all.”

“I’m not cold.” he rolled his eyes. “I’m a winter.”

She looked unimpressed. “So what’s with the lounging in sunbeams?”

Danger Noodle sneered at her, scales glinting in the lamplight.

“It's just a feeling. It’s like a cold hand on the back of my neck, it’s not squeezing but it’s there.” D.N. spread his fingers over the back of his neck. “Like something’s watching me, constantly.”

“Huh.” Remus and Rowan said in unison, heads tipping to the side. Danger Noodle glared, there was no way they weren’t doing that on purpose.

“Might be something?” Remus asked thoughtfully, looking at the corners of the room.

“I’d want to keep an eye on him, if it were me.” Rowan admitted.

D.N. sighed again, exasperated, then Remus perked up digging in one of the many pockets inside his vest. After a search he came up with a bag, tied firmly shut with cord. He climbed off the bed and went to kneel next to the armchair instead.

“I made this for you.” Remus opened the intricately tied knot, and from inside the bag, produced a scarf. It looked like heavy silk of some sort, dyed a beautiful saffron yellow, covered in single-thread embroidery. Vines twisted and twined along it, with a snake hidden among them. D.N. stared at it for a long moment, then recoiled.

“Are you out of your mind? Wait, never mind I retract the question.”

“I made it for you a while ago but…” Remus admitted. “You wouldn’t have taken it.”

“I’m not taking it now.” He stood up, tossing the book on the chair. “What makes you think I would even want it?”

“You’re not as strong now-”

Danger Noodle hissed, flashing sharp teeth, pupils narrow.

“-so I’m going to protect you until you’re stronger.” Remus finished as if he hadn’t just been threatened.

“I am still stronger than you.” the young fae said disdainfully, drawing himself up to his full, unimpressive height.

“Are you though?” Rowan asked, setting her project down and watching them.

“I am certainly more powerful than you.”

“Oh, that’s not even a question.”

“So what this looks like is Remus is offering you his favor to wear, showing that you’re his... I’m going to say ‘ward’, because you’re a kid.”

“I am not a kid!” D.N. retorted, stamping his foot like a child.

“And therefore under his protection. Displaying a connection.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah.” Remus agreed.

“Which is why I’m not interested.”

“I don’t have to give you an oath to give you my favor.” Remus pointed out, he just stared up at Danger Noodle entreatingly. The room was silent except for the storm outside, and the faint sound of someone watching a movie elsewhere in the house. D.N. rubbed the back of his neck again, and Rowan shivered, like a gust of cold air had made it through the window. Her eyes shut and she saw dead branches against a milky sky. Blinking the vision away, she got to see D.N. throw his hands in the air.

“Uugh enough with the eyes. Fine. I’ll take it, but it doesn’t mean anything.” He accepted the scarf and looped it around his neck, spreading the folds upward to the base of his hair.

“It means you’re wearing something I made you.” Remus pointed out and rose up, gathering Danger Noodle into a hug, to which he submitted, to Rowan’s surprise. “Which makes me happy.”

“Mmgnh. Fuck off.” D.N. mumbled, face pressed to Remus’s bicep.

Rowan decided not to comment on how cute it was.

#willow is writing #the witch and the green knight #laoft recursive fic

24 notes · View notes

kaypeace21 · 4 years

Text

Stranger things is about mental health & trauma- deal with it!

I’ve seen a lot of people claim anyone who mentioned this topic immediately be gaslit and told they’re “just crazy” and “rudely projecting their own issues on to the characters.’ Like- no you don’t have to believe my Will DID/Lonnie theory ( I could be wrong). But to claim one of the show’s central themes isn’t about mental health/trauma (screams either complete lack of lit comprehension or denial cause you have your own negative biases towards such people). So let’s just go into what’s literal text-not subtext/symbolism. Just the super blatant stuff. RIGHT IN THE SHOW!

-We have El when she first appears on screen asked by Benny if her parents starved and hurt her and if that’s why she ran away. Benny then calls CPS to say El “may have been ab*sed or something.” After this Lucas says there is “seriously something wrong with her-wrong in the head. She’s probably from the NUT-HOUSE in curly county.penthurst” We also see El cannonically has PTSD-all of s1 she’ll see something benign (a cat, a coke commercial, a closet) and is triggered to see a traumatic flashback. That’s literally ptsd. There’s also hints throughout the seasons she’s developmentally behind in both language, telling time etc (neglect like El’s irl can cause an intellectual disability-analysis on El/that subject here).The real pethurst in pensylvannia (not the one in stranger things/ Curly county) closed in 1986- it was a facility for people and mostly kids with intellectual disabilities (it wasn’t technically a psych facility like the one in st)-but it was infamous for it’s abuse of these intellectually disabled patients kept there. We also have Brenner be a ab*sive psychiatrist.

- Hopper after suffering from the loss of his daughter. Is popping pills like candy, drinking and smoking constantly. He later says he used to hallucinate and forgot what was real -seeing and hearing sarah and says if he didn’t confront the pain he’d “fall down a black hole he couldn’t get out of.” NO... subtext here about what the void represents nope.

- Both mothers (Terry & Joyce) are dismissed as being mentally ill and simply grieving the loss of their kids . But both end up being right about the supernatural.

- “Terry pretends Jane is real. i mean it’s all make believe. you know the doctors all say it’s a coping mechanism.”

- While with Joyce the whole town pre s1 already questioned her mental health. Jonathan says “She used to have anxiety problems (pre s1).” And Jonathan, Hopper, and Lonnie all assume she’s hallucinating: talking to Will via lights, seeing a man without a face, saying Will’s body is fake -due to grief. Plus Lonnie mentions the fact Joyce’s aunt Darlene also used to hallucinate as a possible reason (terry’s aunt also had mental health issues mentioned in s2 by Becky). Lonnie even says everything Joyce is seeing is “all in her head.” Hopper and Jon both say she needs to sleep and accept reality and Lonnie says she needs to see a “shrink”. Hopper “i’m not saying that you’re crazy”. Joyce : “no, you are.” Joyce also says to Lonnie “Stop looking at me like that... like everyone else like i’m out of my damn mind.” Hopper also says about Joyce she’s “on the edge”. Callahan says in response , “she’s been on the edge for a while now” (referring to her mental health- even before Will’s dissappearance)”. While Lonnie says Jonathan is “feeding into her hallucinations ... you’re going to push her right over the edge.” In s2 Hopper says “ I think everyone is on edge- you, me, Will most of all. (when talking about Will’s ptsd/trauma)”

- in s1 They claim Will just “fell” over the edge of the quarry’s cliff. Later the only other queer coded character (Mike) jumps off the quarry cliff (where Will’s body was found) cause the homophobic troy forced him too jump. Troy even says earlier dead-Will is “flying with all the other fairies all happy and gay” (to Mike). And Troy says to Hopper El made Mike “fly” after jumping off the cliff. Friendship saved him from jumping off the edge metaphorically ( and he’ll prob eventually be happy and gay too).

s2/3

-Will is seeing a therapist . And we are told he has ptsd and will experience the anniversary effect, personality changes,nightmares, having episodes, etc. And things “will get worse before they get better”. Mike also asks if what Will is seeing is “real or like the doctors say all in your head?” And Will continues to see hallucinations of the mf/upsidedown that only he can see initially.

-Hopper also agrees with owens mentioning how he knew guys with ptsd . joyce : “it’s not like he’s describing a nightmare. He talks about them like they’re real.” Hopper: “Yeah, because they’re not nightmares they’re flashbacks.I think he’s right about trauma.I think everyone is on edge (bringing that s1 ref back), Me you, Will, most of all.Nothing’s gonna go back to the way that it was. But it’ll get better.In time.”

-Nancy suffers from survivor’s guilt and drunkingly says she killed Barb. Jonathan says like Nancy he has “a weight that you that carry all the time . i feel it too.” (cough depression). He also says he tries to be there for Will but says about Will “he’s not the same. maybe things can’t go back to the way they were. (mirroring Hopper’s words earlier that season)”

-Jonathan said in s1 Joyce had “anxiety issues” than Nancy says in s3 “you really are your mother’s son... you worry too much.” Then we see him look worried after the comment.

- in s2, Axel & a scientist both call El and Will “schizos” because of their powers. In s3 mrs driscoll isn’t believed about the supernatural cause she’s schizophrenic-but like Joyce/Terry was right.

- Kali saves a woman named Dottie (a british slang term for crazy) from a mental hospital and then compares herself and El to dottie. saying her non-powered gang is “Like us ...outsiders... society discarded them.” In graphitti we even see the title “obedlam” a british poem about discarding the mentally ill and leaving them homeless. El before this sees a mentally ill man screaming “we’re all dead!” Kali’s friend says to El, after this encounter they were “dead all of us” until kali “saved them here” (points to head) “and here” (points to heart). Pointing to the theme of love and friendship helping those with such issues. Similar to the cliff analogy.

-The cycle of ab*se. Max in s2 says she’s afraid of becoming like Billy (her ab*ser). We see Billy mimic his ab*ser neil and inflict pain on max. In s3 we see the roots of his behavior are linked to mimicking Neil- Neil in a flashback says about baseball “what are you scared?” “ did i raise a p*ssy for a son”. So young Billy later in a fight says to a boy “ what are you scared to fight me? fight me p*ssy. (as he beats the boy)” Deflecting his anger of his father on to someone else. In s3, We see as a kid he used to say to Neil “don’t hurt her” (his mom)-specifically after Neil backhand slaps her -but we later see possessed Billy backhand slap Max (just like neil). The resentment to his mother leaving - festered into how he views women and max negatively . And his attraction to mrs wheeler prob is linked to him subconsciously missing his mother. Max in s2 even says he can’t take it out on her mother so he does so to her instead (we even have Billy hallucinate hurting mrs wheeler).We see in s2 the cycle of abuse is there- Billy mimics Neil, and then Max mimics Billy. Billy harrasses Max and yells “SAY IT!” (mimicking Neil). Max like Billy later yells “SAY IT” and uses a bat /violence to stand up for herself against Billy- which earlier she said she was trying to combat … explaining she can be angry like Billy sometimes but she never wants to be like him (her nickname symbolizing this: aka ‘mad max’). Billy’s last dying words were an apology to Max- for becoming her neil. And we hopefully will see Max break this cycle.

- Will says his now memories (that he describes like dreams) are “growing “, “spreading “,and “killing”. While Kali says they need to face their father and (as Brenner) says El has to confront her “wound” or else it’ll “grow”, “spread” and “eventually it’ll kill her.” Kali says she used to be like El . She used to bottle her pain away and it “spread.” But she then says “I confronted my pain and I finally began to heal (from those wounds).” We also see with jonathan and nancy when describing “shared trauma” zoom in onto the scars on their hands. The wound heeled into a scar so to speak.

S2 & 3 ENDINGS

both have Hopper do a speech that delves into dealing with trauma/depression but still finding good along the way.

-s2 Hopper outside the snowball: “how are you holding up? Yeah, that feeling never goes away. It is true what they say, you know. Everyday it does get easier.”

-s3 Hopper monolouge : “ Feelings jesus. For so long, i’d forgotten what those even were. I’ve been stuck in one place,in a cave you might say , a deep dark cave (cough s2 supernatural cave). For the first time in a long time, i started to feel things again. I started to feel happy. Life... yeah sometimes it’s painful .sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s suprising... happy.. And when life hurts you, because it will .remember the hurt . The hurt is good. It means you’re out of that cave.”

BUT YES- St has nothing to do with mental health/trauma, we’re just “crazy” and “projecting”. It’s not like some of ya’ll act pompous when you just have a bias and get pissy at the idea of relating to characters you “other” as “crazy” or “damaged” irl or anything (so attack people for pointing it out). Or (benefit of the doubt) you are just like.... oblivious... or just a kid who doesn’t know better XD

#stranger things #el hopper #will byers #jim hopper #joyce byers #max mayfield #billy hargrove #kali prasad #mike wheeler #jonathan byers #nancy wheeler

121 notes · View notes

platypanthewriter · 3 years

Text

The Tanning Rock

Harringrove April prompt 28, Tanning--Creatures!AU (This one grew to nearly 6k and I’m so sorry) @wasting-time-again HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY, HAVE A MERMAN! XD

The lawyer who summoned Billy—about an inheritance, he said—was...weird. Straight out of a movie, with long incisors and a cravat, and he steepled his fingers as he talked.

Max said he was probably actually a vampire, and Billy agreed—which was weird, because as far as Billy knew, his mom’s family wasn’t exactly old money, and it was hard to imagine a vampire getting on a plane to fly clear to California and summoning him to a crypt full of file cabinets, all just to read a will about his mom’s collection of surfing stickers and pile of old National Geographics.

Billy knew his father had disowned him, so he bit his lips together, waiting to hear that his mother had died.

“I am here about the estate of your grandmother,” said the vampire lawyer, and Billy drew a shaky breath of relief. “Your mother was disowned—” he said, and Billy almost snorted a laugh—like mother, like son, he thought, “—and so her domicile has passed to you.”

“Wait, what,” Billy breathed, wide-eyed.

“It is an unusual case,” said the lawyer—Fangun and Stayk, est. 986, read his card, but Billy wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to Fangun or Stayk, or whether the whole thing was a joke yet, so he kept his mouth shut. “You will take ownership of the house and land, however, you may not live there—that is, not year-round, not unless you are given an invitation by a resident. It is a closed community.”

“...can I sell it?” Billy asked, and the deepset eyes of the lawyer stared back at him, bloodshot and dry.

“At well below market value,” he said, steepling his fingers again. They made a dryish noise. “As I said, they dislike outsiders. And a stranger will be even more of an outsider than you, in whom runs...the blood of the place.”

Billy wondered, dully, whether he’d inherited a haunted graveyard, or a den of werewolves, and groaned into his hands. Maybe he was part zombie somehow. Just his luck. “Where is it,” he sighed.

“It is not on commonly available maps,” said the vampire, and Billy nodded. It figured, he thought, though his ears perked up considerably when his grandmother’s lawyer laid out a map of Hawaii.

They got a ride from the shore on a fishing boat at four o’clock in the morning. “It’s barely tourist season yet,” said the fisherwoman, showing Max how to steer. “There will be a ferry, in a week or two, but I can give you two a ride out the day your visa’s up if the ferry quits sooner.”

“We want enough time to look around,” Max said, glancing at Billy. They’d let their lease run out, and sold most of their things, because a few orange crates of records were a small price to pay for never running into Neil Hargrove around town. “You could get a job on one of the normal islands,” Max had suggested, quietly, over and over. “If they don’t like us enough.”

Billy’d never suggested moving Max so far away, but she’d assumed they were going, and after a while he went along with it. It wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, getting a job in a hotel somewhere after the islanders threw him out. Max would probably love it, in Hawaii.

A fresh start, she had said, and it sounded good.

He and Max were greeted by a woman in a wheelchair, who stamped their passports. “Technically, we’re a different country,” she said, smiling. She had very brown skin, and looked contentedly half-asleep in the sun. “You’re the only visitors on the island, for a week or two,” she said, cocking her head. “We’re not always in a big hurry to scrub up the ferry for the summer. We love the money, but the tourists...” she laughed, shaking her head. “Three-month pleasure trip visa. Have a nice summer,” she said, waving them away.

Her benign lack of interest lessened Billy’s initial fears that he’d inherited membership in some rich, yoga-pants-wearing, white Human Superiority cult.

The house was traditional-ish, with a grass roof and walls, big open windows with no glass, only shutters, and a wide shaded veranda all the way around. It looked over a beach with rolling waves, and Billy couldn’t wait to get his board out there.

“I’m gonna look around the house,” Max said. “See if I can find any neighbors. Maybe I can bring them cookies.” She set her jaw, frowning around at their luggage, and the scattered pillows. “Maybe we can buy some furniture somewhere.”

“...we can always just come here for summers,” Billy told her, breathing it in.

“Yeah, you’re gonna have a great time getting a tourism job where you don’t work summers,” Max said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow, and Billy realized with a sinking feeling in his stomach that she expected him to figure it out. Find someone who wanted him to stay, here, on the island, at his grandmother’s house.

“I’m no good at making friends, Max,” he reminded her, and she snorted.

“Better get out of my hair, then.” She folded her arms, taking another deep breath of the smell of grass in the sun. After a long moment, she looked back at him again. “...we’ve got a little over three months, Billy.”

He suspected it sounded longer to her.

When he wandered down to the beach, Billy could see someone’s tanned shoulders lying across a jutting rock about fifty feet out, and he paddled a ways towards it on his surfboard, getting the lay of the ocean. There was a rip tide, dark and eerily quiet, to his right, but the rest of the beach had shallow, warm, clear waves over white sand and coral until a dark dropoff about fifty feet out where the rolling waves began.

As he paddled closer to the rock, he could see the man on it—asleep, Billy thought, just lying in the sun as the waves lapped at his skin. As Billy drifted closer, paddling with his hands, he could see a long-fingered hand hanging in the water, and he paddled faster, suddenly wondering whether the man wanted to be out on a rock, or whether he was a Dude In Distress, his leg cramped, needing a ride to the beach on Billy’s surfboard and a trip around the boardwalk, and maybe some shaved ice.

As Billy approached, the guy opened his eyes, frowning over at Billy with wide, half-awake brown eyes. He pushed himself up on the rock with his arms like the goddamn Little Mermaid, Billy thought, amused. His throat went dry watching the flex of muscle, and the water droplets where the dude had lifted himself out of the bay.

Billy paddled at random, a little, unable to tear his eyes away. He cleared his throat. “Just, uh, making sure you didn’t need any help,” he said, staring at the tanned arms and swimmer’s chest in front of him, nearly triangular, like a superhero. “I, um. Guess you’re fine.”

The guy raised his eyebrows, starting to smirk, and then his eyes widened, and Billy realized in a flash of blue and foam that he’d drifted right into the fucking rip tide. Right in front of the gorgeous dude on the rock, Billy thought in the back of his mind, trying to hold onto his surfboard and let the rip tide take him wherever it would. Just his luck, he thought, dying because he was so damn gay he saw nice shoulders and his brain switched off. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to breathe before he got sucked down, and his lungs and sinuses were starting to ache worse than the rest of him, even as he was buffeted around against his board, when an arm slid around his waist.

He wanted to yell at the guy—and he did, in an explosion of bubbles—because what the hell good was it gonna do, swimming into a rip tide, but the muscles against his back and butt flexed, and they were moving sideways out of the rip tide, and then Billy’s head was above water. He gasped and choked, coughing up half the sea. The ocean moved soothingly around them, as this dude had no trouble holding Billy up, and Billy tried to clear his throat and eyes.

“Have you seriously never seen a tail before,” the guy groaned, hauling Billy along like he was no more effort to lift than a little kid at the pool. Billy felt rock against his thigh, suddenly, and scrambled onto it, coughing and wiping his eyes to see he was on the jutting rock the dude must have jumped off of, to save him.

“How-how fucking humiliating,” he gasped out loud. “Can’t believe. C-can’t believe I fucking p-paddled into a rip tide.”

“You drifted back into the...yeah,” his hot rescuer said, still in the water, with one hand on the rock to hold him steady as he frowned at Billy. His voice sounded a little odd—Billy was reminded of the Chinese grocery by his house, where their English was perfect, but they had a lilt as they tried to speak an atonal language with a tonal ear. Up close, he was even prettier, with moles Billy wanted to track down his neck and shoulders, and a doubtful, scrunched-up mouth Billy wanted to kiss.

“Sorry,” Billy wheezed, still coughing. “Sorry, I’m such a moron, sorry.” He tried to keep his eyes above the water level, but some part of his brain kept looking for tanned legs kicking under the surface, and he suddenly registered that the moving colors weren’t just fish and anemones. “Holy shit,” he coughed out. “You have a tail.”

His rescuer frowned harder, probably worried Billy had brain damage. “I figured that’s why you swam into the rip tide,” he said slowly, and Billy shook his head, groaning.

“No—fuck, I’m sorry, you—you’re just hot as fuck, I’m just a moron, I’m—damn it,” he sighed. “Sorry, jesus, I’m so fucking rude, sorry, I just didn’t notice, I was like ‘How the hell did he get me out of there? OH!’, sorry,” he muttered, sighing. “...drown me.”

“I am though, right,” the merman said, grinning, “—hotter than you,” and Billy realized he’d found the only person on the island more annoying than he was.

“Yeah, yeah, just laugh at the poor gay moron who nearly drowned staring at you, that’s nice,” he huffed, lying back against the warm rock to catch his breath.

“Was it love at first sight?” asked his rescuer, and Billy opened his eyes to glare.

“Shut up, asshole,” he grunted.

“Just asking,” his tormenter asked. “Are you gonna pine away, sighing over me? Hey, d’you think you’ll always do that? If I swim over in town, you think you’ll fall off the boardwalk?”

“Fuck you,” Billy told him, leaning his face in his arms and laughing. “Yeah, probably, you shithead. Are you gonna...follow me around? So I can look like more of an idiot?”

“Mmm, can you though…” the gorgeous merman asked thoughtfully, and Billy growled into his arms, feeling his whole body warm. He blamed it on the sun. “Why,” his rescuer asked, pulling himself up to laugh against Billy’s ear. “—you want me to follow you someplace?”

“Oh my god,” Billy groaned, laughing harder. “Are you afraid to leave me alone now? What if I try and eat my surfboard?”

“...are you gonna?”

“Maybe?!” Billy told him, then pushed himself up, frowning around to look for it.

“I’ve got it, it’s right here,” the smug asshole told him, waggling the surfboard in the water. “Want me to take you back to shore?”

“No!” Billy laughed, sighing. “I’m going surfing, just because I nearly died making an ass of myself doesn’t mean—”

“Hrm, maybe I should keep an eye on you.”

“Why,” Billy asked, then pitched his voice just a little lower. “You like what you see?”

“I could get used to it,” the merman said, and Billy started to preen, but the dickhead finished with “—kind of a comedy special, kind of thing,” and Billy reached over and smacked a big splash of water at him.

He laughed, his throat arching back, the gills along it thin dark lines that Billy fantasized kissing around.

Just as Billy was considering grabbing the surfboard and using it as a weapon of blunt force trauma, the merman leaned in close, his smirk widening around pointed teeth, and his cool, salty lips pressed firmly against Billy’s. Billy made a weird gulping noise in his throat, and the asshole started to pull away, but Billy leaned in, and fell clean off the rock. His weight dunked them both, and they rose sputtering and laughing, Billy held securely in his merman’s arms as his surfboard floated away. He couldn’t really bring himself to care.

“...my name’s Billy,” he panted.

“...Steve,” the mer-dickhead said, raising his eyebrows, like it was weird to want to know his name.

“...I inherited a house here,” Billy told him in a rush, drunk on kisses. “I’m from California. My mom used to talk about this place when I was a kid. Surfing here. With her mom.”

“...is she here?” Steve asked, steadying them with one hand on the rock, and glancing back at the beach.

Billy laughed, shaking his head. “Fuck, sorry, you don’t need to know my shit. We can make out. You’re short-circuiting my brain.”

“...I should probably get your surfboard,” Steve told him, grinning, but he leaned his head in again, gentle with his sharp teeth, and Billy inhaled shakily as the points grazed his lips and tongue.

“Jesus,” he whispered, once he could talk, and then he licked his lips and wrenched himself away to swim after his surfboard, just so his smug rescuer wouldn’t have to fetch it for him. The waves got bigger as he got out to where the trees weren’t acting as a windbreak, and he clambered up on his board, glaring back as Steve wolf-whistled.

When he let the tides pull him back towards the gorgeous merman on the rock, he lost his mind again, telling him his tail looked like a peacock butt, and Steve cracked up, grinning at him.

“...so, neighbor, you have to win someone over enough to invite you to stay,” he said, cocking his head.

“Yup,” Billy told him, pointing up at the house he’d inherited, built into the hill, the old grass vacation cottage blending in with the trees.

“And your method is to tell me I look like bird ass,” Steve continued, and Billy grimaced, waving his hands.

“No! No, I don’t—I know people have to get to know you. Here. I’ll…” he sighed. “I’ll try for a few months and see what happens. If nothing...clicks, maybe I’ll try again next summer,” he said, grimacing, and wondering what Max would do, if they weren’t allowed to stay. Leave, maybe, he thought—she was seventeen, and she could get a job herself.

He ended up teaching Steve to surf, after showing off his best efforts. When he swam back, panting, Steve looked properly impressed, and even more tanned. “Teach me,” he said, and Billy leaned in to kiss him again, nodding.

“That gonna get you to like me enough to let me stay?” Billy asked, and Steve frowned at him, but Billy laughed, and leaned in for another kiss.

“Tomorrow?” Steve had whispered against his lips, and Billy got no sleep at all that night, he just rolled over every couple hours to check the clock, and see that another two minutes had passed.

Steve was fascinating to watch on the board, his tail trailing as he controlled it with his hands around either side, his abs flexing as he held himself in a kind of plank pose with the support of his tail. Billy watched, and realized he was drooling.

“You like me enough to keep me?” he asked that night, teasing, and Steve laughed.

“Ask me again tomorrow.”

Merpeople—or at least, Steve, Billy corrected mentally, realizing he was dealing with a sample size of one—loved bread. Like a cat, Billy thought, watching Steve eye his croissant, or bagel. He started just bringing one every morning for Steve, and some coffee, and it was hilarious watching the fluffy flesh of a croissant dangling between Steve’s shark-like teeth. He waited every morning, and even though Billy wasn’t sure whether Steve was waiting for Billy or the bread he was carrying, he got heart palpitations every time he came down the ramp to the dock, and he could see the little lump of Steve’s head on his folded arms, the rest of him hanging off into the water.

“A few bagels aren’t enough to win me over,” Steve told him, and Billy’s stomach twisted, a little. He wished he hadn’t brought it up, kind of—the knowledge that he might have to leave hurt, like a sore tooth he couldn’t stop worrying at in his mouth. “Maybe more croissants,” Steve said, smiling, and Billy brought him more croissants.

When they’d arrived, they’d discovered the town was filled with mermaid stuff, and at first, Max and Billy had snickered at it, because surely even if there’d been a merperson or two living near a human town once, they’d died decades ago, or they just traded with fishing boats, far out at sea. They hadn’t considered the amount of people in wheelchairs, or the spray bottles close to hand.

When Billy suggested he bring lunch down from town, Steve swam over to haul himself up—his tail flashing in the light—through the bottom of one of the little sheds on the dock. Moments later, he banged the door open, wheeling out in an old rusty wheelchair. He spun it in a circle, waiting for Billy to climb out of the water, and then zipped ahead up the ramp to the path.

“Wait up, jesus,” Billy yelled after him, and Steve laughed, the muscles in his arms mesmerizing as they spun the wheels. He slowed down eventually, panting, enough for Billy to jog and catch up. “...lemme know if you want me to push,” Billy told him, and Steve snorted.

“Touch my chair and die,” he said.

“Fair enough,” Billy said, holding his hands up, and Steve laughed.

“It makes me…” he squinted, thinking. “...seasick…?” he offered, and Billy nodded, trotting along next to him.

“Motion-sick, probably,” he suggested, and Steve mouthed it as he rolled along.

The lady at the shaved ice stand leaned out and folded her arms on the edge of the little window, laughing at Steve. “You know they make those that work!” she called, and he flipped her off. “They don’t have to be electric! They make ‘em that just move smoothly.”

“It’ll just rust in my shed,” Steve told her, shrugging. “It’s fine.” As they waited for their tacos, Steve pulled up to a table, and his rusty, janky wheels kept rolling backwards, until Steve sighed and bent down to stuff some rocks under there.

“My friend Robin and I went in together on a nicer one,” he said, “—but I can’t park it in the shed. This one’s not so bad,” and Billy’s perception of it shifted a bit—maybe it was more like getting stuck with an old beater car occasionally, instead of something Steve needed help with. “...want to wander around, after?” Billy asked. “I haven’t got any souvenirs yet.”

Steve paused, then licked his lips. “Planning your trip home already?”

“...dunno yet,” Billy said, the invitation unspoken between them. It seemed ridiculous to want to stay so badly just because he’d met a pair of gorgeously tanned shoulders and a teasing smile, but it also wasn’t...hard to imagine, lingering on the island to go snorkeling with Steve, and learning about the reefs—he’d absorbed enough for a few semesters of marine biology, he was fairly sure, but told as stories, just off-handed things Steve had seen—and Billy was already wanting a drysuit, so he could go in the fall. Maybe Billy could get a job on a fishing boat, he thought vaguely, or help out in one of the shops.

If Steve would invite him.

Steve had slid his hands under Billy’s swimsuit a few times, pressing him back on their rock, or on the docks, rocking into him as Billy panted and gasped and fell apart under his hands—but he never said anything, after, and Billy hesitated to ask whether it was...anything, to Steve. Maybe he picks an idiot every summer, he thought, watching Steve smile at the depictions of mermaids on every surface of every shop on the main street.

“You all spend so much time keeping everything dry and dead,” he said, grinning over at Billy, who’d been anticipating a comment on the mermaid’s hourglass-like proportions, not her lack of water damage.

“...oh,” he said.

“I have a figurehead like that, but covered in anemones,” Steve said, cocking his head. “It’s beautiful.”

“I mean...you could...plant a vine on it, maybe?”

Steve nodded. “Put it outside in the rain, let it grow.” The lady behind the counter sighed, rolling her eyes, and Steve laughed.

“There’s a whole movement to ‘preserve’ our art,” he whispered to Billy. “Which mostly means they don’t let it become our art.”

“Huh,” Billy said, wondering whether human houses looked like museums, or mausoleums, to merpeople.

“Not to say that I’d pour water on your television set, or drop your mattress in the bay,” Steve said, grimacing a little, and watching Billy’s face. “I get that much.” He looked kind of uncomfortable with the lady behind the counter glaring at him, ducking his head.

Billy leaned to kiss him. He nearly steadied himself on the chair, and then remembering it would roll, and just held his hands away. Steve grinned up at him, particularly at his outstretched hands, and yanked Billy down on his not very much of a lap, hurriedly curling his tail up and around Billy’s waist as Billy threatened to slide down the smooth scales to the ground. Billy threw his arms around Steve’s neck, wide-eyed, as Steve held the wheels firmly, keeping the chair from rolling backwards under the weight of two grown men.

“Let’s go,” Steve whispered, and Billy nodded, breathing Steve’s sun-and-salt smell, and wondering whether it was okay to ask whether Steve would consider inviting him to stay—just until the next season, Billy thought, as the chair and Steve’s tail moved under him. Until the next summer, when he could ask whether Steve wanted him to stay again, or whether he wanted Billy gone.

After staying a whole year, Billy thought he might not have it in him to ask whether Steve was tired of him yet, but the thought of waking every morning to run down to the docks with coffee and banana bread was addictive, and he tried not to think about the end.

Billy ran into the lady who’d stamped his passport, and caught himself staring at her tanned legs propped up on the railing. “Oh, I’m human,” she said, laughing. “But I love it here. I can even shop in the little bookstore, imagine,” she said, and now that Billy thought about it, he realized it had an elevator in the back, and little lifts for the walkways along the higher shelves. “I’ve never had someone offer to lift me into their cafe, here,” she said, her nose wrinkled, and Billy nodded slowly.

“Shoot that thing!” she yelled, when she saw Steve’s awful old wheelchair, and he flipped her off.

“We can only invite a few people,” Steve told him, as they ate noodle bowls. “It’s for somebody you marry, you know, their family, maybe. Or if you leave the island, and have a kid.”

“Yeah,” Billy said softly, hearing the message clearly—invitations were not to be wasted, and Billy wasn’t special enough to keep. He finished his lunch, trying not to feel all butthurt about it. Max would probably understand.

Steve kissed him again, on the docks, and Billy leaned into it, feeling the familiar pressure of tears in his sinuses, and behind his eyes. He had three weeks left, he told himself. Three more weeks. Steve slid a hand up the back of Billy’s head, humming against his mouth, and Billy let himself go soft in his arms.

When they returned to the docks, Steve dug a big beach blanket out, and they spread it out on the sand, and Billy stayed out that night, losing himself in Steve’s warm hands and mouth, under stars like he’d never seen before.

Steve was watching his face the next morning, with a little frown, and Billy pulled away, sitting up.

“Better than croissants?” Billy asked, smirking a little, and Steve sighed.

“Was that what this was? Fucking me won’t make me give you an invitation,” he said. He didn’t look amused, the way he had over the bagels, and Billy wondered whether it had worked, a little. Billy’d always had a talented mouth.

“I won’t know if I don’t try, will I,” he said, laughing. “Maybe another round will help?”

“...I have to go,” Steve said, and he didn’t even fold up the blanket, just pushed himself off the edge and slid over the wet sand into the water, gone in a flip of tail. Billy watched for long minutes to see whether he’d come back—they’d been spending every day together, but probably Steve had stuff he needed to do, all the things he’d done before Billy had shown up at the island, easy with his body and his affections.

Billy folded up the blanket, and sat it in the shed, looking around. There really wasn’t much in there—it was the size of a small bathroom, with some knives for fishing, and a frayed net, and the beat-up wheelchair.

It smelled like Steve, and Billy stood and breathed, his eyes blurring with tears.

Steve didn’t come back, and after an hour or so Billy walked home, and ran into Max returning. “Billy!” she said, with a wide grin. “Nice night? I was out getting breakfast.” She told him about somebody named El, and somebody else named Lucas, and a Dustin.

Max was making friends too, he realized, which kind of made everything worse—she was doing her best, and Billy was just mooning over some guy who thought he was barely good enough for a fuck on the beach. She’d even met their families, he realized, listening, and registered that he hadn’t met any of Steve’s friends. He groaned into the pillows tossed around on the mat floor, and sighed.

“Should I stop seeing him?” he asked, mostly at the ceiling.

“I dunno why now,” Max said. “You’re not gonna find somebody else in a couple weeks.”

“Shit,” Billy groaned again.

“We can try again next summer,” Max said. “I like it here.”

The idea of returning the next summer, once Steve was bored, was enough to make Billy clench his jaw tight against the pillow he was hugging, squeezing his eyes shut against tears. “...yeah,” he said softly.

“God, you sound tragic,” she sighed, wandering over and dropping to sit on his butt. He grunted. “It’s fine, jesus. Worst case scenario we have a, like, vacation home. The vampire dude said we didn’t have to pay taxes on it.”

“Yeah, just pay for plane fare,” Billy sighed.

“He’s out there, y’know,” she said, “—tanning,” and Billy scrambled up so fast he dumped her with a drum noise on the taut mats.

When he swam out, Steve just stared out to sea, and Billy clung to the edge of the rock, biting his lips.

“I’m not giving you one of my invitations,” Steve said. “So stop trying to manipulate me into it.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, kind of wishing they’d never met. “Yeah, okay. Do—is that all, or are you sticking around?”

“I’ll stay,” Steve said, frowning at him, “—if you still wanna waste your time on somebody who’s not—how do you say it? Putting out?”

“...it’s not a waste of time,” Billy told him, swallowing hard. “I just wanted it to last longer, is all—” and Steve’s eyes narrowed intently. He grabbed Billy around the back of the neck, and yanked him into a kiss.

The remaining weeks, he took Billy snorkeling, and they had sex every night under the stars, Billy panting Steve’s name, and Steve holding him so tightly it almost hurt. Billy took him to meet Max, and she eyed him warily, but Billy fought and succeeded at securing Steve a plate of brownies, and he was vocally appreciative. She softened a little, at that.

Two days before they had to leave, Steve was lying next to Billy on the wet sand, the waves lapping up nearly to their waists. His shoulder was warm under Billy’s head, and smelled like the high ocean waves.

“...d’you think you’ll come back next summer,” Steve asked, and Billy snorted.

“Depends on whether I can afford airfare,” he said, sighing. “Depends on whether I can get a job somewhere that doesn’t need me in the summer.”

“...so I might just never see you again?” Steve asked flatly, and Billy laughed, shrugging.

“I don’t know,” he said, “—do you want to?”

“...fuck you,” Steve sighed, and Billy pushed himself up to frown at Steve’s face.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said, glaring back at Steve’s narrowed brown eyes. “You wanted me to shut up about staying. What am I supposed to say?”

Steve bit his lips together, and looked away. “...you know I’m gonna give you an invitation. You can just tell me.”

“What,” Billy whispered, scrambling to sit up, his heart pounding as Steve flopped over to scrabble around under his wheelchair, his tail flapping around a little in concentration, like a cat’s. He held an envelope out to Billy without even looking over.

“There,” he said. “All yours.”

“What,” Billy breathed, and then he half-crumpled it, opening it clumsily. “You—you’re giving me one?”

“Two,” Steve said, flatly, frowning down at the sand under his hands. “You and Max, right?”

“Holy shit,” Billy whispered, scrambling over to kiss him, once, then twice, relishing the little noise Steve made in the back of his throat when his lip slid between Billy’s teeth. “I have to go tell her,” he said, half laughing, his vision blurring with tears.

“Okay,” Steve said, quietly, and Billy hugged him before scrambling up and running back to the house.

Max stared at the two calligraphed invitations on the odd plasticky “paper” the merfolk used, written in Sharpie, and shook her head slowly. “You did it,” she said, and Billy laughed, nodding.

“He wanted me to stay enough,” he said, wiping his eyes, and desperately wanting Max to offer to handle the paperwork, so he could run back and kiss Steve.

There was a knock on the door. Max ran and opened it, and a short-haired woman wheeled in in a rainbow overall dress, and a small, fancy electric wheelchair, her tail the reds and oranges of a sunset. Billy never quite stopped being envious of how pretty the merpeople were.

“Steve gave you his invites, didn’t he,” she said, and Max slid them around her back, her eyes narrowing.

“...yeah,” Billy said, warily.

“Give them back to him,” she ordered, glaring between them. “He’s been saving those a long-ass time. He’s got plans for those, and he doesn’t need guilt-tripping by a pair of manipulative orphans, jesus.”

“I didn’t guilt-trip him,” Billy said, feeling guilty, suddenly, and remembering Steve’s stiffness as he handed them over. “I didn’t,” he said, less certainly. “...he...he just likes me, he wants me to stay—”

“He’s known you three months, and you told him you fucked him to get someplace nice for your sister to live,” she said crisply. “Give them back.”

“He’s not giving them back,” Max hissed, but she was staring at Billy in horror.

“I didn’t say that,” Billy said, waving his hands. “I didn’t! Not...exactly.”

“Fuck you,” the woman said, glaring. “You pressured him.”

“Fuck,” Billy agreed, his eyes tearing up again. “Lemme—lemme go talk to him. Max, give—give ‘em here.”

“No,” she said, sounding choked, but he walked over and grabbed them, and hugged her.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said under his breath, for her ears only, and ran back out.

Steve was perched up on his rock again, and Billy grabbed his surfboard and sat on it to glide out, paddling with his hands. The water was clear under him, his shadow passing over the anemones on the reef, and he watched the fish darting around, swallowing repeatedly.

“Hey,” he said, when he got close enough, and Steve’s head jerked around, glowering warily.

“...you came back,” he said.

“...you want me to stay, right,” Billy said, cutting straight to the chase. “You gave me these because you want me to stay.” Steve frowned back at him, and Billy’s heart sank. “Answer,” he said, his throat closing around the word.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it,” Steve said, reaching out, but he just grabbed Billy’s board before he could drift into the rip tide again. “You wanted to stay.” He was tense, and he wouldn’t meet Billy’s eyes.

“What do you want,” Billy asked again. “...because I think your friend Robin’s in my house, and she says I guilted you into it, talking about Max. Do you...if I didn’t need an invite. Would you want me to stay?”

“...I guess,” Steve sighed, and Billy swung his leg over the board, dumping himself straight down in the water, because he was definitely about to make some kind of awful noise, and the sea felt good on his hot, wet cheeks. Steve couldn’t see him crying underwater, he thought, grabbing a jut of rock to keep himself from floating back up.

He wished he could take a few slow breaths, he thought, closing his eyes, and then something brushed his arm. He opened his eyes on Steve’s wide-eyed face, his hair swirling in the water. Billy bit his lips together harder, his hands clenching on the rock, and Steve shook his head, pointing up.

“Up,” he mouthed. “Come on.”

Billy let himself be hauled upwards, and pushed up on the rock again, like when they’d first met.

“What are you doing,” Steve asked, hanging on to Billy’s surfboard.

“Nothing,” Billy said, keeping his voice level. “I thought you wanted me to stay. For me. You can have your invites back. I didn’t—” he took a deep breath, hearing Steve’s voice say stop trying to manipulate me, and Robin’s guilt-tripping. “I fucking know I’m pathetic, okay, you don’t have to pity me. Sorry I—sorry I fucking tried, jesus, I just—” he shut his eyes tightly again, laughing as he imagined Robin’s disgusted look knowing Billy’d gone out and cried.

“Wait, fuck,” Steve whispered, clambering up next to him, where Billy barely fit by himself, since it was high tide. He was warm from the sun, his tanned skin gleaming with water droplets, and Billy salivated, because his dick obviously hadn’t gotten the message it wasn’t wanted. “Wait,” Steve said, half on top of him, his weight grating Billy’s shoulder blades against the rock. Billy didn’t really mind. “You only want to stay if—if I want you, what—what does that mean—” His brown eyes were huge.

“...don’t really know how to be clearer,” Billy told him, unable to pull his eyes from Steve’s mouth.

“You don’t want to stay unless I’m happy about it,” Steve said, grabbing Billy’s hands.

“Yeah, that’s kinda how it gets, when you fall for somebody,” Billy told him, raising his eyebrows, and Steve took a shuddery breath and kissed him again. He didn’t stop, though, he just kissed Billy and kissed him, laughing shakily, his eyes welling up with tears.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, as Billy clung to him and the rock, trying to keep them from tumbling off. “I want you here, I want you. Stay with me.”

“I’m what you want?” Billy asked, startled, his brain hazy from warm kisses, and the scrape of pointed teeth. “‘M yours then,” he whispered. “All—all of me. S’yours.”

They laid there so long, whispering and giggling, that Billy had tan lines of Steve’s fingers on his shoulder for months.

Here are the other Harringrove April prompts I’ve done!

#Harringrove April #Mermay #Almost #Harringrove #Steve's got a tail #Billy's got a surfboard

51 notes · View notes