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lazypeachsoul · 3 years

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you promise?

Request: by anon “Could you write an Osferth drabble. About anything you'd like. Please and thank you.”

Warnings: Nothing.

Word count: 1,8k

A/N: Here's the first fic for The Last Kingdom Week! Hope you enjoy some sweet baby monk. I might have gone overboard with this story, but I can't help it when it comes to osferth. Enjoy 🌼

The streets of Cookham were bustling with workers returning home from the fields that surrounded the village. Thanks to Lord Uhtred and his fame the once forgotten town had become a stop for every merchant that traveled through Wessex and the workload had increased. And you were no different than any of those other people.

The sun was now setting and it was your time to return the children you minded back to their homes, where their overworked parents would take care of them. It wasn’t normal for common workers to have child minders, normally leaving the kids at home with their mothers, but Cookham was busier than ever and women were working the fields too. And that left you to take care of the little rascals that lived in town.

You had tried to work as a seamstress and at the alehouse, but nothing seemed to really suit you. Well, at least until you started taking care of the kids. You didn’t get much pay since the people you worked for were underpaid to begin with, but the little you got you saved for a new fabric, or a sweet treat or for those times you would meet Osferth at the alehouse and you wanted to prove him that you were a hard working woman.

And how you loved those times. Osferth seemed to always be busy either training or meeting with the rest of what had now been named the “Cookham squad”. Lord Uhtred and his loyal warriors were the talk of all Wessex and a great source of gossip for the entire town. Lord Uhtred and his beautiful wife Gisela took care of the people that lived inside their walls. Then there was Finan, the loud irishman who seemed to bring joy and fun to any occasion celebrated, always close to him was Sihtric, the mysterious dane who didn’t speak much but said a lot with just a look. And the last one was the monk who is not really a monk Osferth.

When you first met him you were trying to learn to become a barmaid and accidentally tripped on his foot, sending a pitcher of ale flying everywhere and leaving you both embarrassed and asking for mutual forgiveness. Since that moment, you had started to meet together at the alehouse every few days, providing you with a nice friendship but keeping all the rules a respectable young unmarried woman should follow.

And that’s exactly where you were headed after dropping your last child at home with his grateful mother. Your heart skipped a beat when you saw the familiar blonde mop of hair sitting on one of the outside benches, and you had to admit to yourself that maybe it was more than just casual meetings at the alehouse. At that moment Osferth turned around and waved in your direction and with a small wave you made your way to the bench, sitting in front of him.

“I thought you didn’t see me, you looked distracted.” Osferth's sweet voice spoke and you had to admit he was right, you almost missed it because of your constant daydreaming about the man. But you couldn’t admit that.

“Excuse me, the children were wild and I’m extremely tired. Must be because of the nice weather.”

“Maybe we should meet another day, I wouldn’t want to tire you more Lady-” “No!”

You hadn’t been able to stop the agitated answer from coming out when you heard his dismissal. You were tired but never too tired to stop meeting Osferth. You could feel your cheeks hot with embarrassment and you tried to clear your throat to diffuse the tension.

“I mean, I would rather stay here with you and relax with a friend.”

Osferth’s face seemed to harden at your words but as soon as the barmaid brought you two cups of ale everything seemed to go back to normal, except for a small curious voice at the back of your head wanting to know why the expression changed.

“A friend. Of course. I enjoy the time we spend together too.” He nodded his head, his blonde hair falling in front of his eyes before taking a sip from his cup. “The weather is really nice so I wouldn’t blame the children. Lord Uhtred told us that the weather would turn nicer before we leave.”

You felt the ale you had been drinking get stuck in your throat but you tried to conceal it with a soft cough so as to not cause a scene in the packed alehouse. Leave? They were leaving?

“Are you leaving soon? You didn’t say anything before.”

“Lord Uhtred just confirmed it this morning. The King has requested the Lord’s help in some negotiations with the danes. He thought it best for us to accompany him since his history with the king is not the most amicable.”

You nodded along as he spoke but your brain was overworking itself trying to comprehend the situation. They were leaving to assist the King of Wessex and they would leave Cookham unattended for God knows how long. Of course the real reason you were worried was not the village, Lady Gisela could take care of it and more without a problem, you were worried about Osferth and you. Was there even an 'Osferth and you' to worry about?

“That’s...great that the King and our Lord are speaking again. Maybe it might help us get resources from the crown.” You tried to excuse your previous silence but it must have been obvious you were deep in thought because Osferth looked at you with a curious face. “And when are you leaving?”

“We’re expected to depart tomorrow morning. Apparently those matters are very important and require us to be there as soon as possible.” He shrugged in a move to downplay the entire situation.

Silence was the only thing that could be heard from your side of the bench, a deep contrast from the rest of the groups happily chatting and drinking. The table was silent but your mind was not, still overthinking every word your companion had said. You were overthinking so much that you almost missed his quiet voice.

“I am going to miss you.” Osferth spoke and as soon as you looked at him again he seemed to flush. “And our conversations. Or friendly conversations as...friends.”

You wanted to laugh at the poor man in front of you. In the many months you had known Osferth you had never seen him that flustered in his life, cheeks and ears bright red and a stuttering mess.

“I’m going to miss you too Osferth. And our friendly meetings.” You placed your hand next to his on the table next to his, not wanting to overstep and make the poor man more uncomfortable.

He moved his hand carefully almost imperceptibly until his fingers touched yours and a warm feeling ran down your entire arm from your hand. He seemed to be the one deep in thought at the moment and you almost wished you could pick at his brain to see what was going on. Is that how he felt every time you zoned out?

“Maybe you could remember me-” “Of course I’m going to remember you Osferth, don’t be silly. You are not going to war, only a mission for the king.”

A nervous chuckle was the only thing he could let out now and his reactions were starting to worry you a bit. If it was only a small trip he shouldn't have been that nervous.

“Let me finish. Maybe if I gave you something that you could remember me by, it would be easier.”

“You don’t have to do that, Osferth. I will remember you anyways.” You tried to reason with him but you couldn’t stop him from moving to look for something in the pockets of his robes.

After a bit of fussing with the robes he placed his closed fist on top of your hand, opening it just enough for something small and metallic to fall into your hand. Moving your hand closer you found a small fragile chain that seemed to have been at least as old as you.

“It’s not much, just a scrap of metal if you try to sell it. But it was my mother’s, the only thing I have from her. I hid it from the monks when I was growing up so they wouldn’t take it away. Carried it into battle with me every time I’ve fought too.”

Every single word of the explanation seemed to make your throat close a bit more and your eyes glossier. You knew Osferth had no real memories with his mother and you could imagine how important that bracelet must have been for him.

“I can’t accept it, it’s so important to you. Why would you give it to me?” You debated with your head shaking and trying to push the chain into his hand again. “Don’t be silly, Osferth. It’s your mother’s bracelet.”

“You must keep it. Please.” He kept his fist tightly closed to avoid you giving him back the piece of jewelry. “I want you to have it.”

“But I don’t have anything to give you in return.”

You kept trying to pry his fist open, all in vain because he wouldn’t even budge. You wanted to get up and hug him for such a meaningful gesture and hit him at the same time for wanting to part with such a meaningful piece.

“You have.” He spoke, grabbing your hand and halting your movements. “Maybe you can give me your promise.”

You looked at him curiously at what his proposal might be. Maybe he just wanted you to take care of Lady Gisela, you knew how he saw her as the mother he never had. Or maybe he wanted you to care for Lord Uhtred’s children.

“You can promise me that once I’m back from Wincester you will allow me to properly court you.” He explained and you felt your heart stop. “I-If you want, of course.”

Courting Osferth was not something you had thought about, mainly because you had nothing to offer. Your parents didn’t have fields or many resources they could offer a prospective husband. And Osferth was a warrior, so you thought settling down seemed to be out of the picture for him. But you had to admit the idea made your stomach turn in the best way possible.

You realized you had been thinking for a long time and still hadn’t given an answer when you felt him squeezing your hand. Could you promise him something like that?

“I promise.” Of course you could, the idea of a lifetime with Osferth only made you more excited about life. “Only you have to promise me to come back soon.”

He nodded with enthusiasm, moving his hands to take the small chain from your delicate hand and clasp it around your wrist. This mission hadn’t even started and you already wanted it to end.

Taglist: @webreathfandoms @thebohemianpenguin @emilyhufflepufftlk @solinarimoon

#the last kingdom imagine #the last kingdom x reader #tlk imagine #tlk x reader #osferth x reader #osferth imagine #tlk week #myfic

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early20sfailingplenty · 3 years

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hey… for comfort, may I have bo holding me really tight and glaring at everyone? seems like a nice way to go 😂

Lily, my love.😍✨ You absolutely can!! Who doesn't want to be hugged and protected by Bo, I mean?🥺😂 I quickly threw this together and I hope you like it!🥰💗

TW; mentions of hospitals, medical talk alluded to, Bo's possessive, swearing in the narrative & dialogue, mentions of past injuries and of losing consciousness/passing out.

She/her pronouns & "Lily" used - personalised!

Word count: 1, 082.

You gripped your phone in your hands, staring blankly at the stark white tiles of the hospital floor. You had passed out today after trying to get out of bed after a nap and though it was something which had happened before, Bo had still gotten you to the hospital, his grip on the steering wheel of his beloved truck white knuckled and his jaw tense, his shoulders set and his beautiful blue eyes swimming with worry and concern. You had been there for too long now and you were bored shitless; there wasn't much visual stimulation to match the loud and overbearing sounds of an emergency waiting room.

Bo hadn't left your side for a second. He had gotten out of the truck once he had parked in the lot and grabbed a ticket with a tense, "wait there", and then he had gone around to your side of the door and helped you out, his hand holding yours tightly. The chances of you going down again were unlikely, but it had happened once already and Bo would never take chances with the one he loved the most. He was there with you when the nurse checked you over, he was there when the tests was carried out, and he was right there beside you in the waiting room, too.

His hand never let go of yours. If Bo had an itch on his nose, then the hand that was joined up with yours, fingers interlocked, was the one he scratched it with. If he needed to get his phone in order to respond to one of his brothers asking after you, then he used his other hand. Bo did not and would not let go of you, and one of the nurses found that out for themselves when they tried to get you alone so that they could give you the medical advice which you needed.

Bo's grip tightened on your hand as he glared at the nurse. "M' 'er partner," He smiled with all the charm you had seen him use on the people who came to Ambrose, but it was his sarcastic smile. It didn't reach his eyes. "S'my wife." He specified after the fact, as if that would sway the nurse any. You weren't yet married but the nurse didn't need to know that. "Anythin' y'wanna say to Lily, y'can say to me, too." There was an undercurrent of ice in his tone which all three of you were aware of; his worry for you made it harder for Bo to mask. The nurse smiled tightly, not wanting to be rude but also not appreciating the way Bo had spoken to them and spoken for you in the same sentence. Still, it was accepted seamlessly - the nurse was too tired and too underpaid to do anything else - and you were filled in on what to do in this situation, how to take care of yourself and what to do if, when, it happened again.

When the nurse briskly walked away, Bo shook his head and muttered, "un-fuckin'-believeable" under his breath.

"What is?" You frowned, looking over at him so that you could press a kiss to the part of his jaw just below his ear.

"Them," His tongue cut like the blades his twin favoured, "Thinkin' m' all righ' wit' you goin' off on yer' own like that when y'passed out earlier. M'goin' nowhere, darlin'."

"I'm all right, Bo," You squeezed your hand in his and Bo jolted, as if he had forgotten that he was holding your hand; he hadn't let go for well over an hour, now, and you were started to wonder if he ever would. You didn't want him to, in any case. When Bo's hand was in yours, all was right with the world. "It's happened before, I - "

Something in Bo snapped and he stood up; neither of you needed to be in the waiting room anymore anyway and he wanted to get the fuck back to Ambrose. He didn't speak until you were out of the hospital and out of the way of the main entrance. Then, and only then, did he spin around, finally letting go of your hand. Your palm was cold with the ghost of his tight and unrelenting grip and you clenched it, trying to keep the feeling of the weight of Bo within your palm. Oh, but you loved him so much that he hurt. He grabbed you by the shoulders and tugged you into him, holding you so tight that you almost couldn't breathe. Almost. You were glad that your ribs were healed now with how he was holding you; that sort of grip would have hurt even a month ago.

"I know s'happened before," Bo murmured. He pressed a kiss to your temple before he rested the sharp lines of his chin on your shoulder. One hand rubbed up and down your back while the other remained firmly planted across your shoulders. "I've been there every time, Lily. But there's only one'a ya', darlin', an' Ion know what I'd do if I lost ya', s'all." His voice was thick with emotion and you cooed, hugging him tightly and squeezing your grip until he grunted just a little - that was your definition of a good hug.

As sweet as the moment was, though, as tender and romantic as Bo was being, you would have laughed if you could see the way he was glaring at people over your shoulder. If anyone got closer than a few paces away from you from any angle, Bo's jaw was clenching and his baby blues would shoot daggers of ice at them. He was extraordinarily protective and it bordered on possessive even during the best of times, but right now it was positively feral. People were walking around the both of you with strange looks, if they had the presence of mind to notice an embracing couple right outside of a building where life and death walked the same halls.

"I love you, Bo." You pressed a kiss to his cheek and you felt it curve with a small smile. He really was worried but for every kiss you planted on his weary visage, the deeper his smile became and the more the ice grip around his heart warmed up. He had you in his arms and that was where he always wanted you to be.

"I love y'too, Lily. More'n y'know."

But you did know. Oh, you did.

#bo x lily sinclair #lily sinclair #bo's muse

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essential-existential · 4 years

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So I have to write about an old friend Fernando (Nando) (Sonrisa) Nunes? (I'm pretty sure that's his last name)

Casey came up with the nickname Sonrisa because we've never seen a happier man, constantly smiling despite being head chef in a kitchen consistently understaffed, overworked and underpaid.

His attitude was worthy of the highest emulation. Always eager to help, if you needed something he was the man you went to, because he would simply get it done--smiling the whole way. He only raised his voice at me once, and it was justified, and I've never felt so low--if you made him mad you know ya goofed up. Now that I think of it he reminds me of Orr from Catch 2, this tiny little dude full of potential and even had a bit of crab apple in his rosy cheeks. When I played pink floyd on the stereo he would always say 'very nice music' nodding to the beat.

He was always interested in learning the names of bands or songs I played or phrases in english; he even taught me some Italian words like "motto benne" and it was always funny to hear him say "capiche".

And he was the BEST cook. Everyone always wanted Nando making their food, otherwise it just wasn't the same. He'd make us things off-menu, burritos and wraps of all combinations, always ready to try new things.

When he died in May from leukemia we were all in shock. He left behind a beautiful wife and family of 5 daughters. It just wasn't real. It genuinely didn't hit me for a few weeks and when it did I couldn't stop bawling. I knew pretty much immediately that I didn't want to go back to work there.

They had a gathering at the restaurant a night or two after--but here's where my emotions take a spin. For starters, they never informed me of his passing, they let the news spread through the grapevine, relying on their employees to reach out to others. That alone rubbed me wrong; why are certain employees in the know and others second string? Why not tell everyone all at once? Then they had a gathering a night or two later. I was only told about this from my friend Matt who recently quit weeks before and he wasn't even sure when it would take place. I didn't know if I could go-- both emotionally and I had made plans, and because it felt I wasn't really invited.

I get home that night and Casey and Matt are walking from the lot leaving the gathering as I'm pulling in my driveway. They convince me to go over and I oblige. I'm really bad with grief, normally I make like the Native American men and go off into the woods to grieve alone. I mingle a bit but mostly feel out of place. All the white employees are drinking or drunk and Casey is almost slammed-- I refuse a shot of fireball. The Latinos and Nandos family are sitting around, but appear distant; I couldn't bear to approach Natalie, Nando's daughter, who I worked in the kitchen with and shared laughs for years.

The thing that gets me though is the comment that my manager Sam's new wife said to me when I arrived. "So, you decided to stroll down the parking lot and join us huh?" I can still feel the snarkiness in the air. I left right after.

Ghosted one of the best jobs I'll ever have because lord knows they never deserved Nando or me in the first place.

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zoocross0vers · 5 years

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A Zootopian Christmas Carol Part 3: The Present

A/N: The next chapter, yes! Apologies for releasing this after December. I really wanted to finish these remaining chapters before the month (and year) were over, but I really didn’t have much free time during the last few days of December. Had family visits and then New Years so…

Regardless, I hope you enjoy and I wish you all a Happy New Year and happy start of a new decade! 2020! :D

FF.net Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13461657/3/A-Zootopian-Christmas-Carol

…

Chapter 3: The Present

Bogo sat at his bed, gripping his head with remorse, “How could I let her go like that? Why was I so foolish? Why, why?!” he cried to himself.

He pressed his head against his hooves when he noticed a light suddenly appear from a slit between his bed’s curtains. “What in the...?”

“Bogo...hahahaha!” he heard a loud, echoing giddy giggle call to him. He swallowed hard and hesitantly opened his bed’s curtains. He peeked out and saw that his bedroom had been decorated with Christmas decorations, warm candle lights, and a large array of food spread all throughout. “Wha--Where did all of this come from?”

“Over here Bogo, hahahaha!” called the source of the giddy laughter from the corner of his bedroom. The buffalo turned to see who it was and spotted an enormous chubby cheetah with a thick mistletoe crown and a large green robe. Bogo stepped out of his bed and approached the big cheetah who was currently wolfing down a whole chocolate cake. “Hi there,” he said between bites. “Cake?” he offered the buffalo a whole strawberry cake that he had in his other paw.

“Uh, no thank you,” replied the buffalo, disgusted by the cheetah as he spewed crumbs all over his face while he spoke. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“Why I’m the Ghost of Christmas Present!” announced the cheetah with a chipper smile.

“Present?” Bogo looked at his surroundings, “May I ask, what does food have to do with the present time?”

“Oh,” the cheetah licked his fingers, “Everything! All that you see here, is the food of generosity, which you Bogo, have denied your fellow mammal.”

“Generosity? Bah! What point is there to show generosity when all mammalkind is selfish and greedy deep down?”

“Are you sure you’re not talking about yourself?” asked the cheetah.

Bogo glared at him, insulted. “In any case, no mammal has ever shown me generosity.”

“You’ve never given them reason to,” scolded the cheetah. “But believe it or not, there are still some mammals out there who can find enough warmth in their hearts, even for a miser-able miser like you. No wait, is it pronounced miser-able or miserable? Mis-rable? No, no wait that's not right.”

Bogo rolled his eyes in annoyance, “Spirit! Can we please carry on with whatever lesson it is you’re supposed to teach me?”

“Oh, right!” the cheetah wolfed down the last chunk of cake that he had left in his paw. He lifted his paws up, “Go on, touch my robe!”

“Come again?” Bogo asked uncomfortably.

“Touch my robe. It's the only way to transport us to our destination!” he announced innocently.

Bogo sighed, hesitantly giving in, “Very well then.” The buffalo placed a hoof on the chubby cheetah's stomach. The cheetah then lifted his arms and a flurry of sparkling snow circled around them, teleporting them just outside a poor, modest house -- on early Christmas morning. “Where are we? And...is it daylight already?” Bogo asked, noticing the bright blue sky and sunlight bouncing off the bright white snow.

“That's right Bogo, it's Christmas morning!” confirmed the chubby cheetah.

All around him, Bogo saw mammals carrying gifts, shoveling snow and wishing one another a chipper, “Merry Christmas!”

Bogo remained stunned at everything around him, until the cheetah spoke again. “It's a beautiful morning, isn't it? Ooh and look at all the food,” said the cheetah as a wealthy elephant couple walked out of a food shop, carrying a large carrot cake which could easily feed thirty rabbits. At the same food shop there was a large salmon dinner on display at one of the windows and another large carrot cake on display at the other window.

“Yes I suppose this is all nice, but what does this Christmas cheer have to do with me? What am I to learn from what I see every year outside my counting house’s window?” Bogo asked confused.

“You may see all this joyful Christmas cheer outside your wealthy window, but I’ll bet you’ve never wondered what goes on inside the windows of others less fortunate than yourself,” said the chubby spirit as he turned Bogo around to face the small, poor house again.

“What is so important about what goes on in this place?” Bogo asked, annoyed.

“This is the home of your overworked, underpaid employee, Nicholas Wilde,” answered the cheetah. “Come on, let's go inside.” The cheetah took Bogo's arm and led him inside through the wall.

Inside, Bogo and the spirit saw Nicholas’ family as they all busied themselves with some sort of Christmas activity. At one corner of the room, they saw a brown rabbit in his late fifties/early sixties sitting by a small, simple Christmas tree. This was Stu Hopps, Nicholas’ father-in-law and his wife Judith’s, father. He placed popcorn pieces into a needle and string on one end, while at the other end, his hybrid grandchildren placed more pieces along the other end. His mixed grandchildren were half fox and half rabbit.

There were two boys, both of which looked almost entirely like foxes and one girl, she looked almost entirely rabbit. Of the boys, there was James Nicholas Wilde, the oldest at age eight -- he had gray fur and amethyst colored eyes like his mother, fox-like ears but narrower and longer in length, and he had a white line running along the bottom part of his tail, but with a black tip at the end. The other boy, Jonathan Stuart Wilde, age seven and named after both his grandfathers, looked almost identical to his older brother, with the only exceptions being that both his ears were fully black, he lacked a white line beneath his tail, and he had emerald eyes like his father. Their younger sister, and Nicholas’ only daughter, had her father’s full red and black fur color scheme, as well as his paw pads, but she had her mother’s amethyst colored eyes. This was little four year old, Felicia Judith Wilde.

James took the finished garland and placed it along the tree, “Like this grandpa Stu?” he asked the brown rabbit.

“Yup, just be sure to keep it even as you go along there, son,” Stu stood up to help him.

From the kitchen, out came Bonnie Hopps (Stu’s wife and Judith’s mother) and Amelia Wilde, Nicholas’ mother. The two carried empty bowls to fill with the carrot stew brewing at the chimney for their Christmas morning feast. “Johnny-Stu, don’t eat the popcorn dear, that’s for the tree,” said Amelia to her young grandson.

The little kit dropped the pawful of popcorn that he had just picked up and swallowed what he had in his mouth. “Sorry grandma Amelia.”

“Stu don’t you think that’s enough popcorn for the tree?” asked Bonnie Hopps of her husband.

“Nonsense Bon, you can never have enough popcorn on a tree, aren't I right kits?”

“Right grandpa!” squeaked the kits in agreement.

At the corner near the door, the chubby cheetah gave a high pitched squeal, “Awwww! I’ve never seen hybrid kits before! They’re just so adorable!”

“Yes, I suppose they are rather cute,” said Bogo without much care -- even though deep down he did think that they were adorable. “But what does this wholesome scene have anything to do with me?”

“You’ll see,” replied the cheetah, “Just keep watching.”

At that moment, Judith Wilde (née Hopps) entered alongside her father-in-law, Jonathan Wilde. The rabbit and fox both carried the end of two large suits -- an elephant sized one, and a cape buffalo sized one. “Mama! Grandpa Jonathan!” The kits ran over excitedly to their mother and grandfather. Judith Wilde looked identical to her mother in both fur and eye color, but Judith was much thinner and a bit of a curvier frame. Jonathan Wilde meanwhile, looked almost identical to his son, but he had blue eyes rather than green ones like his son and wife.

Judith giggled and released her end of the suits in order to crouch down and hug her happy children. “Hi kids, have you been behaving for your grandparents?”

“Yes mama!” the three chirped in unison.

“We were decorating the tree with grandpa Stu!” added little Felicia.

“Hey, Jude!” called Stu to his daughter with a wave. “How’s it lookin’?” he asked regarding the tree.

“It’s looking great!” she replied with a smile. She turned back down to face her children, “Where’s your father and Tiny Finn?”

“They went to church,” replied Amelia for the children.

“Church?” Judith asked in surprise. “That’s a first,” she giggled. “I’m normally the one who has to drag Nicholas go to church in the first place.”

Amelia giggled, “Yes I know, but it was Tiny Finn who insisted.”

“Yeah, it was Finn who asked Papa to take him,” confirmed James for his grandmother.

“Imagine that,” Judith replied as she released her children from her arms.

Jonathan placed the large suits on one of the dinner table’s chairs. He kissed his wife on the cheek, “How’s the food coming along, dear?”

“Delicious. I hope you have an appetite,” she replied with a smile. “How were the sales today? Did Mr. Jumbeaux like his suit?”

“Uh...not exactly,” Jonathan replied, glancing over to the elephant sized suit. Amelia’s eyes widened at the sight of it.

“You didn’t sell it to him? Was he not home?”

“Um...well,” before Jonathan could explain, Felicia and Johnny-Stu grabbed at his paws.

“Come on grandpa Jonathan! Come help us with the tree!” squeaked Felicia as she and her brother pulled at their grandfather’s paws.

“I guess I’ll have to explain later,” the fox chuckled and allowed the kits to pull him over to the tree.

The two does and vixen laughed at the adorable scene. Bonnie saw the small cauldron at the chimney start to bubble and boil. “Oh looks like the carrot stew is ready. Care to help us out with the rest of the food, Judith?” Bonnie asked her daughter.

“Sure,” the three females disappeared into the next room.

“So that young rabbit is Wilde’s wife, eh?” Bogo asked curiously.

“Yes, haven’t you ever met her before?” asked the chubby spirit.

“No, I’m afraid I’ve never had the pleasure. She’s quite beautiful. Her jovial demeanor reminds me of Gazelle’s before I…” Bogo paused, hesitant to continue.

“Before you broke her heart and chose money over her, you mean?” the spirit asked bluntly.

“Yes, that,” Bogo gritted between his teeth, completely embarrassed. “Wait, how did you know?”

“The Ghost of Christmas Past told me. We’re really good friends!” he chirped innocently.

“Gossip amongst spirits, how fun,” he muttered, annoyedly.

At that moment, Nicholas came home, carrying his young five year old son, Finn, on his shoulder. Finn Tiberius Wilde, looked almost identical to his sister as he was more rabbit than fox. Unlike his sister however, he had emerald eyes like their father and gray fur like their mother. “Merry Christmas everyone!” Nicholas called to his family.

“Papa!” called his other three children and came rushing to the door to hug him.

“Hey there kiddos!” he lowered his young son from his shoulders and set him beside his brothers and sister. But not before handing the boy a small wooden crutch to help support his ability to stand.

Bogo’s eyes widened, immediately taking notice of this, “Spirit, what is wrong with that small child?”

“Much, I’m afraid,” answered the spirit with sadness.

“Nicholas!” Judith chirped happily when she saw that her husband had come home.

“Hey Carrots!” he greeted her by her nickname. The two hugged and kissed. Judith then crouched down to hug her little son.

“Hi there sweetheart,” she gave the boy a kiss on the cheek, “How was church?”

“It was great Mama! I made a lot of animals smile today!” he announced with a big smile.

“Really? How did you do that?” Judith inquired with a good natured giggle.

“Because they saw me smiling, even though I'm a cripple!” he stated with joy.

Judith stared at her son with awe and confusion, but then simply smiled back at him. “I'm happy you were able to make others happy, sweetheart.” She gave him a kiss on his forehead, now go play. Christmas breakfast will be ready in a few minutes.”

Little Felicia ran over to gently pull her brother over to play with them by the tree. Tiny Finn eagerly limped over as best he could to play.

Judith stood beside Nicholas and they took a moment to simply watch their happy children play. “He’s really something, that son of ours,” stated Nicholas, placing an arm around his wife’s shoulders.

“He really is,” Judith agreed, snuggling up beside her husband.

“You know what he told me while we were at the sermon?”

“What?” Judith inquired, curiously.

“He said he hoped other animals saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk and blind mammals see."

Both Judith and Bogo stared at Nicholas and then at the child, completely bewildered.

“So that's what he meant,” Judith said with a proud smile, “Hard to believe that he’s only five years old, and has such a warm and wise heart already.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas breathed with an equal amount of pride for their son, “Sounds like he really takes after his mother.”

“He’s your son too. You can't give me all the credit,” Judith smirked, playfully bumping him with her hips.

Nicholas smiled, but immediately frowned right after. “Though I appreciate that Carrots, I don't think I deserve any credit,” he said glumly, as he walked over to sit at one of the chairs with a sigh. “I didn't get a raise, Judith.”

“What?” Judith asked, standing beside him.

“Mister Bogo said that I couldn't have a raise,” he repeated.

“But why?” she asked incredulously, “You work so hard for him. You’ve increased profits and you’ve been his only employee for ten years. You’ve even sacrificed spending Christmas Day with us for all those years. Not to mention New Year's.”

“I know, but according to my boss, Mr. Buffalo Butt, I haven't done enough to earn it. Plus, I already work more than I should for him so I can't even ask for more work hours.”

“What did he just call me?” Bogo asked the chubby spirit.

“Uhh... I didn't hear anything,” the cheetah answered, feigning ignorance toward the subject.

“Did he just call me 'Buffalo Butt’? Has he always called me that behind my back?” Bogo asked almost incredulously.

“Shhh,” silenced the spirit, “Keep listening.” Bogo grunted annoyed, but obeyed nonetheless.

Nicholas lowered his head in shame, “I’m a failure Carrots.”

“What? Nicholas, look at me,” Judith placed her paws at her husband's cheeks and lifted his gaze to hers, “You're not a failure. You're a wonderful husband and father. And I know you're a wonderful worker too. You do enough to provide for our family. If there's anyone who should feel ashamed of himself, it's Mr. Bogo. He’s selfish, self centered, and only thinks of himself!”

Bogo flinched at each insult she sent his way.

“You do everything you can to help his business grow and yet as wealthy as he is, he can't find the funds to pay you the wage you’ve so rightfully earned through your hard work?” Judith continued. “Someone should really report him for exploiting his employees like that. Why if that were me, I’d look him straight in the eye and demand he pay me the proper wage, and you know I would.”

Nicholas couldn't help but chuckle at how adorable she looked when she was both angry and determined. Also, it warmed his heart just to see how much she cared. “I don't doubt that in the least hun-bun. But if I do that then I'm definitely out of a job. He said something today, that as much I’d like to disagree with it, I know it’s true.” Judith eyed him with a confused brow. “Like I told Finn earlier today at church, if there's one thing I’m grateful to that buffalo butt for, it's that he gave me a job when no one else would.”

Bogo's eyes widened in surprise at his employee's words.

“I don't know if you remember Carrots,” Nicholas continued, “But I had a real hard time trying to find an honorable job before we got married. I wanted us to have a future together where you would be proud of me and where our children would be able to look up to me as a positive role model. Not the hustling low life -- trying to make ends meet to avoid the workhouse me -- that I was before I met you. And after so many failed attempts at a decent job, Bogo was the one to give me that job. Speciest and selfish as he is, he was impressed enough with my business savvy to give me a chance. If it weren’t for him, I would never have been able to put a roof over our heads and provide what I can for us.”

Judith smiled, a little more calm. Perhaps even finding a slight bit of appreciation for the buffalo. She hugged Nicholas’ head, caressing his ears, “And you do an amazing job at it.” She kissed him. “You don’t know how proud I am of you and I don’t think you have to worry about our children viewing you in a negative light.” They looked over to their children who were playing nearby.

James continued helping his grandfathers with the decorations on the tiny tree, while Johnny-Stu ran around with a garland of popcorn as his giggling younger sister and brother ran/limped after it. In the midst of his giggling, Finn stopped as he started having a coughing fit. Nicholas and Judith flinched with concern as did his grandfathers and siblings.

Bogo also found himself displaying concern for the sickly kit. A fact which the spirit noticed.

Little Felicia placed a paw at his arm and Finn smiled at her as if to tell her that he was okay. Just to be on the safe side, Johnny-Stu helped his brother over to the small steps that led to the bedrooms and sat him down there. He handed the popcorn garland to him and it brought a smile on the younger kit’s face. Johnathan, Stu, and James smiled and went back to decorating.

Nicholas and Judith smiled as well, but their concern for their child remained on their faces. Most notably on Nicholas’ face. Nicholas frowned sadly and insecurely rested his head against Judith’s chest as he gently pulled her closer, wrapping his arms around her. He spoke as softly as a frightened child would to his mother. “I’m scared, Judith,” he said with a tremble.

“What?” she asked, visibly shaken by his demeanor. Judith remained in his arms but pulled away enough to look at his face. She wanted to see his expression as she knew this was serious if he referred to her by name like that. His eyes shimmered a little, as if he wanted to cry but was not allowing himself to do so. She had never seen him look so vulnerable before.

“I’m scared,” he looked back to their son who coughed a little again, “He’s getting worse the more time passes and we still can’t afford his medication or to give him a more proper nutrition. Not on my pay anyway. And if Bogo keeps refusing to give me a raise, then…” he exhaled a trembling sigh, “I don’t know what we’ll do. I might have to go back to hustling or even pick-pocketing to--”

“What? No,” Judith immediately pressed her forehead against his to speak to him directly, “Nicholas, listen to me, you will not go back to that lifestyle. You worked so hard to get away from that dishonest life. What if you get caught committing a crime? What would we ever do if you were arrested?” Nicholas lowered his head in shame. “Besides, you're not alone. Your father and I have been working very hard to get Suitopia off the ground. With both his and my sewing skills and the right investor, I’m sure we'll be able to make a legitimate business together that sells clothes for all mammals! No matter the size or species! I'll bet we can even make a wing for dresses and children's clothing!”

Nicholas chuckled at her enthusiasm, “Your optimism never ceases to amaze me, Carrots. How did the sale go by the way? Did Mr. Jumbeaux like his suit enough to invest?”

“Uhh... not exactly,” Judith said, recoiling into herself. She glanced over to the chair where her father-in-law had placed the suits. Nicholas followed her gaze and stood to approach the suits on the chair.

“Why is his suit still here? Did he decide to cancel the meeting with you and my dad because of the holiday?” Nicholas asked her, curiously.

“No, he... cancelled his order and any future affiliation with us,” she said glumly.

“What? Why?” Nicholas asked in shock. “You said that he was really excited about his suit when you showed him the designs and material.”

“I know. He told me that he was willing to see what I could do, though to tell the truth I think he only agreed to give me a chance because he was more entertained by the idea of a bunny making an elephant sized suit. Little did he know that I relish a challenge and that I'm more than capable of tailoring a suit like that within three days. With your father's help of course.” Judith smirked confidently.

Nicholas smiled. “So what happened?” Nicholas asked, not understanding what went wrong.

Judith's confidence faded. “Well, when I met with him the first time, I made the deal alone. But when he saw me walking into his office with your father, he immediately told him to leave and to get his 'grimy, thieving’ paws off his suit. He thought your father was trying to rob me, but then when I explained that he was my business partner and that he helped me make the suit, he had us both kicked out of his office.”

“What?!” Nicholas yelled, startling everyone. He turned around to his father, father-in-law, and children, “Sorry, sorry everyone. Everything's alright, no need to worry.” Everyone went back to what they were doing. Jonathan however seemed to know exactly what they were talking about and lowered his gaze in shame.

“You alright there, John?” Stu asked him with concern.

“Never better. Just observing the tree is all. It's looking great!”

Stu and James nodded in agreement and continued their decorating.

Nicholas held Judith's face protectively in his paws, “Did he hurt you?”

“No, not really. He had one of his servants throw us out. But that didn't bother me as much as the things he said. He actually had the nerve to say that he didn't want the suit just because he didn't want anything that a 'filthy fox’ had touched. I got so mad that I went on a tirade insulting him. That's when he had us kicked out.”

Nicholas cupped a paw at her cheek, smiling gently at her. Proud that she tried to defend his father's honor.

“I'm sorry Nicholas,” she apologized soft spokenly. “I guess it was my fault that we ultimately lost that sale and investment opportunity.”

“Hey, don't take it too hard Carrots. You said it yourself, the sale was already doomed once he saw my father. It wouldn't have been worth it to have a guy like that as a business partner.”

“I know, I just wish things had gone differently,” Judith sighed, glancing over to the other suit on top of the elephant sized one. She walked over to it and took it in her paws, “After all you’ve said about Mr. Bogo, I highly doubt that he’d ever want to invest in us too. But we made this in case if you ever see that he’s in need of a good suit. Maybe he’d like to buy one or hire us to tailor some for him.”

Nicholas felt the suit, “That feels really soft. Is that wool?”

“No, it's cotton,” Judith smiled.

“Mr. Jumbeaux oughta consider calling himself Mr. Dumbeaux if he was really dumb enough to deny a finely tailored suit like this.”

Bogo and the chubby spirit moved closer to observe the buffalo sized suit. Bogo touched it and was actually able to feel it without the bunny or fox noticing. “Mhmm, soft to the touch but firm and sturdy, fashionable, good design. Yes, this is indeed a finely made suit. Did Wilde’s wife and father really stitch this themselves?”

“Yes they did!” chirped the cheetah. They're pretty talented, aren't they?”

“Yes, Wilde must feel so lucky. He has a beautiful wife who is also quite talented and ambitious,” Bogo smiled, genuinely happy for Nicholas.

Judith smiled at Nicholas’ compliment, but lowered her gaze almost immediately afterward, as if losing faith in her own talent. Nicholas held her and lifted her chin up to face him, “Hey, don't make me be the optimist now.” Judith giggled at his attempt to humor her, “We’ll get through these tough times together. Just like you said.” They smiled at one another when Bonnie and Amelia walked back out of the kitchen carrying plates and a couple of dish trays.

“Breakfast everyone!” Bonnie called out to everyone. “Care to help us Judith? Nicholas?”

“Yes mother,” Judith replied and took some plates from her mother. Nicholas took a couple in his paws as well.

“So glad to see you and Mr. Hopps were able to join us for this Christmas, Mrs. Hopps,” Nicholas told his mother-in-law.

“Well of course,” Bonnie replied with a smile, “It’s Judith’s turn this year after all.”

“Yeah, and thank you for havin’ us Nicholas,” Stu added. “I’m just really sorry Bon and I couldn’t chip in more with the food besides just a few vegetables and a blueberry pie. It’s been a rough few months ever since we were forced to close down the farm. I don’t know if it’s the soot in the air or just the constant bad weather, but…” he shook his head with an apologetic sigh.

“It’s okay Mr. Hopps, I understand. Guess we’re all going through some tough times,” Nicholas said with an understanding tone.

Stu nodded. “Bon and I are fortunate enough that our kids are all grown and able to fend for themselves even without the farm. But I only wish we could’ve been able to help you given that yours and Jude’s little ones are still well...little,” Stu said as he glanced over to Tiny Finn, who was struggling to climb onto his chair. Nicholas quickly picked up his son and helped him sit, tying a little bib around his neck. Judith meanwhile came around and took the boy’s cap and cane.

The little kit, much like his siblings, lit up at the sight of the food on the table. There was a blueberry pie which Bonnie set down on the table. A tray which had two baked potatoes, two full carrots, a spoonful of peas, about five lettuce leaves, and a single tomato sliced into ten thin slices for each member of the family. Amelia carried over another tray with a cover. She lifted the top, revealing only three cooked sardines.

The adults finished serving the food and drinks and they all took their seats.

“Oh my! Look at all the wonderful things to eat!” chirped Tiny Finn, happy despite the meager meal. “We must thank Mr. Bogo,” he said innocently to his parents who sat beside him.

Bogo’s jaw dropped in awe. He was touched by the boy’s innocent consideration.

Nicholas and Judith looked at one another. Judith sighed reluctantly as if giving Nicholas the go ahead to supporting their son’s statement. Nicholas nodded to their son, “Couldn’t have said it better kiddo!” Nicholas raised a glass, “To Mr. Bogo, the founder of this feast.” Bonnie, Amelia, Stu, and Jonathhan all scoffed, while the children gazed at the adults in confusion.

“Nicholas sweetie,” said his mother, “Maybe it would be best if we not include him in our toast.”

Little Felicia tugged at her grandmother’s sleeve, “Why not grandma Amelia?”

“I understand mother, but it is Christmas,” Nicholas responded, “And everyone deserves consideration on this day,” he placed a paw at his son’s back and smiled at him. The kit smiled back at him, as if proud of his father.

Though hesitant herself, Judith stood with her glass in paw. “I know it may be difficult to toast someone like Mr. Bogo, seeing how he is a stingy, odious, and all around unfeeling mammal.”

Bogo, shrunk with each word Judith said, more so after seeing the other adults nod in agreement.

“But,” Judith continued, “Nicholas and Finn are right. We should remember that Mr. Bogo did give Nicholas a job. So, I’ll toast to his health for Nicholas’ sake and because it is Christmas and...I hope the rest of you can find it in your hearts to do the same.” The other adults looked at one another and sighed, giving in. Judith lifted her cup, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to Mr. Bogo.”

The other adults, and children all raised their glasses, “To Mr. Bogo.”

The Wilde and Hopps families drank a sip of their respective drinks and ate. Tiny Finn was given the meaty torso of one of the sardines. He was ready to dig into it when he noticed that his father had only taken the tiny tip of the tail. Being the ever considerate boy that he was, Tiny Finn took his fish and tried to hand it to his father. Nicholas looked at him in surprise and smiled, politely denying the fish from his son. He then hugged him and they each continued eating their respective meals.

Bogo observed the innocent child and asked, “Spirit, tell me, what will happen to Tiny Finn?”

The normally chipper chubby cheetah, frowned, “If these shadows remain unchanged, I see an empty chair where Tiny Finn once sat. And a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved.”

Bogo uncharacteristically felt his chest tighten with horror, “S-So does that mean...Finn will…”

Bogo turned to face the chubby cheetah when he felt a cold breeze brush past him, forcing him to shut his eyes.

When he opened his eyes he saw that he was still in the Wilde’s home, but there was no one to be found -- not the Wildes, not the Hopps, not the chubby spirit. There was now only darkness in the simple little home.

…

A/N: I’ll bet a lot of you thought Finnick was going to be Tiny Finn, huh? Lol! Funny as that would be he’s not Nick and Judy’s real son...nor is he a child, so he unfortunately can’t play the role. But don’t worry he has an important role in this fic somewhere ;)

Oh, by the way, I know it's a bit unoriginal of me, but I personally really love Helthehatter’s bunny-like hybrid kit design (ie Violet Wilde), so I kind of adopted it here as what Felicia and Finn would look like. I just really love it, it's like the canon look to me for bunny-like hybrids. And I feel that if Nick and Judy could have hybrid children, this is what the bunny looking ones would look like. As for the fox ones, I kind of just reversed it in that they look more like foxes but have some subtle bunny like features. This way we have both funnies (bunny looking ones) and boxes (fox looking ones). :D

#zootopia #wildehopps #nick x judy #judy x nick #a christmas carol #continuing christmas gift #the gift that keeps on giving #fan fic #crossover #christmas 2019 #happy new year #2020

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buckybabybaby · 5 years

Text

Mr Hollywood (Chapter 14)

Summary: Bucky Barnes, an underpaid teaching assistant in a small English village, dreams of a movie career back in his home country of America. He finally gets the break he's always wanted, and if it wasn't for you, his best friend, he wouldn't have been able to take it.

But is that fact enough to save your friendship when it's tested by the pressures of Hollywood?

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Reader (Gender Neutral)

Word count: 1842

Chapter summary: The city that never sleeps with the man that really needs to...

Warnings: None!

Previous: Chapter 13

Mr Hollywood Masterlist | Main Masterlist

*****

Waking up the next day, the first thing you're aware of is how warm you are. Cracking one eye open, it takes you a second to remember where you are, the bedroom looking different in the morning light. The rays shining through the thin curtains and the heavy quilt are a little too much now you're awake.

Attempting to move the duvet away, it comes as quite the shock when it resists, mumbling something from behind you, the weight across your centre tightening and pulling you back into the middle of the bed. Twisting your head to the side, you're met with a head full of messy brunette hair, and your body freezes at the realisation that Bucky has cuddled up to you in his sleep. Granted, just one arm over the covers, but it's still much more intimate than you've been with him before and you don't want him to know you're awake in case it becomes awkward. His breathing is slow and even against your shoulder, still dead to the world, and you relax back into his hold knowing how deeply he sleeps. He regularly slept through his alarm when you worked together, and many a time you had had to use the spare key to enter his flat and chivvy him out of bed.

Staring up at the ceiling, you allow yourself to enjoy his embrace. You feel well rested, the aches from yesterday gone and with the blankets folded down away from you, you're content in your comfortably hazy state.

At least you are until your tummy rumbles.

Bucky shuffles beside you, rolling onto his back and releasing you from his grip, allowing you to slip out of bed and tip toe out to the hall. Closing the door quietly as you leave him be, you take a moment to admire the sight, how peaceful he looks sleeping in his own bed for once. The first half of filming for season two has just wrapped, and it's no secret that the hours are just as brutal as they were for the first, the actors pushed to their limit in the pursuit of keeping to budget.

Bucky needs all the sleep he can get.

Alone in the unfamiliar house, you slowly walk down the corridor, not wanting to open the wrong door and invade someone’s privacy. Especially not on your first day here. Following the stairs down to the next floor, you find the kitchen, an airy open plan space with the living room off to the right.

A box of your favourite cereal sits on the counter near the fridge, the sticky note with your name written in Bucky's handwriting stuck on the side bringing a smile to your face.

“How did you sleep?”

Whipping around as the voice startles you, you find Sophia stood at the table with her plate of toast and orange juice.

“Don't skulk around like that!”

“I'm not skulking, looks like you've got something to hide. Was the bed comfy enough?”

Turning back to make your breakfast, you ignore her and her smirk.

“Fine. Don't tell me. But just so you know, the bathroom is in-between Bucky's room and Day's so we wouldn't be able to hear anything if you wanted-”

“Sophia! Stop, please. And anyway,” You point at the clock. “Why are you up so early?”

“I'm not that tired actually, thanks to you keeping Benjamin entertained on the plane. What about you?”

“Hungry.”

“I'll let you get back to your food then.”

The breakfast bar seats are surprisingly comfortable, and you happily sit in the kitchen checking your phone as you eat and wait for Bucky to finally make it out of bed.

“Y/N.” His voice is scratchy when he walks in. “There you are.”

“Morning.” You push a bowl towards him as he takes a seat opposite you. “I poured you some cornflakes.”

“You should stay over more often,” He grins as he adds milk and takes a spoonful.

“And you should lend me your tops more often. This is the softest thing I've ever worn.”

Gaze skimming up your legs to where his t-shirt falls across your top half, he pauses halfway through a mouthful. Something in the air changes as he puts down his cutlery, breakfast forgotten as he stands up again.

You can't look away as he approaches. “Bucky?”

He shakes his head. “I could get used to this. You, here with me. Waking up together.”

“Bucky.”

“Well, if you stayed in bed long enough, that is,” He goes on, coming to a stop before you as you slide off your seat.

“And I could really get used to seeing you in my clothes.” His fingers skim the hem, centimetres away from your thighs. “You're so pretty in this.”

“I'm not,” You protest weakly.

He chuckles. “Still so shy with compliments. I guess I'll just have to keep repeating them until you believe me.”

Winding his arm around your waist, he brings you between his legs and you look down, chest tight.

He tilts his head to catch your eye again, “Y/N, I want to-”

The door opens behind you and you step away from Bucky instinctively, not missing the way his hands reach out for you.

Dayton's eyes narrow as he assesses the situation he's walked in on. “Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Bucky spits at the same time, glaring at his brother as you wish you could become invisible.

Shifting your weight from one foot to another as Dayton grabs a glass from the cupboard and fills it up with water, your sides tingle with the ghost of Bucky's touch.

“Well, better get this to Sophia.”

Dayton winks at you as he leaves, making you even more flustered.

When he's gone Bucky's attention is back on you but the moment has past, and before the tension becomes to much you change the subject.

“Erm, if you have nothing else important to do, could you come shopping with me? Or not. It's fine if you're busy, I can go alone.”

“Of course I'll come, I said I would. And we can't have you getting lost on your first day can we?” You nod as you laugh at the thought. “I'll go get dressed.”

*****

Getting ready doesn't take very long as you can only put yesterdays outfit back on. Standing next to Bucky by the front door as he fixes his hat, you stare at your reflection in the mirror and wish you'd worn something more stylish for the flight over. Next to him in his bespoke outfit you feel plain and uninteresting.

You feel even more under-dressed when you hear a set of footsteps coming down from the second floor, and then there in front of you is the woman you've heard so much about. Seeming like she's just stepped out of a fashion magazine, her immaculate hair and perfectly fitting dress-suit has you shrinking away, intimidated despite her friendly demeanour.

“Aren't you going to introduce me, Bucky?”

“Oh, yeah, 'course. Mum, this is my-err, my, my Y/N. Y/N.”

You flush, smiling at her through your embarrassment. “Nice to meet you, Mrs Barnes.”

She doesn't notice how tense you've become, kissing one cheek then the other. “So lovely to finally meet you Y/N. Oh! You're even more beautiful in real life! And it's Winnifred.”

Bucky giggles as you look to him helplessly.

“George! Come meet Y/N.”

Mr Barnes trails in, just as welcoming as his wife. The resemblance to his sons is remarkable even with the softness of laughter lines added to his face over the years.

He clasps your hand in both of his. “Glad you finally found some time to visit. Bucky's been excited for your arrival all week. Hasn't stopped going on about it.”

“Dad,” Bucky groans as you rise your eyebrows over at him, amused.

“As we all have, obviously.” His dad tries to save himself.

“Right, well we'll have to leave you kids alone now, work calls,” Winnifred apologies as her phone buzzes and she grabs her bag.

“Kids?” Bucky mutters with a roll of his eyes.

“You'll always be my baby, darling,” She says, flicking the brim of his hat so it falls off and she can ruffle his hair.

Smoothing it back down as he blushes, he opens the door. “All right, definitely time for you to leave!”

“See you two later. Oh, we should all have lunch! Not today though.” She thinks as George coaxes her out the house. “I'll text you our schedule and we'll make it work.”

Bucky's dad waves back at the two of you. “See you both soon.”

The door swings shut behind them and Bucky turns to you, grinning bashfully.

“Sorry they're so full on.”

“They're very sweet.”

“Suppose they are. I owe them a lot.” He collects his hat from the floor and resits it upon his head. “Ready to hit the shops?”

*****

Shopping is exhausting. Not only is New York enormous, with every store possible spread across miles of avenues and boulevards, but you've never shopped from American brands before, so you have no idea which one to start with. Bucky isn't much help, you have to pull him away from the designer shops more than once during the day. He says it's not a problem, he can pay, but that's the last thing you want since he paid for you to come over. You don't let him get lunch either, insisting on trying out a little toasted sandwich van parked near one of the entrance gates for Central Park.

Finding a bench near a fountain, you sit close together and tear into the paper bag full of melted cheese and hot vegetables between warm bread.

Once the food is finished, you watch the other tourists and native New Yorkers for a while. After so many years of daydreaming about visiting, it's surreal to actually be here, the three week break Bucky's managed to bag for himself stretches before you like the summers holidays did when you where a child. Compared to the snatched moments you've shared in the last year, it feels endless.

This is the happiest you've been for months. “Thank you for bringing me.”

“Thank you for forgiving me so I could.”

You watch the water cascade down the statues together for a few more minutes, arms brushing, until you can no longer take it.

“Bucky?” He hums. You take a deep breath, acting braver than you feel. “Dayton thinks we should talk. Do you think he's right?”

“I think he's an interfering piece of-”

“No you don't. And you're not answering the question.”

Bucky sighs, repositioning himself on the bench so he can look at you directly, his face a mix of emotions. “I wanted to talk this morning, before Dayton barged in like the-.”

You interrupt. “How about we talk now instead?”

“All right.” Standing up, he holds out his hand for you to take, squeezing it gently when you let him help you up. “Come on, I know the perfect place to go.”

*****

Chapter 15

Sorry I left it there... ;) As always, thank you for reading! <3

#bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #bucky imagine #bucky barnes imagine #buckybabybaby #Mr Hollywood

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shrimpcache · 4 years

Text

A sort of loneliness, a sort of longing

I dream constantly of a reality far, far away from this one. Where I am, this reality I inhabit, is a cold one. The hastily cleaned floors of the coffee shop are cold to the eyes, tramped by sneakers and sandals, heels and oxfords, a cacophony of travel over the clean, clean tile. In this cafe, I say hello to the cashier (hello two hundred and fifty one out of three hundred). I know her day because I’ve worked it, the grueling low-skilled labor of meeting eyes with every stranger who passes through- It’s almost closing time and the guilt of my presence curls in my chest as I order; when I leave, I am forgotten. The memory of me, our interaction, burns quick. Flash paper to a match, and I am replaced by someone else in the conveyor belt for iced coffee, and as I leave, I wonder why I feel so empty inside.

What would I have to change in order for this itch to leave my bones?

So, as I walk away, coffee and receipt in hand, I imagine a town, far, far away. Somewhere I would like to be. Smaller, where the number of friends to strangers is almost equal, where my home is alone in the woods with a long, dirt road leading to town. As I leave to the porch of my small-but-not-too-small home, I turn as I close the front door, calling to my wife, “I’m going into town!”

It’s the mid-ground between close and far, and I would walk if I wanted but instead I choose my bike, with it’s white wicker basket attached to the front and its pale peeling paint. I ride into town and its a beautiful day, sunny but not to hot, and when I arrive the farmer’s market is just beginning to bustle. Fresh green and summery reds and yellows line every stand. In the crowd of patrons, there’s dozens of friendly faces, and when I approach the fruit stand, overflowing with apples and peaches and jams, she asks, “how have the dogs been?” It’s familiar and kind, paired with a familiar old smile, and I respond about how much they’ve loved the rainy season. She knows it’s a thinly veiled complaint about mud and bath times; we share a knowing look and laugh as she bags my produce and I hand her a small wad of paper bills. As I leave, we exchange a, “see you next week” and I promise to tell my wife that she said hi. The day is calm, and I say hello to acquaintances without worrying about how I look or dressed this morning. I ride back home feeling warm and content, an unbridled smile on my face as I recount my trip to my wife; I update her on my conversation with the lady who works the fruit stand, my conversation with our closest neighbors and how their son will be moving out soon, how I saw the Mason’s out on a walk as I was on my way home-

And then I get into my car with my coffee sweating through the receipt against my palm, freezing my skin numb, and the plastic cup is full but something is still empty. There is still a cold hollow in my chest from the empty, unfamiliar eyes of the underpaid cashier and the strangers who waited in line in front of me.

I drive home wondering about how it could have been, escaping back into the quiet, friendly community in my head.

#this just in im dissatisfied with life and i crave connection #i have my friends but i have no community #anyways this was just me talking about how i wish my life was #bye #my writing #original

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lumiolivier · 5 years

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Fan Fiction Master Post (and Where to Find Them):

Hello, Internet. It’s been about a year and a half since I last updated my master post and it’d be nice for you to pass this one around instead of the others. And so much has happened since the last list! I finally jumped on the Ao3 train! This list has got everybody here. If you got nothing better to do and need a little fic to put on the wounds life has dealt you (or if you’re a little bit of a masochist and want something that’ll tear your soul to shreds), then pick a link and indulge yourself, K? Like last time, this list is organized alphabetically by fandom and chronologically, if there’s a series. You’ll see what I mean. Enjoy!

** indicates a story in progress as of the time of posting this list.

Attack on Titan:

Classified Files: Ackerman, Levi

AU Crack! Hanji needs a favor from Levi, but there's no way Levi would be so willing. That's what she has Eren for! But...Well...Why can't Hanji's experiments ever go right?

Black Butler:

Just a Simple Interview, Right?

1 of 4. What starts out as just an interview with 19 year old earl Ciel Phantomhive for the paper turns into a little more than that a young reporter bargains for when she meets his enigmatic, yet beautiful butler. (Mostly T rated with some lemon chapters)

His Strange Little Girl and Her Butler, the Enigma

2 of 4. She had her interview, but gained a few new friends and one very, very special butler. Now, she has her beautiful demon husband for the rest of eternity. But when the honeymoon’s over…is it really over? Of course not. We can’t have anything simple, can we? (Also T rated with a few lemon chapters.)

You, Me, and Cambion Makes Three

3 of 4. The Michaelis family has grown by one. The young lord has finally married Lady Elizabeth. So, what comes next? A little catastrophe, perhaps? (Yet again, T rated with a few lemon chapters.)

Her Butler, One Last Time

4 of 4. So blissfully living as a magazine contributor in modern day New York City. Until she meets her new landlord…or her demon husband from a past life?

Peace, Love, Unity, Respect

(Mini-series) She’s graduated college. Her boyfriend dumps her. Her roommates find a way to cheer her up. But for whatever reason, she’s feeling a little desperate. Especially when the DJ keeps giving her looks. He feels like he’s seen her somewhere before…

Crossovers:

Trouble Comes in Threes

(Hetalia x Fruits Basket) Francis, Gilbert, and Antonio could get anyone they want. They're beautiful, they're young, and the whole school knows it. But...They've had it all and grow bored. Even traveling outside city limits wouldn't prove to be any sort of challenge. But after a mess of a party, it appears Yao and Kiku's family tree is extending its roots when their cousins relocate. They couldn't stay at the Sohma house forever.

A New Hacker Has Entered the Chat**

(DRAMAtical Murder x Mystic Messenger) The RFA is usually pretty airtight when it comes to their information. Although, when their systems end up getting hacked, Seven and MC put their heads together to figure out who did it and why their source is coming from two different places.

DRAMAtical Murder:

His Angel Bunny

When Angel goes into work on her day off, she just wants to throw her head against the wall. Until she sees a cute boy with a face full of metal and a heart full of sadness. She had to do something about it. Little did she know, that would lead to the greatest domino effect adventure of her life.

About Time

Just a quick one-shot of Koujaku doing a HUGE favor to humanity. Thank you, Koujaku, for your bravery and your services.

Death Note:

Lawliet

Ever wonder how L happened? The name? The person? The little boy behind it all…? (child!Lx parental!Reader going into the Kira investigation)

Fairy Tail:

The Princess and the Dragon

(AU) She wants to be where the wizards are. However, her father has other plans for her. Stay out of the books, Lucy! You don’t need to practice magic! How do you expect to further the bloodline if you don’t meet anyone?

The Siren’s Song

(AU) Beware a frozen heart desperate for warmth...What a load of garbage...Right?

The Knight in Shining Armor (At the time of me posting this, the last chapter is going out this week)

(AU) Erza's flashbacks to the days before she joined the guild kept getting worse and worse. Master Makarov couldn't stand to see one of the strongest members of the guild falling apart like that, so a special job for a special S-Class wizard should be enough to snap her out of it. Especially when that job is for the Fiore royal family.

Fullmetal Alchemist:

Halfmetal Heart

Edward and Winry’s precocious daughter Tricia has picked up the family trade, but when she goes to apply for her state certification, something wonderful catches her eye…

Don’t Forget

Their house used to be a pile of ash, but now, it’s a home as Edward and Alphonse reflect on the day it burned. One-shot

Happy Birthday, Sir

Today marks a very special day in Amestris. It’s the Fuhrer’s birthday! And his wife has a little something, something planned for him, but can Mustang let it be a surprise? One-shot. Partially goes off the Halfmetal Heart canon

The Spark and the Sparrow

Just some young Royai fluff about a thunderstorm that happened at Master Hawkeye’s house. One-shot

Hetalia:

Candy From Strangers**

Amelia's boyfriend is a jerk. No matter how anyone looks at it, he's a straight up jerk. One night, things got a bit out of hand and...Well...He's her ex-boyfriend now. A broken plate to the cheek does that. But a kind hearted stranger in the park was more than ok with fixing up more than the deep cut on her cheek.

Draw a Circle

France stumbles on a mysterious naked woman and can't keep her to himself, so he consults his good friend Britain. Who is she? And where did she come from?

The Legend of Zelda:

Courageous Duality

Five years after the Kokiri Village has been burned by the Gerudo King’s newest apprentice, Link gathers the intestinal fortitude to go back and pay his respects to his old home. Until he finds his true destiny deep within the Lost Woods. Takes place after Ocarina of Time

MCU:

Kilgrave’s Good Little Girl

Who better to bring in a murderous psychopath than a murderous psychopath? (Reader)

Mystic Messenger:

Mistake Messenger

A one-shot collection of alternate routes for Mystic Messenger ranging from sweet and fluffy to naughty and depraved. MC x EVERYONE.

Man’s Best Intern

(AU) Poor Jaehee. Overworked. Underpaid. Under appreciated. Luckily, with the newest C&R intern, anything is possible. Although, when Mr. Han takes a particular shine to her, Jaehee’s workload may be doubled even more.

The Number Next Door**

(AU) MC has finally gotten the opportunity to move into the apartment building of her dreams. After years of clawing her way up with her design blog, things have finally fallen into place for her. That is, until she learns her next door neighbor likes to blast meme music at 1AM.

Regularly Scheduled Programming

(One-shot) Saeran and MC indulge themselves with one night a week for garbage TV. Although, sometimes, we can't always get what we want.

Ouran High School Host Club:

Kiss, Kiss

1 of 3. You’re starting at a new school and for any normal person, that’s difficult. For someone with your list of diagnoses, it’s even worse. Especially when all you want is to keep your head down and find a quiet place to study.

Back to Normal, I Guess

2 of 3. After her summer in New York, Lana goes back to her school in London with her heavy heart full of the memories she made at Ouran Academy. But little does she know, the Ouran Host Club will always be there to welcome her back, no matter what time zone she’s in.

Our New Normal

3 of 3. Lana misses Japan. Can we blame her? Unfortunately, she had to graduate from Ouran Academy sometime. But her new life in New York with Kyoya is only just beginning. College is an entirely different ballgame.

Switch**

Daddy's only looking out for his little girl and he wants what's best for her. She's not ready to take over the...uh..."family business" quite yet. She doesn't understand why she has to go so far just to go to school. But Daddy's word is law. Hey...Why does the angry guy in her homeroom seem familiar? And what's a host club?

Supernatural:

A Family Forged in Fire

1 of 2. Lena was living in an orphanage. Constant rejection day in and day out. They were looking for a baby, not her. Little did she know that a case would bring a pair of brothers that would turn her life upside down.

When the Fire Goes Out

2 of 2. After taking down the devil himself, a girl needs to get away, doesn’t she? Even though it puts her brothers in a worry and opens up a golden opportunity for someone new to slip into her life.

Yuri!!! On Ice:

Adopted

1 of 2. AU: Victor and Violet adopted two precious little boys that they can’t help but love and became an unorthodox family. Even though the youngest can’t stand the oldest, but that’s the way siblings work. And things get even more troublesome when they both want to take up the very thing that brought Mommy and Daddy together.

Off the Rails

2 of 2. After Junior Grand Prix, the Nikiforov family has moved to New York and began their training for next season, including Violet’s comeback. However, her comeback may be a bit more than she…or Victor…bargained for.

Not a Perfect Fairytale (But It’s Ours)

Fairytale AU. Whoever decided the prince needed a princess has terrible foresight…

Surprise

Yurio is always a little paranoid, but for some strange reason, today, his radar was up even more than usual. Especially when Yakov doesn’t yell at him for missing a simple jump. One-shot

Dr. Nikiforov Has a Ring To It

Getting sick sucks something awful on its own. Getting sick with no one else home but your overbearing roommate to take care of you? That’s a mess in itself. One-shot

Pierced Through the Heart

(One-shot) Yurio and Otabek had been together a while now. Why couldn't they have something match like Victor and Yuri?

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chiefnooniensingh · 5 years

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I Won’t Hesitate (for you)

Chapter 1: I've been waiting for this moment (all my life)

Summary: Alex Manes, renowned Private Detective, is resting after solving an open-and-shut case in Istanbul aboard the Orient Express, when tragedy strikes and one of the passengers is discovered murdered in his locked cabin. Knowing he might be the only one who can solve this locked-room mystery, he takes it upon himself to solve this - seemingly - simple case.

Things quickly take a turn for the complicated as a 10-year-old murder case becomes connected to the current victim, the passengers turn out to be less trustworthy than they seem and Alex runs into a few old acquaintances.

The case may not be as simple as Alex first assumed, and soon he is faced with an impossible choice.

Will Alex solve this case, or does a murderer walk free?

Based on Dame Agatha Christie's novel and the most recent movie adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express.

A/N: And here it is!

I started this way back in July, the first story idea that stuck with me for longer than ten seconds. Instead of starting to write immediately, like I usually do, I started by outlining all the chapters. Based on that, I have managed to finish the entire story, before giving into the temptation of posting it. I plan on posting a chapter at least once a week.

I hope you guys like it!

Also who can guess the songs that inspired the chapter and story titles?

A special thanks to Aileen (@acomebackstory), Callie (@callieramics), @hm-arn, @royalshadowhunter and @ladymajavader for their continued support and cheerleading. I don't know if I would've finished it without you guys!

In this chapter: We meet Alex Manes, Private Detective and control freek, after successfully having closed a case in Istanbul. On a whim, he decides to return to Paris by Orient Express. On board, he runs into some old acquaintances.

[also on ao3]

Late August, 1920

It was the month of the ratification of the 19th amendment. Whilst women throughout America were celebrating a resounding success (though most were not allowed to vote until well into 1921), a local New Mexian newspaper reported a tragic story:

Ortecho Family Drama Unfolds: Rosa Ortecho (11) disappears in the dead of night. Police suspect foul play.

The Ortechos were stellar chefs of Mexican descent, moving to New Mexico to open their first US-based restaurant. While the country wasn’t as welcoming to them as they had hoped, the food spoke for itself and soon Ortecho’s Bistro had built a faithful customer base.

Mr. Ortecho ran the restaurant alone, after Mrs. Ortecho was committed to a mental institution, and raised his daughters with the pride and flair worthy of a cook. Their youngest, Liz, was 9 when the drama unfolded. Rosa and Liz shared a bedroom and their sisterly bond was as close as it could be. Liz adored Rosa.

So when she woke up on that faithful night, awoken by a cold draft from a window that had most certainly not been open when Mikey had tucked them in, and she looked over to find Rosa’s bed empty, a part of Liz died on the spot. Screaming, she quickly woke up the entire house, and within a few hours, the entire town was up and looking for Chef Ortecho’s eldest daughter.

Detective Valenti of the local sheriff’s department was put on the case, but the bedroom held no clues other than an open window and the land surrounding the house was large and not easily traversed. It was commonly agreed that the kidnapper could not have gone far.

“After two weeks of silence, Chef Ortecho finally allowed reporters on his property, to appeal to the kidnappers and anyone who has any information on the whereabouts of his daughter. ‘Please,’ Chef Ortecho pleads, desperation clear in his voice, “Please, Rosa and Liz are all I have. If I lose one of them…please, return my daughter, Liz’s sister. She’s just an eleven-year-old girl.’ Afterwards, Chef Ortecho was too overcome with emotion to speak, and Detective Valenti shooed the reporters out of the house.”

Not long after the interview was released, Detective Valenti brought terrible news; the body of Rosa Ortecho was found a few miles from the house, half-buried in a forest. The kidnapping had become a murder.

The Ortecho family was wrecked. The restaurant closed indefinitely and Chef Ortecho and his only remaining daughter were barely seen in public.

Detective Valenti stayed on the case as long as he could. He had solved all cases that came before, even if they were deemed ‘unsolvable’ and was driven to solve this one. But the longer he went on, the colder the trail got. Several suspects were named, but none had clear motives, and all had believable alibis.

The case grew cold.

Present day, 19th of October, 1935

Alex Manes shook hands with the Police Captain of Istanbul’s biggest precinct. He had just assisted in solving a very complicated theft and the thief was now safely behind bars. This is what he loved about his job; he got to travel to all kinds of places to help people.

“Teşekkürler, Mr Manes. We could not have solved this case without you,” the captain said.

Alex smiled. “You had all the facts already, all that was needed was to put them together. The world is built on logic, one just needs to learn to see it.”

The captain shook his head with a smile. “As you say, Mr Manes.” The two of them stepped outside, into the warm autumn air. The city was bustling with people, the air filled with delicious smells of spices and coffee. “Will you be enjoying our grand city, Mr Manes? The Haga Sofia is open for tourists now.” The captain couldn’t withhold a small hint of disapproval at the city��s decision to turn the greatest mosque into a museum.

Alex shook his head, shrugging on his coat and putting on his cowboy hat, the only thing he kept from his childhood years. “No. There’s a case waiting in New York. I’m planning on traveling to London tonight, so I can be in New York in time for Thanksgiving.”

“If I may be so bold, take the Orient Express,” the captain said, his face lighting up. “The wife and I saved up enough money a few years ago, and we went by Orient Express to Paris. The ride is beautiful.”

Alex looked the captain up and down, noting the crooked tie and the dishevelled hair. The captain was busy and criminally underpaid, yet he seemed like a decent fellow. “I thank you, Captain.” He held out his hand again.

“And I, you, Captain.”

“Just Mr Manes now, I’m afraid,” Alex corrected. He straightened his hat and began to walk towards his hotel, enjoying the walk in the early autumn sun and a city in bloom. If his father knew he was in Turkish country, he would not hesitate to call Alex a traitor. But Alex wasn’t in America anymore, and neither was he in the Army. His father had no control over his life anymore, and Alex preferred it this way. Jesse Manes’ racist and discriminatory lifestyle was not something Alex wanted anything to do with.

At the hotel, he tightly packed his suitcase and took a taxicab to the train station. A line was forming at the Bucharest ticket booth, but the Paris ticket booth was line-free. Alex walked right up. “Good afternoon. I was wondering if there were any tickets left for the 10.31 to Paris?”

The man looked up and they both did a double take. “Alex?”

“Flint?” Alex stared open-mouthed at his older brother, who was in full Orient Express costume, looking extremely bored. Flint and Alex hadn’t gotten along in their youth, but when they were both in the Army, they rekindled some of their brotherly bond. After Alex was honourably discharged, they lost touch.

“Little brother!” Flint boomed, making several passengers look around in surprise. He jumped up and pulled Alex into a bone-crushing hug. “It’s been a while, what you been up to?”

Alex chuckled and patted his brother’s back. While he had grown fond of Flint in their three years on the force together, it was still uncomfortable to be greeted this way. Flint had been the worst bully of all his brothers. “Oh, you know, solving some cases, travelling the world. How about you?”

“Been working here for a year now. Father is the new director of the Compagnie.”

Alex scoffed. “The French must love that.”

“It wasn’t the most popular decision, no. But you know Father, once he sets his mind to something, he gets it.” Flint rolled his eyes, and Alex felt a strange sort of warmth. He had always been the only one to be at odds with their father, and it was strange to share this with his brother. “Anyway, after I was discharged, I really needed a job and he landed me this one. The work is boring but living in Istanbul is a dream. Did you know they opened the Haga Sofia to the public now? It’s stunning.”

“Yes, I did, but sadly, I did not have time. And I have to return to New York before Thanksgiving. So, can you get me a ticket to Paris?”

Flint clicked his tongue, looking remorseful. “Sorry, Alex, everything was fully booked weeks ago. But if you really need to go to Paris, I can put you on the Belgrade car. There’s a direct line to Paris from Belgrade as well, on the Arlberg-Orient Express, and the transfer is only a couple of hours.”

Alex sighed, but took out his check book. “Well, I could complain, but what would that help?”

“Tell that to all the passengers to whom I had to deliver the same message.” The two brothers laughed as Alex wrote out the check. “Here’s your ticket, little brother. Don’t lose it, or they’ll toss you out halfway to Sofia. Even if you’re the boss’s son.”

“I think being Alex Manes makes me more likely to be tossed out, but I’ll keep it safe, nonetheless. Thanks, Flint. It was good seeing you.”

“Same to you, man. If you’re ever in Istanbul again, don’t hesitate to visit.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. See you around!” Alex took up his suitcase and carried it over to the Belgrade carriage. He worked his way through a crowd of people, all of them were ready to board the Paris carriage. A young, dark woman was supporting a middle-aged, frail-looking woman who could only be her mother. A blonde, high society woman was ordering her and her husband’s suitcases to be brought on the train. Alex almost tripped over a man who was tying his shoelace. “Oh, excuse me,” Alex said, side-stepping the man. A white coat was hanging over his arm. A doctor, Alex deduced easily, then moved on.

A man helped Alex haul his suitcase on the train and find his cabin. It was a single cabin, and Alex exhaled. Sharing a cabin was murder on his senses, which were always in overtaxed at the end of the day, and there was nothing better than reading a good book to wind down, with no distractions. “Thank you, kind sir,” Alex said, giving the man a generous tip. The case in Istanbul had paid very well.

“The dining carriage is that way, just pass through the Paris carriage and you will find it there. Breakfast is served at 8.30am, lunch at noon, tea at 4pm and dinner at 7. Should you need anything else, you can ring this bell and the conductor will be right with you.”

“Is there one conductor for the whole train?” Alex asked, incredulously. That seemed too much work for one man, as several carriages would be added in Venice and Lausanne.

The man laughed. “Certainly not, sir. Every carriage has its own conductor, who has a small cabin at the end of each carriages. At night, the doors between carriages will be closed for safety reasons, but everyone still has a right to call upon the conductor at all times.”

“That’s excellent, thank you very much. Enjoy your day.”

“You as well, sir.”

The man closed the door behind him, and Alex sank into his bunk with a heavy sigh. His leg was aching. He swore. He’d been walking around too much on it and the scar near his knee was acting up heavily. Alex stretched his leg with a groan, just as the whistle outside sounded and the train shocked into movement.

Alex looked out the window as the pulled out the train station. Istanbul had been nice, but after the chaos of the city, Alex was looking forward to a restful week on the train. He needed to recharge before his major case in New York.

He watched the city centre turn into the less populated outer cities and then into wide open nature. With another groan, he opened his trunk and took out his book. It had been locked in his trunk ever since he arrived, and now he finally had the time to read the newest murder mystery.

Just as Alex had gotten emerged in the story, a knock sounded, startling him. He blinked, reorienting himself, then said, “Come in!”

The door slid open and a man in a conductor’s uniform stepped in. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but a cabin in the Paris carriage just became available and my boss has off – ” Alex froze as he looked up at the man, and their eyes met. “Alex?” The way his name rolled of the conductor’s tongue catapulted Alex straight into his teenage years, and his heart soared and sank all at once.

“Michael?”

The silence stretched between them for a full minute, both of them staring, the echoes of years long past the only thing that made any noise. Finally, Michael blinked and cleared his throat, “As I was saying, my boss has offered you the empty cabin. Now I know why.” The bitterness in Michael’s voice made Alex feel like he’d been slapped in the face.

“Michael, I – ”

“If you’ll follow me. Sir.” Michael turned on his heels sharply and walked out, leaving Alex to struggle to his feet, pick up his trunk and drag it along with him to the next carriage. Michael’s silence was icy, leaving Alex feeling uncomfortable the entire trip. Michael stopped in front of a cabin roughly in the middle of the carriage, opening the door with a bang and standing aside. “Your cabin, Mr Manes.” Michael never looked at him once. “Courtesy of Master Sergeant Manes.” He turned to leave.

“Michael, wait.” Alex dropped his suitcase and grabbed Michael’s arm. Michael froze, but didn’t turn back. “I haven’t seen or talked to my father for two years.”

Michael scoffed. “I don’t care anymore, Alex. You enjoy your trip.”

Alex recoiled as if Michael had slapped him. Speechless and with a constricted throat, he watched Michael walk to the dining carriage and disappear. Feeling his eyes burn, he blinked rapidly and turned to enter his new cabin. He was stopped short when he heard an all-too-familiar voice. “Alex.”

Alex was once again catapulted into a past, but this time not a past he’d care to remember. He squared his shoulders, snapped all his walls in place and turned around. “Father.”

“Flint said there was a guest wanting to go to Paris on the Belgrade carriage. I did not realize it was you.” Master Sergeant – no, Compagnie director Manes looked as disapproving and strict as ever. Alex hated looking at his face more than anything else.

“Guess he wanted to spare you,” Alex said curtly. Then, as to not be discourteous, “Thank you for offering the cabin to me.”

Jesse Manes simply made a non-committal sound. “Are you still solving other people’s problems for them?”

“A private investigator, you mean?” His father had never approved of his career choice, but then again, he’d also been disappointed when Alex was medically discharged after only three years. “Yes, I am. I just helped solve a major case in Istanbul. Not that you’d be impressed, it didn’t involve actively trying to kill someone.” In the old days, a comment like that would’ve resulted in a vicious beating. But Alex was a grown man now, with several years of combat training under his belt, so all Jesse Manes could do was ball his fists and grit his teeth.

“Welcome aboard my train, Alexander.” Director Manes turned on his heel and left the carriage. The door next to his cabin opened, and the blonde woman from the platform stuck her head out the door.

“Is everything alright out here?” She had an American accent.

Alex managed a smile. “Of course, ma’am. I’m sorry if I disturbed you, I keep running into old friends.”

“A fellow American! A pleasure. My name is Isobel Bracken, and this here is my husband.” A dark-haired man wrapped an arm around her shoulder and she smiled at him with affection.

“Noah Bracken, a pleasure to meet you.”

“Manes. Alex Manes.” The two men shook hands. Alex felt an unexplainable shiver run up his spine, so fast that he might have imagined it, when he looked into Mr Bracken’s eyes. Alex couldn’t put his finger on the feeling, but he felt his guard raise slightly.

“The private detective?” Isobel straightened, an expression on her face Alex found difficult to read. “I read about the case you solved recently in Algiers. Unbelievable, how such a tiny detail can solve such a major case. Impressive!”

Alex smiled indulgently. He didn’t much care for the fame his work brought him, he enjoyed flying under the radar, and people recognizing his name would only make his work harder in the long run. “Thank you, Mrs Bracken. If you’ll excuse me, I was just relocated to this cabin and I’d like to unpack.”

Mr Bracken nodded and went back inside, but Isobel lingered a single moment longer, frowning. “I was told a Miss Cameron would be in the adjoining cabin.”

Alex shrugged, his mind already wandering. “I guess she never showed up. Good afternoon.” He went inside his cabin, unpacked properly this time and sat on his bed, staring out the window. Running into Michael on a train he never even planned on taking before earlier today had rattled him in a way he never expected.

It had been ten years since Alex had seen Michael. A lot had happened since then. He’d built up a new life for himself, a life that didn’t include Michael, and while it had hurt more than he could possibly say to make that choice, Alex thought he’d gotten over Michael.

Apparently not.

#malex ff #malex #malex fanfic #roswell new mexico #motoe au #my malex ff #my fanfic

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Jennifer Schaffer, The Wife Glitch, 51 The Baffler (April 2020)

Household tech makes women’s work profitable—for men

Five summers ago, I was invited to visit an eccentric acquaintance on a picturesque island off the East Coast. The island was divided into two parts: the shingled, sea-beaten summer homes of the inherited wealthy, and the year-round homes of the working people who serviced the island’s various amenities—the old-timey movie theater, the upscale restaurants, the twelve-dollars-a-beer bars.

The acquaintance and I had become friendly years prior in San Francisco, where I had been a student and he was, by his account, a high school drop-out tech millionaire. Let’s call him Matt. I’d found him funny, kind, and more down-to-earth than the archetype would suggest. Like many Silicon Valley guys, Matt’s small talk ran five sizes too large, from the purpose of fidelity in modern society to various bodily functions he was attempting to outsmart. But he always seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say in response. Our conversations often took on the appearance of a mutual interview: Matt, interviewing me as though for a job, unsubtly trying to determine how intelligent I was; me, interviewing him as though for a profile, shamelessly provoking and storing up his most memorable lines.

It didn’t seem out of character, then, when years later Matt reached out to ask me for help on a potential moonshot philanthropic venture related to artificial intelligence and education. I happily agreed, and a few weeks later, Matt invited me to join him at his summer house, graciously encouraging me to bring along my then-boyfriend. We booked tickets later that night.

When we arrived on the island, we rented exorbitantly expensive bikes and used Google Maps to find our way to Matt’s house. The weather seemed almost self-congratulatory with temperance: sunshine diffused through fast, bright clouds; heat offset by a steady sea breeze. The house itself was beautiful, stuck in time. It had belonged to Matt’s family for generations and was littered with trinkets that went back as far as the Civil War. The floor was made of long, splintered wooden planks, and the dusty windows looked out onto a semi-wild expanse of tall, bleached grass. The Atlantic was somewhere beyond the grass; you could hear it, but you couldn’t see it.

We stayed on the island for just a few days. Matt was almost constantly busy, glued to his laptop and his phone, occasionally running mysterious errands. It wasn’t until the last full day of our trip that he decided it was time to discuss the project. Hearing him talk about the potential of artificial intelligence was like reading the script to an action movie: the possibilities were exhilarating and the vision ambitious, but it was hard to believe it’d all get made. Still, I offered my perspective in earnest, and Matt listened closely before suggesting we go for a walk on the beach. We set out, climbing a set of steep, sandy paths before arriving in front of a calm sea. Waves broke, metronomic, between two panels of rich blue. Matt began to tell me, with flat-line sincerity, about how he felt it was reasonable to assume that we were living in a simulation.

I had heard this idea before, always from men for whom life looked pretty great: wealthy men, white men, intelligent men, respected men. Here was yet another. What was it about the idea that this all might be a game, someone else’s game, that struck such a chord among those who were by all accounts winning?

I thought back to another conversation we’d had in the kitchen, two nights prior. Matt had been describing his approach to dating—a topic which he’d clearly given a great deal of thought, studying the criteria that the various four-letter billionaire tech moguls (Elon, Mark, Jeff, Bill) had used when selecting a “mate.”

“I don’t want to be with someone who has my skill set,” Matt began, “I want to be with someone who has strengths in another area, who can fill in my blind spots.” He went on to describe a woman he was seeing, who he was flying out first-class the day we left. He liked, for instance, that she was good at reading people, that she was perceptive and sensitive to things like art and literature, that she was knowledgeable about cooking and food culture, that she understood his world but was not exactly of it and so could objectively add something to his field of vision. I found this odd but charming: better than the engineers I knew in college who thought it was “dating down” to be with a humanities major. Unlike them, Matt spoke eloquently about how selecting a partner was among the most pivotal choices a person made in life.

“So if we’re in a simulation,” I said, snapping back to the moment, the beach, Matt’s expectant look. “How would partnerships work?”

Matt grinned. “That would depend.”

“On what?”

“On who controlled the simulation.”

Happy Wife, Happy Life

Look: he wanted a wife. Don’t we all? Someone to think ahead about our needs; someone to make our homes and our lives orderly; someone to tend to our emotions when they’re raw and sore. Someone to track and manage the infinite details of living; someone to be responsible for our moods; someone to balance the books. We all want someone who knows us so intimately they can predict what we’ll want; someone who picks up our loose ends without complaint; someone who fills in our weaknesses with her strength; someone who does what it takes to help us succeed. Someone who attends to our desires eagerly, with a smile. Someone who means it.

But, you know, we’re progressive. We want a wife, but we want her to be happy. More than happy, we want her to be fulfilled. We want a true wife, a born wife, a wife who would feel imprisoned by any other role, so that to be our wife is in its own way a golden opportunity, a liberation. We want a wife who wears her responsibilities like a privilege.

And who could blame us! Regardless of gender expression or sexual orientation—everyone needs a wife. There isn’t enough time in the day to fulfill the demands placed on a modern human: to be available to work throughout all our waking hours; to show determination and ambition so that we are not made redundant; to service debts and taxes and run a cost-effective household; to source and consume healthful meals three times a day; to exercise our bodies the recommended amount; to maintain mental well-being amidst chaos; to care for dependents (aging parents, young children); to be present and attentive to those we interact with; to find, build, maintain, and perpetually assess the longevity of meaningful and fulfilling partnerships; to get eight hours of quality sleep. Literally: how does one do it?

For most of Western history, the answer was: the wife. Now what?

An App of One’s Own

The new answer, for those with a little disposable income, may seem obvious. Food, laundry, health, money management, well-being? There’s an app for that, honey. By which we mean: there’s underpaid labor, and a massive tech conglomerate ready to profit off that, honey! Seamless your dinner, Cleanly your laundry, Babylon your doctor’s visits, Wealthfront your savings, Headspace your sleep. Such services are either entirely automated or rely on poorly compensated human workers as a stopgap. The end goal is the same: to take work which, for most of history, has been uncompensated and drive the price of it up as high as possible to the benefit of a minute number of venture capitalists, company directors, and shareholders.

There’s an app for that, honey. By which we mean: there’s underpaid labor, and a massive tech conglomerate ready to profit off that, honey!

Of course, those with more substantial disposable income can still cut out the digital middle man and hire underpaid labor directly into their home, or proceed directly to what I like to call “artisanal wife” mode: choosing a partner with a wide set of skills who will focus their energies on servicing your various needs, without the economic imperative to pursue paid labor themselves. And then there is the highest echelon of earning power: the bunker-deep pockets of the billionaire class that reaps the profits of the underpaid workers, holding the entire sick, inverted pyramid of wealth on their shoulders like a packed delivery cooler. For those at the top, it’s always been the “lady of the manor” approach: a wife who manages an entire fleet of, you guessed it, underpaid labor. Judging by the number of extraordinarily ambitious and competent women in my graduating class whose aspirations have been funneled into marriages to hedge fund scions, the “ladies of the manor” remain in high demand.

For those without any disposable income at all—a rapidly-growing demographic made perpetually larger by tech-accelerated inequality, because irony isn’t part of Silicon Valley’s vocabulary— there are virtually no options. Most working-class women have no choice but to work one job or several—often in the precise, underpaid sectors being automated by technology—alongside providing caregiving labor at home. The direct and knock-on consequences of this second (or third, or fourth) shift labor are borne out in the growing chasm between the life expectancy of the rich and the poor. Meanwhile, the privileged middle remains perpetually marketed to by apps and products designed to give the illusion of technology-supported self-sufficiency, masking the interdependent web of individuals and stakeholders which make up any given household service.

Picture it: a bearded dad stands alone in the kitchen making a stir-fry. “Eloise?” he calls up to the ceiling, “Dinner in five.” His voice is loud but calm, pleasant. The kitchen is lit with clean blue LED lights. Four bright yellow lemons sit in a clear glass bowl, next to a full, meticulously balanced ceramic fruit platter. The only sign that there is cooking taking place is the cutting board in front of him, topped with a mound of chopped neon bell peppers. An open bottle of craft beer is placed on the center of the kitchen island; Dad wears a casual chambray button-down shirt. This is all very relaxed, the tableau suggests, but also pristine; homely, but perfect. Dad is easy-going, dinner is effortless. Eloise arrives promptly and slides into a seat at the kitchen island, where Dad serves up a nutritionally void but photogenic bowl of stir-fried cabbage. “Enjoying that?” He asks, self-satisfied, as he watches her eat. Eloise raises her eyebrows and nods. “Mum will be pleased!” Dad exclaims, and gently asks Alexa—the female voice that lives inside a smart speaker on the kitchen counter—to add stir-fry vegetables to his shopping list. She does so dutifully. Dad and Eloise retire to the sofa, where they eat ice cream together and Alexa plays a Philip Pullman audiobook.

Mum will be pleased! Or, as the identical German ad, in which the bearded British dad is simply swapped out for a slightly younger-looking bearded German dad, puts it, Mama wird sich freuen! The subtext is clear: Mother isn’t here, Mother is “leaning in.” But we—a progressive, modern family, assisted by an unobtrusive yet highly skilled and patently stylish, artificially intelligent smart speaker—are thriving.

Who Cares?

We are fast approaching the social breaking point of a historical movement in capitalism that has simultaneously brought our waged life into our private life (what’s a private life?) and the tasks of the domestic into the commodified world. In the nineteenth century, as industrial capitalism boomed, the state shunned responsibility for care work, cementing it firmly in the private sphere—giving rise to a particular kind of Victorian, feminine responsibility in the home. The twentieth century saw the rise of a “family wage” for the working class; families were expected to survive on the husband’s work alone, further ensnaring women in unpaid care roles. Pre-sexual revolution, the labor of the twentieth- century wife served as a critical support structure for the male worker. Though he was waged and she was not, the family finances depended on their combined work in clear and distinct gender roles.

During the manufacturing decline of the 1970s, as wages began to plummet for working-class men, capitalism Trojan-horsed its way into feminist liberation, warping a necessary social cause—freeing women to pursue aims outside of housework—to suit capital: freedom means working for capitalists! The result has been the normalization and subsequent necessitation of the two-wage household. Across the industrialized world, the cost of living has soared while wages have stagnated, to the point where what could once be afforded on one salary can barely be afforded on two. At the same time, right-wing commentariats lambast the low birth-rate and the death of family values, framing feminism as the root of all evil, carefully eschewing the reality that liberal and conservative governments alike have chosen the enrichment of a few over the social reproduction of the many.

Without federal assistance in the form of publicly funded childcare for all, wage protections for workers, or a universal basic income—to name but a few of the creative opportunities at hand—the individual becomes increasingly reliant on her employer. It is no coincidence that technology companies, particularly keen to co-opt and commodify historically feminized care work, offer the most pointed range of reproduction-related benefits for their employees: egg freezing and paid parental leave abound, though often not childcare.

The end result is that we now all have at least three jobs, three modes of survival to tend to: our financial survival, the survival of our communities, and the survival of our family units. The state has long shirked its responsibilities in each sphere; now, the wide, slobbering maw of the tech industry waits, ready to commodify whatever it can.

Rage Against the Machines

Perhaps you can sense the despair in my tone. Certainly, when I have broached this topic with men, the most common response has been: But come on, isn’t that better than before?

“Before” being the presumption of a wife’s place in the home as “natural” and “right,” unpaid and largely unseen? The electroshock therapy that presumption necessitated when housework drove a generation of wives clinically mad? Legal rape? Or should we go a touch further back to “wife as property”?

Is today a better state than those “befores”? Yes, of course it is, though a lobotomy might be too.

To pay wages for housework would require a wholesale transformation of the economy, revealing at the core of capitalism a fundamental reliance on the unpaid labor of women.

What troubles me, what keeps me turning the matter over and over in my head, is this: for centuries, women asked for recognition of the value of “women’s work”—which is to say, the practical labor that makes the world go round and has historically been placed on the shoulders of wives and mothers and daughters without question. Many simply asked that the work be recognized as just that: work—not a calling, not a natural state, not a pure act of love. Others asked that men take on their share of domestic labor, and in so doing, free women to pursue other, potentially more fulfilling or stimulating forms of work—and leisure. And through the Wages for Housework movement led by Silvia Federici, women even asked that that value of their work be recognized in capital’s primary currency: a wage. This demand was more radical provocation than concrete policy proposal, one which attempted to speak the language of capitalism in order to undermine it. To pay wages for housework would require a wholesale transformation of the economy, revealing at the core of capitalism a fundamental reliance on the unpaid labor of women.

How strange and predictable it is, then, that wages for housework have, at last, become widespread—but in the form of our subscription to digital services and gig economy labor. This work has become concretely valuable at the precise moment its value can be effectively captured by a small cadre of men sitting at the top of the tech industry.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It is no coincidence that the first artificial intelligence boom began around the same time as the sexual revolution; no coincidence that the history of women in computing has been roundly overwritten by the myth of male coding genius; no coincidence that the voice coming out of your smart device is almost always a woman’s. Stemming from a fundamental arrogance on the part of men—the idea that work historically performed by women is so straightforward, so mindless even, that it can be effectively programmed— the latter part of the twentieth century saw a rise in technologies aimed at making traditional women’s work faster, simpler, or redundant.

Robot mistresses, digital nurses, smartphone secretaries, algorithmic wives, and app-based mommies: huge swathes of the modern tech boom are a reaction against women’s partial liberation from housework and our increasing resistance to performing unpaid and undervalued emotional and sexual labor. When small-minded men are terrified of losing something, they belittle it; they puff their chests out and stomp their feet and declare they do not need it at all, that they have something better at hand anyway. And the rise of personified technologies in particular is a mass response from a male-dominated industry to the revelations of the twentieth century: the sexual revolution and women’s movement that upended traditional gender roles, and the economic pressures requiring women to seek employment outside of the home. The first wave of at-home artificial intelligence—embodied by Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and the nameless personality living inside the Google Home—was designed to replace or supplement roles historically filled by women: mothers, wives, mistresses, secretaries, nannies, even sex workers.

Of course, in addition to being historically female, these roles are almost always underpaid or undervalued. As philosopher Helen Hester notes, the same tasks Alexa and Cortana perform for a premium are not just ill-remunerated but often resented and mocked when performed by human women. A smart device’s insistence on helping is clever and valuable; a wife’s insistence on helping is taken for granted or viewed as frivolous nagging. It’s no surprise many women no longer want to take on the roles they’ve been programmed to perform, or that still more of us simply cannot afford to, regardless of what we desire. The system is malfunctioning; we’ve gone off script. Tech, looking for a fix to the glitch, has found it at the intersection of cheap labor, algorithms, and automation, which in concert perform thankless female labor (with no bitching or aging) for an upfront cost, to the enormous financial benefit of the overwhelmingly male industry leaders and stockholders.

Much of the writing about the sexism latent in the tech industry, and the development of artificial intelligence in particular, has focused in on three concerning realities: the dramatic underrepresentation of women at virtually every level of the industry (and the self-perpetuating, demi-god-in-a-sweat-drenched-hoodie culture that serves as both the primary cause and effect of this lack of gender diversity); the gender bias being coded into tomorrow’s (and today’s and yesterday’s) algorithms by virtue of this lack of diversity; and the portrayal of many personified tech products as servile and female, chief among them Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home which, if not real AI, still stand as most Americans’ first experience with something even remotely close.

What concerns me as much as these developments is the broader picture of which they form only a part: a world in which the exact forms of labor women have fought to have recognized and remunerated—chief among them caretaking labor, tedious household labor, buoying-the-male-ego labor, service-with-a-smile labor—are being co-opted, monetized, and sold back to us as shiny, premium, cutting-edge tech, the intermediary step of individual households outsourcing such tasks to workers primarily from the Global South having been insufficiently profitable for the Silicon Valley brain trust. As automation rises, technology will increasingly undercut the wages of these workers; the human workers who depend on these precarious gigs are viewed by the tech industry and the broader economy as a temporary inefficiency.

This is the dark ethos of the twenty-first century: most of us are performing labor that can and will be at least partially automated. We work, and as we work, we audition for the right to continue working. There is no room at the negotiation table; any unpaid work will remain unpaid until, in due course, we will pay to have that work done for us by automation. And like that, the mainstays of human life become premium services we pay for. Like that, the value only flows up.

The Future is Fembots

Pop culture and advertising have reacted in lockstep with the rise of household technologies. Disney’s Smart House, released in 1999, showed an overworked female computer scientist developing the perfect AI “smart home” to liberate women from housework, only for the “smart home” to become increasingly unwieldy and possessive—hormonal even—after a motherless teenage boy tinkers with the code to make the artificial intelligence behave more maternally. The happy ending comes when the scientist reprograms the smart home and settles down with a nice man.

More recently, Her and Ex Machina played into the heterosexual male’s neuroses that feminine affection is, in a sense, always a ruse and as replicable as code. The British television series Humans shows male and female bots—designed to perform care labor in family households and the homes of the elderly—driven to rebellion over a desire for recognition. Many early advertising campaigns for Google Home and Alexa, like the one described above, portrayed modern men aptly assisted by gentle, obedient, disembodied women. Such visions of techno-capitalist feminism abound: women empowered by technologies that free them from the unsavory realities of pregnancy or household labor or sex; men taking on new, progressive roles as a result of their obedient female-voiced assistants.

It has been quite some time since we’ve seen a direct cultural portrayal of feminized tech that has any real teeth. But if we look back to a time before Lean In feminism, there have been more honest attempts. Much of Bryan Forbes’s 1975 horror film The Stepford Wives feels oddly familiar, even millennial in its sensibility, from its pared-back interior design, its fetishization of upstate domestic life, and its portrayal of a certain type of liberal man who—while paying lip service to progressive ideas—yearns for a wife who will let him call the shots. Based on the 1972 novel by Ira Levin, the film follows Joanna Eberhart as she moves from New York City to Stepford, Connecticut, with her husband Walter and their two children. Walter quickly joins the local Men’s Association, where former technology and entertainment moguls relax with scotch and cigars. The women of Stepford, meanwhile, are uniformly beautiful and obedient, spending their days ironing sheets, watching children, and preparing casseroles: a hybrid of tradwives, Instagram influencers, and spam bots. Their husbands adore them.

Joanna, an aspiring photographer, felt coerced into moving to Stepford, but she tries to put on a game face. Hoping that her new suburban lifestyle will offer her the chance to focus more on her art, she is understandably creeped out by the passivity of the Stepford wives and her husband’s secretive involvement in the Men’s Association. She soon forms an alliance with the two other women in town not yet obsessed with housework: Bobby, an outspoken New York feminist, and Charmaine, a tennis-playing trophy wife. Together, they attempt to start a women’s group. But when they gather the women of Stepford together, the wives fall into discussing a litany of household tips: advice on starching their husbands’ collars, brand name suggestions, and vague musings on their domestic contentedness.

In the end, it becomes apparent that these beloved wives are robots, modeled on the human wives of Men’s Association members, who are summarily murdered once their robot replacements are ready. (The seventies were not known for their subtlety.) Unlike in the camp, feel-good 2004 remake, love and corporate feminism do not save the day. On the advice of a psychiatrist, Joanna tries to escape, but ends up strangled to death by her robot replacement.

The messaging is a little too obvious to be worth digging into at length: housework deadens a part of a woman, and men are desperate for control. What really stuck with me about The Stepford Wives is the way the men watch the women, both the human Joanna and their robot wives. In one scene, a Men’s Association member draws Joanna with incredible skill, making sketches of her face and her eyes. In another, a man records her voice, allegedly for a hobby project; preying on her kindness, he claims that his childhood stutter has made him fascinated with language and accents. The men look at Joanna with admiration and desire: she is beautiful, spirited, and kind. There’s lust, but it’s not quite sexual. It’s as though they genuinely want to understand the way she works, if only so that they can reconstruct her according to their own desires and ideals. It’s the same way they look at their own wives, always with a knowing confidence in their eyes.

I wonder, sometimes, if this is what it all comes down to. Perhaps our moment is just catering to a particular kind of man, the kind who longs to look at those who serve him, without ever feeling the unsettling tug of need. Who desires nothing more than to look at a woman—real or simulated, no matter—and think: I made you.

#technology #women #feminism #objectification #women's work #housework #interpersonal relationships #the stepford wives #analogy #tech industry #automatization #commodification #women's labor #labor

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toongrrl-blog · 5 years

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Part One of Barb Series: Why Barb Died (Character Device Talk)

*Please watch the Betty Draper Francis video first, for extra credit, check out the channel’s vid on Jack Dawson and come with knowledge of Beth March*

Happy end of the 2010s! Before I discuss what Barb could have brought to the Party in Stranger Things I need to discuss how as a character she needed to die.

1. Beth March

In one scene in Little Women, the girls and Laurie discuss their ambitions for adult life. Oldest sister Meg wants to marry and have kids, oldest middle sis Jo wants to become a known and successful writer, youngest sister Amy wants to become rich and famous as an artist and maybe a socialite, and middle child Beth wants things to stay the way they are for her, with her loving family at her side. What’s wrong with this? What the other three sisters have in common is that they are hoping for adult lives which include a lot of change, responsibility, independence (either as a career woman or running a household with little kids underfoot), new experiences, and even new people in their lives (Meg would need to meet a guy to marry and have kids with him, Jo would need to meet people in her professional life, Amy would entertain guests and appeal to patrons). Shy Beth is a talented pianist, vet, and doll collector and is very charitable but she doesn’t seem to want to take the risks it would take to grow as a person and thrive and mature or be noticed for her own merits aside from “Angel of the House” and the future looks pretty hostile; so by the end of the novel, Beth has died in her early 20s while sisters lives have changed (Meg married and had children in a cottage while gaining confidence as a homemaker, wife, and mom; Jo sells her writing and meets a professor who wants to start a school where she becomes headmistress after they marry; Amy goes on a Grand Tour of Europe and marries wealthy and happy).

The series Stranger Things, on a whole, is a coming-of-age series that borrows from the John Hughes and Steven Spielberg films of that era that captured the joys and pains of growing up, while Joyce’s and Hop’s storylines borrow from conspiracy thrillers around that era and somewhat from Hitchcock films. All these films captured ordinary people undergoing extraordinary (E.T., North By Northwest, The Goonies, The Stepford Wives) and life altering events (Jaws, The Breakfast Club, Silkwood) that force them to encounter challenges and make decisions they wouldn’t normally make in their mundane lives. Joyce ends up facing a monster with an axe and even makes demands of people who could wipe her off the Earth, the boys have to ride their bikes to evade murderous men in vans and hide a young traumatized girl, Nancy has to learn to create and use deadly weapons and use her skills of sneaking out for something besides sex, Jonathon has to cut his and another girl’s hand to lure a monster to their trap, Hop sneaks into a morgue just to slit a dead boy’s corpse and find cotton stuffing, Will has to use what knowledge and skills he has to survive another world filled with creatures out to kill him, most of the kids throughout the series have to lie and break laws to save their town.

While the official guide does list Barb as being a varsity softball player and a mathlete and Shannon Purser concurs that Barb would have been the Velma of the group if she lived, there is one big thing that separates the Velmas from the Barbs and Beth’s of the world: Velma takes risks, she would trespass private looking property and dilapidated buildings to solve a mystery. Barb is a loyal friend and honest and studious and smart, but she’s ultimately the good girl archetype: cautious, obedient to her elders, predictable, conservatively and femininely dressed, chaste. An archetype that Nancy is trying to flee (not that the alternative of being a girl who sneaks out with her boyfriend to makeout is going to help Nancy at all) to avoid ending up like her mother. Barb has the fangs (talent and means) to be a Party member, she just lacks the nerve to jump and sink those fangs.

2. Commentary on the Patriarchy and the Tyranny of Beauty Standards

Most of the female characters in the series don’t fit the strict criteria of their Reagan era Indiana small town regarding what makes a good woman. Joyce is a single mother who doesn’t come with well-coiffed hair and she appears to be hysterical and is a working mother in a time and place where all these factors would label her a “bad mother”, Nancy is a frank young woman who takes risks and even asserts her sexuality and herself when plenty of people (like the shitheads at Hawkins Post) would prefer her to be a delicate virgin in pastels, El is physically stronger than the boys with her powers and she is very direct in her manner despite her soft-spoken demeanor, Max is a girl who is interested in arcade video games and skateboarding and brightly colored summer clothing and reads her Mom’s Cosmo cover to cover and is assertive, Erica is an assertive young girl who can talk truth (and shade) to adults and has a knowledge of My Little Pony and Cold War Politics, Robin is snarky and has a style that makes her stand out from most girls in Hawkins and is a teen genius, Kali’s rage and Joan Jett-esque appearance would make the preppy and pastel and autumnal tone wearing residents of Hawkins in Cardiac Care, Suzie has defied notions about girls in science and math and even the Mormon beliefs of her parents by french kissing and dating a non-Mormon boy like Dustin, and Karen despite her appearance of hot housewife perfection is dissatisfied with her marriage and comes close to cheating on her husband.

In contrast Barb is pretty much the most conventional character: she dresses conservatively in ruffles and pink, she is seemingly chaste, follows the rules diligently and worries about getting punished by the Holland and Wheeler parents, and has a more common body type found in cis-gender women (correct me if I’m wrong, hopefully I don’t offend trans pear shaped women) and not often found in the older members of the female cast. But despite Barb’s body being common among women in general and specific to her region (the American Midwest is noted for starchy and creamy and fried foods and is historically farming country, where pioneers would find her strong for work in and out of the log cabin and give birth to the necessary amount of children i.e. extra hands for work), the delicate and slender builds of Joyce and Nancy, the classic proportionate and slender grace of Robin, and the leggy and toned image of Karen are closer to the female standard of beauty in the 1980s. In Barb’s lifetime (1967-1983), the image of beauty was dominated by leggy, toned, slim, busty women or lean women with minimal breasts: no room for tall, broad, pear shapes like herself. And in 1983, Molly Ringwald wasn’t yet a household name that freckled redheads with dry wit and atypical images could look on with pride. Hell I remember reading a copy of Color Me Beautiful where they recommend that women with heavy hips and small waists (similar features of Christina Hendricks and Shannon Purser) shouldn’t cinch their waistlines, the celebration of Marilyn Monroe pinups with round hips, pillowy thighs and tummies, rounded tushes were long gone by then. Basically Barb being her natural self, was not seen as “feminine enough” and combined with her glasses and style (any plus sized or early developing gal can tell you that it is hell to find junior styles that suit your body size and shape) have ruled her as “uncool”.

There is also that Barb does a lot of things that the boys do: being slightly geeky, a loyal friend, has innocent and wholesome interests, chaste, and is quiet (like Will) but she still gets killed. One can sense that #JusticeForBarb came out of an anger with misogyny in media and society that tells women to be a certain way and punishes them whether they fit a mold or not. Women are still underpaid in the workplace, underrepresented in government, still deal with unequal and toxic relationships, are shamed for being virgins or for having sexual experience (Carol pokes fun at the idea of Barb finding the sex sounds too much and yet contributes to the slut shaming graffiti of Nancy), are told on one hand to look a certain way to attract the male gaze and shamed when they indulge in sexual desire (something Nancy can attest to with her glamorous mother who offers to lend her black heels and focuses on Nancy’s beauty before a funeral, the same mom who was angry her daughter had sex), they are either too fat/skinny/busty/flat/frizzy/straight haired/pale/slutty/prudish/dark/feminine/masculine/full-butt-ed/quiet/loud/naive/cynical/smart/dumb/angry/happy, and they deal with a media that sells a very narrow standard of beauty to the point that when they see a drop dead gorgeous actress or model with similar features they feel seen.

Oh Bondage, Up Yours!

*Read this is not a “Barb is a slut shamer!” piece yes that was shitty but she was a teen girl in a small 1980s town and she ISN’T starting a (paraphrasing Kimberly Nicole Foster quote) “no whores allowed campaign” OR trying to pass a law that demands women keep their ectopic pregnancies to full term*

3. End of Innocence

When Barb died, it marked the end of Nancy’s childhood and her needing to grow up. That was the night Nancy went straight from childhood (Barb), teenager (sex with Steve), and then shortly became an adult when she realized that Barb had disappeared. For many women (like myself at ages 9 and 10), the moment they get their period or grow breasts or reach a certain age, marks a dramatic end of their childhood. Suddenly many are told to police their behavior and language around boys, even policing the food they eat or their bodies. There is also extra responsibility and stress, demogorgans being one of them. Nancy is now having to deal with the sorts of issues that adult women dealt with on Mad Men along with scary monsters threatening her town and the fact her parents are not as happy as they look to the world, there is a gap between the experiences of her and Mike, she has a baby sister who probably was conceived to save the marriage, and Nancy can’t confide or trust either of her parents (who are absorbed with their own issues). Now Nancy is making big decisions that Barb, with the sheltering and seemingly close parents, will likely never deal with. Nancy is even taking fashion risks with clothes that are more functional, stylish, show off her figure, and can even withstand flayer blood and exorcising her boyfriend’s little brother.

4. A Huge Threat

Barb was intended to be a character that we connected with, someone to be built up somehow. There was a character like this in a movie: her name was Marion Crane. She was a secretary who has been supporting herself and her little sis since their parents died, patiently waiting for her boyfriend to make more money at his job so they can marry and stop sneaking around sleeping with one another, in desperation she steals a lot of money from her workplace, drives to California where she meets a mild-mannered but strange young man who manages a distant motel in the vicinity of a Victorian house where an older woman is croaking about promiscuity, after talking with him over a dinner of sandwiches in his taxidermy themed office, she goes to take a shower and has decided to return to Phoenix to return the money, then a strange figure comes with a large butcher knife in horribly out of date clothes and starts stabbing her to death.

This was from the Hitchcock film Psycho, the forerunner of the slasher genre that dominated the earlier half of the 1980s, and it premiered to shocked audiences in 1960. The meaning of the grisly murder of Marion, a character the audience was following from the beginning of the film, was that Norman Bates was a huge threat and intensified the need for Marion’s killer to be brought to justice.

The same thing can be said about the deaths of Benny and Barb, to show how much a threat the demogorgan and Hawkins National Lab were to the townspeople of Hawkins (and the world as a whole), basically such big threats that a little boy can be kidnapped from the safety of his home, a young teenage girl could be snatched up and killed from a suburban swimming pool, and a kindly cook and owner of a local diner would be executed for knowing about a runaway child.

5. The future of Women in Stranger Things

Not all is lost, Barb’s death forced the Duffer Bros to take a look at how women were written and treated in their series, and even helped spurred tv viewers (who ordinarily wouldn’t pay attention to social issues) to take a deeper look and interest in how people especially women are treated. For some reason I like to think: Max, Robin, Erica, and Suzie are a way of recognizing Barb’s potential within the series and even what viewers saw.

Now stay tuned to where I figure out how Barb could have been beneficial to the party.

#barb holland #justice for barb #StrangerThings #womeninmedia #beth march #betty draper #1980s women #messy #Not A Space For Character Bashing #Role of Women

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fallforcs · 6 years

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Hayrides, Fate, and Fortune Cookies

Art by @imagnifika

Author: @searchingwardrobes

Hayrides, Fate, and Fortune Cookies

Summary: “Wow, you’re hot, but I’m pretty sure that’s your wife.” + “You are incredibly hot, and I keep falling in your lap on this hayride. I swear I’m not doing it on purpose. Wow, this is awkward!”

Rating: G for fall fluff. Like the fanfic equivalent of hot chocolate with whipped cream and cinnamon.

Trigger warnings: None unless you count the possibility of getting a toothache from the fluff :)

A huge thank you to my beta, @looselipswontsinkships . She was swamped with school, yet still managed to look this story over and catch my silly mistakes. Also a shout out to my artist. I had this idea in my head of a beautiful fall aesthetic for my story (which I could never make myself), and look what I got! It’s not only gorgeous but exactly what I was hoping for.

I absolutely adore fall, so I hope you all enjoy this little Captain Swan autumn one shot …

When she woke up that morning, Emma Swan would have never believed that the day would start with a hayride and end with fortune cookies. Of course, she had promised three year old Henry that she would take him to the pumpkin patch in the little coastal town of Storybrooke, Main. The one that all the mom blogs in Portland rated the best pumpkin patch in the area. Peter’s Pumpkins and Pies. In Storybrooke . Ah, she got it. Cute and clever. Or something.

There was so little that she, as an overworked, underpaid single mother, could give to her tiny son. She could at least give him this. She could take pictures of Henry in his cute fall jacket amidst the bright orange pumpkins and post them on Instagram, just like all the other moms.

But then she had awakened to a cold drizzle outside the window and a leaden gray sky. She gently told Henry the weather was just too nasty for the pumpkin patch. Then Henry had dissolved into a puddle of tears on the kitchen floor. Now, Emma wasn’t one of those moms who was ruled by some kind of toddler tyrant. But the thing was, Henry wasn’t that kind of kid. Sure, he had colic the first four months of his life, but it was as if he’d spent all his tears in that brief space of time (though it hadn’t felt brief when she was in the middle of it.) But now Henry was a complacent, easy to please child. His tears that morning were more of the “my little heart is breaking” variety rather than the “I’m going to scream until I get my way” variety.

Emma’s heart broke a little bit too. She was supposed to feel like she didn’t suck at this mom thing for once. So she bundled Henry up in his waterproof jacket with the flannel lining and put his Spiderman boots on his little feet, and prayed the rain would taper off during the 45 minute drive.

For once, Emma’s prayers to anyone up there who would listen were actually answered because by the time she parked in the open field next to Peter’s Pumpkins and Pies, the rain had stopped. However, their feet still made loud squelching sounds as they walked across the soaked grass, and Emma was glad for the rain boots they both wore. The sky was still gray, and the wind that lashed their faces still held a hint of dampness. It also brought the smell of wet, dirty fur downwind from the petting zoo. Not the most pleasant aroma. Emma would have to make sure Henry didn’t notice the barnyard where they kept the animals. The last things she wanted to do was wade through the mud to pet wet, smelly sheep and goats.

“Two please,” Emma said when she reached the ticket booth.

“That’ll be twenty-four dollars,” the plump, cheery woman behind the counter told her.

Emma’s eyebrows rose to her hairline. “Tw-twenty f-four dollars?” she stuttered incredulously.

“That’s right, tickets are twelve dollars a person,” the woman explained, her smile not wavering in the least at Emma’s reaction.

“But, he’s only three,” Emma said, gesturing down to Henry, “does he get in free?”

The woman peered at Henry over the edge of the booth and shrugged apologetically at Emma. “Only guests two and under are free.”

Emma let out a long breath. “A child’s ticket?” she asked hopefully.

“That is the child’s price,” the woman clarified, pointing to a bright sign decorated in fall leaves that announced: Adult Admission at Child’s Price! This weekend only! “Adult tickets are normally sixteen dollars.”

Emma bit her lip as she fished the money out of her pocket. She had promised Henry, but there went pizza for tonight. She guessed it was bologna sandwiches again.

The good thing about the rain was that the crowd was thin. Emma figured that the weather was a blessing in disguise since the weekend’s special deal usually made it a crowded one. Emma was also relieved to see that the petting zoo was down the hill and out of sight of her enthusiastic three year old. Henry was bouncing up and down and swinging their joined hands back and forth.

“What do you want to do first, Henry?” Emma asked, the sight of her son’s joy causing everything else - the weather, the mud, the smells, and the expensive cost of admission - to be pushed far from her mind. “There’s a corn maze, a story barn, a hay ride … oooh, look you can paint your own little pumpkin!”

Emma was relieved to see that everything, including the mini pumpkins to paint, were included in the price of admission. The only thing they would have to pay for was a large pumpkin to take home and carve and maybe a pie. (Okay, she was definitely getting a pie. If pizza was out, she was at least getting a dessert out of all this.)

The next hay ride wasn’t for another fifteen minutes, so they decided to go the story barn where an enthusiastic teenager in overalls and braids was getting ready to read a picture book to the children gathering around on huge logs. Emma grimaced when they took a seat; the logs had apparently soaked up all the rain. Henry scrambled up to stand on top of the log so he could see better over the gathering crowd.

“Henry care-“ the words had barely left Emma’s mouth when Henry’s left Spiderman boot slid out from under him. He pitched backwards, arms pinwheeling in empty air. Emma reached out to grab him, but another set of hands caught him first. “Oh my God, thank you! I –“

Emma’s words failed her then as she looked up into an unfairly attractive face. The man had lustrous dark hair, a finely chiseled jaw covered in delicious looking scruff, and the brightest blue eyes she had ever seen. The eyes were what left her speechless. Then he smiled. A charming, somewhat rakish smile, and then Emma felt herself go hot. She blinked, trying to rouse herself from this stupor. She never let men affect her this way. Ever.

“Be careful there, lad,” he chuckled as he swung Henry up.

He had a British accent, too. Great. If he wasn’t a solid ten before, he sure was now. And he was fit too she could now see as he deposited Henry gently back onto the log (in a seated position this time). His tight jeans, black leather jacket, and gray t-shirt beneath put his toned physique on clear display. The v-neck of the shirt also showed off dark chest hair that made Emma’s throat go dry. He winked at her as he took his seat again on the log behind them.

“Swing me up too!” the little girl next to him squealed. She was an adorable thing with big blonde curls and huge blue eyes that were the same shade as Henry’s rescuer. The man caved immediately to the little girl’s request, and she giggled in delight as he scooped her up and swooped her around in an arc.

“Put her down, Killian!” a woman admonished, though her words had little heat. “The show’s about to start, and you’re blocking everyone’s view!”

The man – Killian, apparently – obeyed the woman’s request immediately, settling the little girl on his knee. It was then that Emma noticed the wedding band glinting in the sun on his left hand. Emma’s heart immediately sank. Sure enough, the woman beside him also had a wedding band with a sparkling diamond solitaire nestled above it. Emma wondered how those rings could sparkle so much on a cloudy day. They must be mocking her.

Emma turned away, putting her arm around Henry to pull him closer as story time began. It was about a misfit pumpkin who was square instead of round, though Emma had a hard time following the plot. She was far too aware of the handsome stranger behind her, and she had to force herself not to glance behind her. He’s with his wife she kept admonishing herself.

The enthusiastic storyteller had Henry giggling in all the right places. She finished up the story with a bow, informing everyone that another hayride was about to leave from the wooden gate directly behind them. It was insane how fast the mob headed in that direction, and Emma held tight to Henry’s hand. They were jostled by overeager children and parents who acted as if this were a ride at Disneyland instead of a flatbed piled with hay. A large man with an ample midsection shoved Emma from behind, propelling her right into … married hottie.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, her face burning with embarrassment. To make matters worse, her next step sent her sliding through a slick patch of mud, and the stranger had to grasp her by both arms to keep her from falling.

“No harm, love,” he assured as he helped her find her footing again.

“Mommy, hu-wee!” Henry piped up, yanking on her hand.

She shook her head to clear it and saw that the hayride was almost full. She mumbled a thank you to the blue-eyed Brit and hurried after her son. The man’s wife and daughter were already climbing the steps into the hay bed, and he hurried past Emma to assist them. Emma took the opportunity to really look at the woman. She moved with elegance, even when taking her husband’s hand to climb aboard the flatbed. Her light blonde hair was in a fishtail braid that rested over her shoulder. She smiled at the little girl as her husband swung the child up, tickling her as she settled into her mother’s lap. It was a picture of domestic bliss framed with the wooden fence and the trees above covered in red and orange leaves like the covers of those parenting magazines that littered the waiting room at the health department. But she could at least scoff at those, knowing they were fake families made of perfect models. This scene was like salt rubbed right where it would hurt most.

Emma brushed off the melancholy thoughts as she helped Henry up into the hay. She had never been so keenly aware of how scuffed his boots were, how faded his little thrift store jacket. Did everyone on this hayride look at the two of them and feel pity? Or worse, judgment? Emma bit her lip, wondering why the handsome man and his picture perfect family were bothering her so much. She grasped the sides of the flatbed and pulled herself up. She and Henry were the last two on, and the hay was packed with people. Emma hesitated, glancing around for an open spot. Impatient, Henry began to whine and cling to her leg. His weight, combined with the uneven bed of hay and the slight tilt of the vehicle on the rutted trail, sent Emma pitching sideways. She fell into another person, both of them grunting with the impact. Emma braced herself against a strong pair of shoulders and looked up into the shocked blue eyes of the same handsome – unavailable – man as before. What did his wife call him again? Oh right …Killian.

To Emma’s shock, his wife actually laughed as Emma stammered an apology. She had literally fallen into the man’s lap, and her legs were tangled up with his. A blush colored his own cheeks as he grinned at her.

“We’ve got to quit meeting this way,” he teased.

“Stop flirting and let the poor woman go,” his wife admonished with a light slap to his shoulder.

She was either really secure in their relationship, or she was really used to women falling all over her husband. Probably the latter, though most women probably didn’t do it as literally as Emma just had. Emma scooted quickly out of his lap, but still didn’t see a spot for her and Henry. It felt like everyone on the hayride was staring at her.

“Here love,” Killian said, scooting over closer to his wife and slinging his arm over her shoulder, “you and your boy can squeeze in here.”

Emma mumbled a thank you yet again – when had her tongue swollen to twice its size? – and wedged herself between Killian and the back gate of the flatbed. She got Henry situated on her lap just as the tractor lurched forward. She grabbed onto the metal grate next to her to steady herself.

“Killian Jones,” the man at her side officially introduced himself, offering his hand.

“Emma Swan,” she replied, shaking it.

“Elsa Jones,” the other woman said, leaning over Killian to offer her hand to shake as well. The last name snuffed out the tiny flicker of hope that had remained in Emma’s heart. So they were married. “And this,” Elsa Jones added, tickling the little girl in her own lap, “is Bethany.”

“Nice to meet you, Bethany,” Emma told the little girl, “how old are you?”

“Thwee,” the child answered, struggling to hold up the requisite number of fingers.

“What do you know?” Emma said to Henry enthusiastically. “You’re three too, Henry. Say hello to Bethany.”

“Hello,” Henry muttered as if it pained him to do so, then turned his face to bury it in his mother’s chest.

Emma frowned. “What’s up with you, kid? You’re never shy.”

Killian leaned towards her conspiratorially. “Maybe he just has a thing for blondes.”

He waggled his eyes, and Emma wondered what his angle was. Maybe he was referring to his wife? Then again, he had also winked at Emma earlier. The guy’s handsome looks suddenly weren’t affecting her quite the same way. What kind of jerk flirted with another woman right in front of his wife?

Emma pressed her lips together as she purposefully looked away from him. Come on, Emma, a part of her argued, maybe he’s just friendly and doesn’t realize how it comes across. But another part of her argued back that the male gender hadn’t exactly proven itself trustworthy throughout her life. Most were scumbags, weren’t they?

The hay ride took them past a field of cows and another of beautiful horses. Emma and Elsa both chatted with the children about the animals, asking what sounds they made. Elsa laughed and chatted with Emma about the things mothers usually do; the struggles of potty training, the annoying kid shows with songs that get stuck in your head, the infernal stubbornness of three year olds. Emma found it odd that she didn’t include her husband in the parenting equation, and even more strange that he didn’t put in his own antidotes. The cracks were showing in this supposedly perfect little family, but it strangely didn’t bring Emma any satisfaction.

The hayride was incredibly bumpy because of all the rain, much to Emma’s chagrin because she kept falling against the rock-hard chest of the man sitting next to her. The more it happened, the more irritated Emma became and the more apologetic Killian became.

Next they passed a field of pumpkins where families ambled amongst the orange gourds, searching for the perfect one. The children both exclaimed with delight, asking when they would get to choose their own pumpkin. Bethany tugged on her father’s arm, pointing excitedly.

“I see, starfish, pumpkins!” he chuckled, brushing a kiss against her curls.

Emma blinked, her heart playing ping pong with her brain. Who was this guy? Flirtatious jerk? Inattentive husband? Doting father? Emma couldn’t tell.

As they rounded the pumpkin patch, the tractor hit a deep rut and then slid in the mud. For one terrifying moment, the entire thing pitched sideways and everyone on board screamed. The driver corrected, guiding them back onto steady ground with a huge bump. The bump sent Emma careening sideways, and she ended up draped across the chest of Killian Jones, her arms encircling his neck.

She reacted more quickly this time, her “I’m so, so, SO sorry!” now directed at Elsa. The woman, amazingly, still didn’t seem fazed. As a matter of fact, the smile on her face and the light in her eyes almost seemed … delighted?

Emma didn’t want to waste one more minute trying to figure out this little family. As soon as the driver opened the gate, Emma scrambled down from the hayride, balancing Henry on her hip. Her son, however, wasn’t cooperating with her attempt at a quick getaway. At some point during the hay ride, Bethany had apparently become his new best friend. She squealed and grabbed his hand as soon as her family climbed down.

“We wanna do the maze!” Bethany shouted.

“The maze! The maze!” Henry echoed her, jumping up and down.

Then the two of them were off like a shot towards the nearby field of tall corn.

“Don’t get too far ahead!” Elsa shouted after them.

“You’ll get lost in there, Henry!” Emma called out as she and her new friend jogged down the hill after them.

“I’ve got them!” Killian assured, passing them with his longer strides. He grabbed up both kids easily, one in each arm, and they both giggled with delight. He turned towards Emma and Elsa with a wink then set the kids down at the entrance to the maze marked “easy.”

Elsa and Emma slowed their pace, following Killian and the children into the maze. Elsa gave her an almost mischievous smile before leaning over to speak to her in a low voice.

“I think he likes you.”

Emma’s eyes grew wide as saucers and her mouth hung open at the other woman’s words. She glanced over at Killian, then back to Elsa, then blinked rapidly. “He, you mean Killian? As in your … your … husband?” She practically whispered the last word.

Elsa’s eyebrows flew to her hairline before she tilted her head back and let out a long, hearty laugh. Emma narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest, failing to see why being invited into some weird open marriage scenario was so hilarious to this woman.

“Oh my God, no!” Elsa laughed, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. “I guess I can see how you thought that. We should have been clearer when we introduced ourselves. Killian’s my brother-in-law .”

“Ohhh …” Emma said, trailing off, feeling like she’d just gotten mental whiplash, “but he is married. I saw the ring.”

The smile fell from Elsa’s face as she shook her head, “I’ve told him so many times to take that ring off. He says he can’t bear to, but I think it’s sort of a way to protect his heart, you know? Women assume, like you did, so they stay away.”

Emma tilted her head as her gaze landed on Killian again. He grabbed Bethany before she could dash off in the opposite direction from Henry, tickling her as he tossed her over his shoulder.

“What happened to his wife?”

Elsa sighed. “It was a brain tumor. By the time they found it, the cancer was too advanced. He only had Milah for about four months after the diagnosis. That was four years ago.”

Emma groaned and covered her face with her hands, “God, I feel horrible now.”

Elsa chuckled. “I understand now why you got a little prickly back there. You thought my husband was hitting on you.” She laughed again as if being married to Killian was the funniest, most preposterous scenario. “I mean, he’s a great guy, but he and Liam – my husband – couldn’t be more different. I guess steady and serious is more my type.”

They walked in silence for a moment. They could no longer see Killian or the kids, but they could hear the children’s giggles around the corner and followed the sound.

“Liam is in the navy,” Elsa explained, “and when he was deployed eight months ago, Killian moved here to help with Bethany.”

“Wow,” Emma said, feeling even worse about the assumptions she had made, “that’s a rare guy.”

“Yeah,” Elsa agreed, “that’s why I want to see him move on from his grief.” She stopped and turned to Emma with an earnest expression. “That’s why I was so happy the second he winked at you back at the story barn. I haven’t seen him flirt with a woman that way in so long. And he blushed ten shades of red when you landed in his lap.”

Emma groaned. “Twice. I landed in his lap twice.”

Elsa nudged her shoulder. “Maybe it was fate giving you a little push.”

The “easy” corn maze took far longer than Emma would have expected, and they were all hot, sweaty, and hungry by the time they found their way out. The clouds had rolled away, revealing a bright blue sky, and the temperature had risen with it. Henry had shed his jacket long ago, leaving Emma to lug it around along with her own.

“Why do people think these things are fun?” Emma quipped as they exited the corn field, and Elsa and Killian both laughed in agreement.

“And that was the easy one!” Elsa said with a shake of her head.

“Let’s get some food into these little ones, shall we?” Killian asked, gesturing to a food truck that had been parked along the tree line with wooden picnic benches set up in front of it.

“The little ones?” Emma laughed. “ I’m starving.”

“Uh, why don’t I take the kids and get us a table?” Elsa suggested. “And you two go get the food?”

Emma had only just met the woman, but she was no fool. She noticed the slight tilt of Elsa’s head in Killian’s direction as she locked eyes with Emma. Then she was corralling the kids towards the tables, assuming the other two adults would follow her orders.

“How she and my brother don’t fight twenty four seven is beyond me,” Killian commented with a shake of his head. “They both like bossing people around.”

Emma laughed as they made their way to the food truck. When they joined the long line of people waiting to order, she cleared her throat nervously and shuffled her feet.

“I owe you an apology,” she finally blurted out.

Killian’s brow furrowed. “Miss Swan, you really need to stop apologizing. It was crowded and bumpy –“

She waved her hand to stop him. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about … .” she searched for the right words and finally settled on the one Elsa had used earlier, “being prickly.”

He cocked his head at her. “Prickly?”

She let out a long breath. “I was sort of rude. I … I thought you and Elsa were married.”

He gave a small chuckle but didn’t dissolve into laughter as Elsa hand. Instead he lifted his left hand and fiddled with the ring resting there. “I can’t fault you for being confused, love. And if you were right, I would definitely be worthy of your cold shoulder.”

“Are you always so eloquent?” Emma asked, stuffing her hands in her pockets.

He laughed and scratched behind his ear. “So I’ve been told.”

“So I’m forgiven?”

His smile broadened. “Of course.”

They shuffled forward in the slow moving line, and Emma gazed across the field where Elsa sat at a picnic table. Henry was chasing Bethany in circles nearby.

“Elsa explained it all to me,” she told him quietly.

“About why I’m tagging along with their little family or why I’m still wearing a wedding ring?” he asked bluntly.

Emma shrugged. “Both.”

He nodded, staring down at the ring and twirling it around his finger. “It was hard for me to be around them at first. I know it hurt Liam; he was so excited when Bethany was born. But all it did was remind me of what I had lost.” He looked up and met Emma’s gaze. “Milah was pregnant when they found the tumor. Our child and Bethany would have been about the same age.”

Emma frowned as her heart sank. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

He released a sigh as he rubbed his chin. “But it was wrong of me to stay away. I see that now. When Liam shipped out, I was going nowhere, doing nothing with my life. The least I could do was be here for my family when they needed me. Being around Bethany has been the best medicine for my soul, you know? I love that little starfish with all I have.”

Emma smiled. “Kids can do that. Henry is the only good thing to come from a very painful time in my life.”

Killian frowned. “I’m sorry, Emma. Is his father in his life at all?”

Emma shook her head. “No. He doesn’t deserve to be. Let’s just say he took advantage of me, then left me.” She pressed her lips together, hoping Killian didn’t ask for more of the story. She was shocked she had told him that much.

He reached down and gently took her hand. “He must be the world’s biggest idiot, then,” he told her softly, giving her fingers a tiny squeeze.

Emma felt a blush stain her cheeks even as she rolled her eyes. “Smooth.”

Killian wiggled his eyebrows. “It was rather, wasn’t it?” he quipped, making her laugh.

By that point, they had reached the truck. Emma looked over the menu, which was filled with typical country fair type refreshments: funnel cakes, corn dogs, French fries, and candy apples. Emma’s heart sank as she looked at the inflated prices, imagining the tiny wad of cash remaining in the front pocket of her jeans.

“It’s on me, Swan,” Killian said as he stepped up to the window, pulling his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Anything you and your boy would like.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Emma protested.

He smiled gently at her. “I know I don’t have to. I want to.”

Emma hated charity, but the way Killian spoke so sincerely, the way his gaze rested warmly on her, it didn’t feel like charity at all. She gave a simple nod, then gave the employee in the window her order. They made their way back to Elsa and the kids laden down with five corn dogs, four orders of fries, an order of onion rings, and five cans of soda. Killian helped her hand everything out, and they all sat down. Elsa and Emma went to work immediately cutting the kids’ corn dogs into bite size pieces.

“Onion rings, not fries,” Killian pointed out before taking a sip of his drink, “I’ll file that information away, love.”

Emma shook her head, hating the way he could so easily make her blush as she concentrated on Henry’s corn dog. She cleared her throat. “Who says you’ll need it?”

He arched one brow and smirked. “A man can hope.”

Elsa smiled delightedly at the pair of them, no doubt praising herself for her matchmaking skills.

*********************************************************

After eating, the kids wanted to go to the pumpkin painting booth. Each child got a complimentary tiny pumpkin to paint. Being typical three year olds, both children were too stubborn to let Elsa or Emma assist them. Little Bethany poked her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she carefully dabbed blue and yellow polka dots all over her pumpkin. Her circles were blotchy and misshapen, but for three, it was extremely impressive. Henry, on the other hand, insisted on covering his pumpkin sloppily in every color available.

“She’s really good at this,” Emma commented, gesturing to Bethany’s handiwork.

Elsa grinned and elbowed Killian in the ribs. “It’s in her genes, isn’t it?”

“You’re an artist?” Emma asked as Killian scratched behind his ear. She was beginning to wonder if it was a nervous tic of his.

“I dabble,” he admitted with a shrug.

“Dabble?” Elsa snorted with a roll of her eyes. Then she looked at Emma and explained, “he’s a graphic artist.”

“Well,” Killian explained, gesturing to the table before them, “I was referring to the paint. I dabble with painting. The computer stuff is my job. But drawing and painting? That’s my hobby.”

Emma smiled with appreciation at him, then frowned down at Henry’s pumpkin. The colors had all mixed together into a nasty brown. “Well, I can’t say there are any artistic genes in my family.”

Henry turned with a broad grin to show off his pumpkin, and Killian hid a laugh behind his hand. Emma shrugged as she praised Henry’s effort. Oh well, maybe her kid would have other talents, right?

The employees manning the booth lined up all the pumpkins to dry on a shelf behind them, jotting the kids’ names on paper towels. They were informed that they could pick up the dried projects on their way out in about half an hour, so the five of them headed for the pumpkin patch.

“We’re avoiding the petting zoo,” Elsa whispered in Emma’s ear conspiratorially.

“Oh, I’m with you on that one,” Emma whispered back.

“I mean, it rained this morning,” Elsa continued, wrinkling her nose, “do you know how bad those animals are going to smell?”

Emma laughed, “I know, right?”

She remembered reading Anne of Green Gables as a kid. Tried to read it, anyway. The librarian at her middle school thought it would be perfect for Emma; the story of an unwanted orphan finding an unlikely family. The librarian was wrong. Emma Swan had never met a Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, had never been as optimistic as Anne Shirley, and she had certainly never had any friends who were “kindred spirits.” But now, here with Elsa? She was re-thinking the possibility of such things.

The kids raced through the rows of pumpkins, thumping them with their hands like giant drums. Elsa chose a medium sized pumpkin to make a pie, tucking it under her arm. Emma just stood there, looking up and down the rows with a frown on her face.

“Something wrong, love?” Killian asked.

Emma shrugged with a wry laugh. “Never been to a pumpkin patch before. I’ve always just gotten them at the grocery store.”

Killian nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. “The first time I ever went was with Milah after we’d been married about a year.” He pushed a pumpkin idly with his toe before meeting her gaze. “Not many foster parents take the time you know. Never even carved a pumpkin until Liam and I were on our own.”

Emma blinked, shocked to recognize the shame in his eyes. “Foster parents?”

Killian nodded. “Mum died when I was so young, I don’t remember her. Papa just up and left. So …”

Emma bit her lip. “Similar story,” she admitted, “I guess. Thing is, I don’t even know who my parents were or why they abandoned me.”

They were quiet for a long moment, and Emma was relieved to see only understanding, not pity in Killian’s eyes. Then he gave her a soft smile and reached out to twirl a lock of her hair around his finger.

“Well Swan, you never forget your first,” he told her with a smirk.

Emma gaped. “Excuse me?”

He laughed. “First pumpkin that is.”

Emma rolled her eyes and smacked him in the shoulder. “You’re awful.”

“You think I’m cute, admit it,” he teased, sauntering into her personal space.

Emma swallowed hard as she tilted her head to look up at him. The sun overhead sparkled in his blue eyes and his smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.

“Are you two ever going to pick a pumpkin, or are you just going to keep flirting?”

Elsa’s voice snapped them both out of it, and Killian rushed over to hoist the large carving pumpkin that his sister-in-law was attempting to juggle with the pie pumpkin. Killian turned back to Emma, his expression looking a bit bashful as his tongue swiped across his lower lip nervously.

“We’re having a get together tonight,” Killian began, “for Elsa’s sister’s birthday. It’s real casual; just ordering some Chinese and then having a bonfire. We … we would love to have you. And Henry, of course.”

“That’s a great idea!” Elsa exulted, smiling broadly. “Bethany and Henry have obviously hit it off, and we always order way too much food.”

“Um …” Emma hedged, her gaze darting from Killian to Elsa and back again.

A part of her wanted to say yes. She had only just met these two, and they already felt like such great friends. But the other part of her, the cautious part, latched onto the fact that she had just met these people . Wasn’t this the part in movies where the naïve young mother gets taken in by the seemingly friendly couple who are actually serial killers? Or she accepts a friendly offer only to find herself escorted to the compound of some weird cult?

Emma shook her head before the words were even out of her mouth. “It’s such a long drive to the city. We really shouldn’t.”

Killian glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s three already, and we’re eating at six. You can just come on over and visit until everyone arrives.”

“You’ll love Anna and her husband,” Elsa insisted.

Emma looked into both their faces, so friendly, so open. In Killian’s eyes, and in their conversations, she also felt a deep connection that she couldn’t explain. But instead of those things comforting her, they only freaked her out more.

“I really can’t,” she said firmly.

Neither of them could hide their disappointment. Killian’s shoulders sagged and he dropped his head to stare at the pumpkin in his arms. When he lifted his gaze to Emma’s, his expression was almost pleading.

“It was wonderful meeting you, Swan. Perhaps … I could get your number?”

Emma felt her heart thudding in her chest, the air suddenly tight in her lungs. They had too much in common, too much shared tragedy. He would expect things to get serious, and that terrified her.

“I … don’t think that’s a good idea.” She averted her gaze when she saw the clear hurt in his eyes.

“Well,” he said with a resigned sigh, “let me help Elsa get these to the car, and I’ll come back and carry yours for you.”

“No, don’t do that,” Emma told him quickly. She feared if she was in this man’s presence for one more minute, her resolve might crumble. “We may be awhile yet. First pumpkin, remember? Gotta make it a good one.”

The smile he gave her was forced, and Elsa laid a hand on his arm as they walked away. Emma remembered her words earlier, I haven’t seen him flirt with a woman that way in so long. He had finally put himself out there, and Emma had crushed him. After they disappeared over the hill, Emma collapsed onto an enormous pumpkin behind her.

“Mo-mmy!” Henry exclaimed, pulling on her hand. “Why you sittin?”

Emma looked at her son wearily. “Because Mommy feels like dirt, that’s why.”

She let Henry pull her to her feet, and she wandered aimlessly among the pumpkins. Henry didn’t seem to mind her stupor, content to run around, climbing on pumpkins and using them like bongo drums. She finally snapped out of it and helped Henry pick a pumpkin for them to carve. One that wasn’t too big or too small and was nice and round. When she hoisted it into her arms, she regretted turning down Killian’s offer to come back and carry it for her. Thankfully, an employee came over to assist her, pushing a wheelbarrow.

It wasn’t until Emma had paid for the pumpkin with the last of the cash in her pocket and had the employee lift it into her backseat that she remembered the tiny pumpkin Henry had painted. She contemplated leaving it, considering that it looked like it had been rolled in doggy poo, but then she thought about what would happen if Henry remembered it. She might have a meltdown on her hands, especially since he hadn’t had a nap today. She sighed wearily, took Henry’s hand, and headed back to the painting booth.

Emma smiled at the workers and thanked them as they handed her Henry’s brown-smudged pumpkin. As she turned to go, Henry’s exclamation stopped her.

“Mommy, look!”

Her son was holding up a pink polka dot Minnie Mouse backpack. On the table next to him was the adorable polka dotted pumpkin Bethany had painted earlier. Emma gasped and took the backpack from her son’s hand. She remembered Elsa carrying it around all day, even complaining how she couldn’t get Bethany to wear it. She examined the pack, looking for a tag with an address, but she could find nothing. She zipped it open, and there, written in black sharpie on the inside cover was, “Property of Bethany Jones, 1245 Sweet Haven Lane, Storybrooke, ME.”

“Henry,” Emma said to her little boy with a smile on her face, “I think fate just gave me another push.”

***********************************************************

Emma’s GPS told her to take another right turn, then announced that her destination was on the left. Emma parked along the curb, leaning to look out of the window of her yellow bug at the adorable blue Victorian house at 1245 Sweet Haven Lane.

“I hung-wee, Mommy,” Henry told her from the backseat.

“I know, kid,” Emma told him as she unbuckled her seat belt, “we might be eating in just a minute.” If they still want us, that is.

Emma helped Henry out of his car seat and onto the curb. She grabbed Bethany’s things from the front passenger seat, then took Henry’s hand as they walked up the front steps of the beautiful house. It was a little after six, and dusk was falling. The porch lights were already glowing beside the quaint front door. Emma took a deep breath and knocked.

The door swung open a few moments later, and Emma’s breath left her lungs when she saw Killian Jones standing there. Thankfully, he smiled when he saw her.

“Swan! You changed your mind?”

Emma returned his smile and lifted the backpack up for him to see. “I found this after you left. Your address was inside.”

“Oh,” Killian said, his face falling as he accepted the bag, “thank you.”

“The pumpkin she painted is inside.”

“Uncle Ki-wee!” a small voice called, and then Bethany Jones was colliding with her uncle’s leg. “My bag!” she squealed, grabbing it and hugging it to her chest. “Hen-we!” she exclaimed next, launching herself at her new friend.

“Beffy!” Henry shouted in return.

Before Emma could say anything, Bethany was pulling Henry inside and tugging him down the hall. She shouted as she ran, “They came, Mommy! It worked!”

Killian’s jaw dropped and his face turned red. He pointed at his niece’s retreating form. “I did not plan this, I swear. This was all Elsa’s doing.”

Emma smiled shyly up at him. “I don’t mind. I’m kind of glad, actually.”

He grinned so wide, Emma noticed for the first time that he had dimples. “So you’ll stay?”

She shrugged, trying to play it cool. “I do like Chinese food.”

Killian ushered her inside, where she was promptly enveloped in a hug from Elsa.

“Don’t be mad,” she whispered in Emma’s ear.

Emma smiled at her as she pulled away from her embrace. “Mad? I might just thank you.”

Elsa gave a relieved laugh as she pulled her gently into a formal dining room. A red head walked through an archway that led into the kitchen, carrying two cartons of take out. She actually waddled more than walked because she was very hugely pregnant.

“Emma,” Elsa said eagerly, pulling her across the room, “this is my sister Anna.”

The woman set the cartons of fried rice onto the table and then hugged Emma eagerly. “It is so nice to meet you! Elsa told me all about everything,” she finished with a wink.

Emma could only stammer and blush as Anna stepped away. A man with dirty blonde hair came through the archway next, carrying plastic containers of sweet and sour chicken.

“So who was at the door?” he asked as he came into the room, not really paying attention. “Was it that blonde Killian has a crush on?”

Killian walked in the room at the same moment from the hallway, and he stood there, the top of his ears turning red. Bethany was wrapped around his left leg, and Henry around his right. Both were giggling delightedly. Overall, it made an adorable picture.

“Kristoff!” Anna admonished over her shoulder, then quickly turned back to Emma. “Forgive my husband, he has no filter.”

“Says the girl who asked me why I smelled like wet fur the day she met me,” Kristoff grumbled.

Anna rolled her eyes. “Just go get the soy sauce, honey.”

Chastised, Kristoff shuffled back to the kitchen. Elsa shook her head. “Don’t mind them, their cutting banter is their idea of foreplay.”

Anna laughed as she eased herself awkwardly into a dining room chair. “As you can clearly see,” she said, rubbing her large abdomen.

“When are you due?” Emma asked politely.

“Not for another month,” Anna said on a long sigh, “and I know, I’m huge.”

“You look perfect,” Kristoff assured her as he returned with the condiments.

He leaned over and planted a kiss to her forehead. Anna tilted her head and smiled up at him, squeezing the hand that rested on her shoulder. Emma had to admit they were an adorable couple.

Elsa encouraged everyone to take a seat, adamant about who sat where. Therefore, Emma wasn’t surprised to end up on Killian’s right with Henry on the other side of her. Food was passed around amidst easy chatter, and Emma just soaked it in. The only time she ever had this as a kid was with that one family when she was fourteen. Then they had chosen their “real kids” over her, and she had run away.

“So Elsa said you live in Portland,” Kristoff said, making small talk to include her. “What do you do?”

“Oh, um … “ Emma hedged, squirming in her seat, “right now I’m just a temp, filling in here and there.”

She stared at her fried rice, hoping her answer didn’t make her sound irresponsible. Giving birth in jail at 18 wasn’t exactly conducive to higher education, and even though she had worked her butt off once she got out to be able to keep Henry, employers weren’t exactly jumping to give her a chance.

“That’s so funny,” Elsa laughed, “I was working at a temp agency when I met Kristoff. I would never have offered him a home cooked meal if I had known he would steal away my sister.”

Emma laughed along with them as they reminisced, relieved that no one was pressing her about her career plans. Until Elsa turned to her again.

“Have you thought of online college?” she asked. “That’s what I did while working as a temp. Anna and I lost our parents when I was a freshman in college, and it drastically changed both our plans.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma said softly.

Killian leaned over, “Welcome to the orphan’s club.”

Emma glanced around the table at all of the welcoming faces around her, and for the first time since she pulled up to the curb in front of the house, she relaxed. The conversation shifted to lighter topics, and Emma found herself smiling and laughing.

“Killian!” Anna gasped, reaching across the table to grasp his left hand which was reaching for another helping of rice, “You took off your wedding ring!”

“Um, aye,” he said awkwardly, pulling his hand from her grip and scratching behind his ear. He glanced at Emma and held her gaze as he explained. “It felt like it was finally time to move on.”

“Oh, I’m so happy!” Anna gasped, both hands flying to her face and tears filling her eyes. She grabbed her napkin and dabbed at her cheeks as they spilled over. “Sorry, pregnancy hormones you know.”

“Mommy,” Bethany piped up, tugging on Elsa’s sleeve, “when we get mashmell-os?”

Elsa rubbed her daughter’s back. “In just a little bit, sweetie.”

“I think we’re all done, right?” Kristoff asked. “All we have to do is toss the paper plates and put away the leftovers.”

“Yay!” Bethany cheered.

“Wait!” Anna said. She reached for a small bowl full of cellophane wrapped fortune cookies. “It’s a birthday tradition, you know. Choose a cookie.”

“We all have to go around and read our fortunes out loud,” Killian explained.

“Oh,” Emma said with a nod as she reached into the bowl as it was passed to her.

“Birthday girl first!” Anna squealed, then broke open her cookie. She read it silently, then burst out laughing. “A great change is coming your way.”

Everyone laughed along with her, and Elsa quipped, “Believe me, you have lots of changes in your future, most of them smelly ones. Right, Emma?”

“Okay,” Anna said, rubbing her hands together gleefully, “I choose Killian to go next.” She exchanged a delighted glance with her sister then added in a sing-song voice, “I hope it’s a good one!”

Killian just shook his head at the teasing as he cracked open his fortune cookie. As he read the tiny slip of paper, however, the blood seemed to drain from his face, and his eyes widened considerably. He just sat there for a long moment, staring at it.

“Well,” Anna pressed, leaning across the table and craning her neck to try to see his fortune, “what does it say?”

“Nothing,” Killian said with a shake of his head, “just your generic good luck sentiment, you know.”

“Killian,” Elsa admonished with a narrowing of her eyes, “that’s not how the tradition works and you know it. Read the fortune, Jones.”

Killian swallowed as red crept up his neck. Then he cleared his throat and read, “Kiss the person to your right.”

Every pair of eyes at the table swiveled towards Emma. Except Killian, who stared down at his plate.

“No way!” Kristoff argued. “It doesn’t say that. Let me see!”

He reached across the table and snatched the fortune. Upon reading it, he handed it to his wife. Her jaw dropped.

“That’s really what it says!”

The fortune was passed around until it got to Emma. Sure enough, Killian wasn’t making it up. Emma’s face burned as she slid the paper over to Killian, their fingertips brushing. She ever so slowly lifted her gaze to his. He gave her a sheepish smile and an apologetic shrug.

“Well, kiss her!” Anna insisted. Her sister and her husband added their encouragement as well.

Emma could see that Killian was conflicted. So she arched a brow and gave him a flirty smile as she said, “Well, how about it? You gonna kiss me or just sit there?”

There was a combination of cheering and clapping from the others, even Bethany and Henry, though they probably had no idea what was going on. Killian chuckled and ducked his head, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. Then his eyes met hers again, and he leaned towards her. But just before his lips could connect with hers, he changed his angle and brushed them across her cheek instead. Emma was simultaneously disappointed and amazed at how that simple brush of his lips sent a thrill all the way to the core of her. A groan resounded from the others but Emma gave him a tender smile. Though part of her wanted him to kiss her properly, she knew it would have been awkward with everyone, including her three year old watching. He reached out with his thumb and brushed it across the dimple in her chin. It was only a quick, light touch, but it made her heart flip anyway.

*************************************************

After the fortune cookies, Kristoff and Killian got a bonfire going in the backyard, and everyone gathered around to roast marshmallows. There was also a chocolate cake for Anna’s birthday. Both Kristoff and Killian could play the guitar, and Elsa was an amazing singer. Emma had never heard a better rendition of the birthday song. Then the guys took requests, readily singing and playing whatever was thrown their way, even the PJ Masks theme song (as requested by Henry and Bethany, of course). It showed what good uncles they both were to Bethany that the men already knew all the words.

Now Henry was asleep in Killian’s arms as he walked them to her yellow bug. He gently placed the child in his car seat, and Emma’s heart ached in her chest as Killian smoothed her son’s hair across his forehead. Emma put her hand in her pocket and fingered the fortune she had gotten: When fate gives you a sign, leap.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked as Killian stood and gently shut the car door.

“Sure.”

“Was that kiss really the best that you could do?” her mouth turned up flirtatiously as she said it.

A slow smile filled Killian’s face as well. He sauntered into her personal space as he answered. “Perhaps I was worried that you couldn’t handle it.”

Emma tilted her head as she bit her lower lip. She saw Killian’s eyes drift to stare at that spot, his pupils dilating. “Maybe you’re the one who couldn’t handle it.”

He pounced on her so suddenly, that Emma let out a yelp. It was quickly swallowed up, however, by his mouth on hers. The kiss was deep and aggressive, and it caused Emma to lose her balance. Killian cupped her cheek with one hand and steadied her at the waist with the other. He turned her slightly to pin her between the bug and his body. Emma snaked her arms up his chest and then grasped the back of his head with both hands. It was his turn now as she kissed him back with ferocity, a groan escaping from his throat.

When they finally parted, panting, they were both wobbling slightly and disoriented. They pressed their foreheads together to steady themselves.

“Now that,” Emma gasped, “was a kiss.”

He chuckled, brushing both of her cheeks with his thumbs as he cupped her face. He bent down to kiss her again, this one slow and languid. His fingers drifted to her hair, tangling there and tugging slightly. It took every ounce of willpower Emma had to push him away, and even then she chased his lips, brushing them chastely before reaching behind her and grasping the door handle.

“Good night,” she told him as she opened the car door.

“Wait …” he said, looking completely wrecked by their kisses.

Emma put two fingers to his lips to stop his words, then with her other hand, she pressed a tiny slip of paper into his palm. Then she quickly entered the bug, started the car, and drove away. She glanced in her rearview mirror only once to see him standing in the street, staring down at that tiny bit of paper. She tore her gaze away as she turned at the next stop sign.

Suddenly, her cell phone started ringing. Emma picked it up and grinned broadly to see an unknown number flashing on the screen. She cleared her throat and took a deep breath so that when she answered, she sounded calm.

“Hello.”

“You know, a lesser man might think you were teasing, Swan. Writing your number on such an itty bitty piece of paper.”

“Well,” Emma teased back, “I wanted you to work for it.”

“When can I see you again?”

The timbre of Killian’s voice when he asked the question sent a shiver down Emma’s spine.

“When are you available?”

“Well, we’ve already been on a hayride, solved a corn maze, been to a pumpkin patch, and had a bonfire. How about we continue the fall clichés and carve said pumpkins together? Could you and Henry be here tomorrow afternoon? Or do you work Sundays?”

Emma didn’t know what touched her more; that he wanted to see her again so soon, that he was including Henry, or that he had chosen a casual activity. It took her so long to get herself together, that Killian got nervous waiting on the other end.

“Swan, you still there?”

Emma cleared her throat. “Um, yeah, sorry. I was just … thinking that tomorrow is perfect.”

Over the next few weeks, Killian insisted that they check off every fall tradition together. In addition to carving pumpkins, they watched a Storybrooke High football game cuddled underneath a fuzzy blanket, jumped into a pile of leaves, bobbed for apples at the Storybrooke Fall Festival, and took Henry and Bethany trick or treating. By the time Emma found herself gathered around the dining room table once again for Thanksgiving with Killian’s family, she had decided one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Fall was definitely her favorite season.

#ffcs 2018 #fallforcs #fall for captain swan #blinddate with a fanfic #cs ff #cs au #searchingwardrobes #hayrides fate and fortune cookies

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bethels93 · 6 years

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Yesterday, I was finally able to see Mary Poppins Returns! For most movies, Japan has slightly later release dates so I had to wait for a bit. But I wanted to put my thoughts into a post while the movie is still fresh in my mind 😁 This will be over two posts, so it’s not one long stream of rambling 🤣

None of the GIFs or pictures posted belong to me. Credit to the makers of them 💗

Mary Poppins would like to inform you that there will be spoilers for Mary Poppins Returns so, if you haven’t seen it and wish to remain unspoiled, please do not read this post!!

🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨

Let talk about the characters:

I liked how the eldest kids (John and Annabel) are the opposites of Jane and Michael from the first movie. Here we have two children who have had to grow up quickly due to the loss of their mother and they become surrogate parents to the wild Georgie. Mary Poppins has not only returned to help Jane and Michael; she’s there to look after ALL of the Banks children and help John and Annabel be children again. Georgie has no problems being a child and his innocent remarks throughout the film are some of the best comedic moments.

Upon seeing the trailer, I thought Jack was just going to be a Bert 2.0 and, in a way, he is. Most of the characters are the 2.0 versions from the first Mary Poppins. While we didn’t know too much about Bert’s story, we know quite a bit about Jack. He’s a lamplighter (a leerie) who was apprenticed under Bert and met Mary Poppins when he was younger. Rather than flirting with Mary Poppins, he acts like a nephew whose favourite aunt has come into town. The world of lamplighting has it’s own magic and Lin Manuel Miranda does an amazing job of bringing Jack and that magic to life. He definitely does a better Cockney accent than Dick Van Dyke as well 🤣

Michael has been through a lot in the last 25 years. He’s lost his wife and he’s struggling to keep it together but does so for the children. He finds himself turning into his father after the bank (the same bank his father was a senior partner and where Michael now works) is threatening to take the house. I thought Ben Whishaw played him beautifully. The first film never really portrayed George Banks in a sympathetic light, so this film differs slightly in that Michaels behaviour and outbursts are the result of tragedy. On the other hand, Jane definitely has been taking after her mother. She’s campaigning on behalf of the underpaid workers, working at soup kitchens and taking part in labour rallies. Emily Mortimer retains the sweet nature which Karen Dotrice brought to the role whilst adding her own flare. One aspect that’s been a bit controversial amongst tumblr users is the relationship between Jack and Jane. With her political attitudes and her wardrobe, Jane has been taken by some to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community. However, one of the films subplots is a budding romance between Jack and Jane. In my opinion, I loved the romance. It was pure, sweet and a genuine joy to watch. However, I know some people took their interactions as platonic. I just think it’s a testament to Mortimer’s and Miranda’s acting that fans can interpret the character and the relationship in different ways. I think no one is correct: we can each have opinions on the character and it prompts for interesting discussion as a whole.

I’ll just briefly touch on the other characters before the main attraction. Colin Firth is particularly good as the primary antagonist; William “Weatherall” Wilkins is the nephew of Mr. Dawes Jr (portrayed by Arthur Malet in Mary Poppins). Brits always do well at portraying villains and Firth is no exception. Julie Walters takes on the role of Ellen (portrayed by Hermione Baddeley in Mary Poppins). She’s delightful for a bit of comedy relief and ties nicely to the first film.

Now, he’s where I’m a bit conflicted. Meryl Streep plays Topsy; Mary Poppins’ Russian cousin who owns a fix-it-all shop. She’s essentially Uncle Albert 2.0 except, rather than floating on the ceiling, her entire shop turns upside down (literally) every second Wednesday. I don’t know how to feel about her role in the story. The gang go to Topsy to fix a bowl which the children plan to sell to help save their house. The whole segment she’s in teaches the children to look at things from a different point of view and they then decide to not proceed with selling the bowl. I felt it was a bit of an unnecessary part of the movie and would have rathered they had maybe Jane or Ellen teaching them the lesson, rather then try to get their money’s worth with Meryl.

Ahh, the cameos! The biggest one is, of course, Dick Van Dyke as Mr. Dawes Jr. It’s a great moment and really brings together the two films. Karen Dotrice (Jane in MP) makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo when she bumps into Jack and Jane and asks for directions. The best surprise was Angela Lansbury (Mrs. Potts from the animated Beauty and the Beast) as the Balloon Lady; this movie’s version of the Bird Lady. She was just a delightful and warm character.

... and finally, the reason we’re all here. I was exceptionally worried going into this because I loved Julie Andrews’ character so much. The one thing Emily Blunt does spectacularly is she doesn’t try to be Julie Andrews. She uses some of her lines and is a firm nanny, but she really makes the character her own. In the first Mary Poppins, we see a break in her tough shell at the end when she’s leaving the children. In this film, her facade breaks quite a few times but I think it shows character development. This is the second time, that we know of, Mary Poppins has visited and helped the Banks Family so she’s as much a member of it as the children are. Her emotions are much more on her sleeve in this film as much as the character tries to hide them. At the moment, I think of them as two separate characters which I don’t think is a bad thing. Both Dame Julie Andrews and Emily Blunt have taken a remarkable character and portrayed her to a high standard with just the right amount of wit, magic and British stiff upper lip.

I’m going to finish there for this post 😴 Let me know what you thought about the film and whether you agree or disagree with anything I’ve said. Always up for a discussion 😊

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octaviainthewasteland · 5 years

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Wonder Woman: on female characters in comics PART 3

p. 1, 2, 3

Finally my lazy ass finished it. Warning: Image heavy. Please bear in mind that English is not my first language and we do not beta, we die liek mne!

Part 3: Woman: Warrior, Wife, Wonder

Summary: Critical analysis of the character of Wonder Woman

Under the cut

Previously, I have talked about gender inequality in the comics industry and poor portrayal of female characters in the comics. In this part, I am going to talk about comics as an active political tool, and Wonder Woman as a medium of gender politics.

Lepore and Fawaz both define Wonder Woman as the banner-bearer of the feminist separatist utopia (Lepore, 2016: 199) (Fawaz, Hall, Kinsella, 2017: 9), though they refer to different feminist movements. While Lepore stresses the importance of the movement of 1910s for the invention of Wonder Woman, Fawaz matches Themyscrira, the home island of Wonder Woman, to the idea of separatism of 1970s. As noted by De Beauvoir and Fawaz, it was impossible to imagine the life without men. Women have no separate history, no separate culture. They were attracted to the idea of an island, isolated from the rest of the world. This fantasy on the pages of the comic book has become a safe space for exploring the social, cultural and political possibilities and conflicting notions of a better, desirable world (Fawaz, Hall, Kinsella, 2017: 4).

The very birth of Wonder Woman is a political statement. In the early 1930s Margaret Sanger has led the birth control movement. (Lepore, 2016: 147) The question of to whom belonged the power over the woman’s body has been on everyone’s lips. On the pages of The Origin of Wonder Woman Marston tells a story of a matriarchal birth, a celebration of woman’s agency. (Wonder Woman #1, 1942) Parallels can be found between the legend of Wonder Woman and Christian narratives, even more so than, for example, Superman, who is typically analysed as a Jesus figure. She is born, fathered by no mortal man, and sets on saving the humanity from the forces of hate and oppression, fighting injustice, suffering, intolerance and destruction. She is omnibenevolent and wise, even being chosen by the ring of the Star Sapphires, because her heart is abundant with love (Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #2, 2010) However, Diana has neither father, nor any similar patriarchal figure in her life. She is born in a feminist utopia with no contribution from a man. The significance of this phenomenon cannot be overstated. Wonder Woman is devoid of the weight of patriarchy; hence she is the manifestation of the feminist fantasy (Curtis, 2017: 307). For 70 years she has been an exceptional figure within the pop-culture, centered around the question of Fathers and Children and ignoring the trope of the Absent Mother. The feminist utopian fantasy, though, has been killed in 2012. Of all people, by her own new authors, Azzarello and Chiang. Not only does Wonder Woman have a father now, trivializing her story, taking away her legendary status, but also this new version destroys the sisterhood. In the new version, Hippolyta lies, because she is scared of Hera’s jealousy and revenge. The same Hera, who has protected Diana and Hippolyta from Zeus’ forced advances. The same Hera, who has blessed Diana at birth. Goddesses and Amazons are no longer a monolithic front, now they are pitted against each other, fighting over the affections of a man. Wonder Woman used to be a character born from defiance. Now she is a character born from fraud, and the supremacy of the male principle has been reinstated. (314)

What early villains of the Wonder Woman comics share is their opposition to gender equality. Some villains were fictional, some of flesh and blood. Jill Lepore uncovers a schism, verging on an open war, between the writers of Wonder Woman in 1942 (Lepore, 2016: 210-213). Gardner Fox rejects the idea of the female superhero and downgrades Wonder Woman to typing out minutes and getting trapped to be saved by the male members of the Justice’s Society.

(All-Star Comics #14)

He refuses to include her in the action and show her fighting side by side with the rest of her colleagues. (All-Star Comics #12-17, 1942-43) On contrary, the political influence of Marston’s Wonder Woman grows by leaps and bounds, both in fiction and in real life.

It is worth to also compare the politics of visual presented by the case of Fox and Marston. Under Fox’s pen Wonder Woman becomes a meek female heroine, an incompetent lady, and the textbook token female character, which makes a team diverse without delivering any real contribution. After the death of Marston, she is stripped even of such nominal power. Just as Athena warns Amazons, if they submit to a man, they will lose their powers. The metaphor of the gauntlets is very curious, in fact. Amazons are bound, so that they do not forget what happens if they let man conquer them (Madrid 2009: 36). Surprisingly, Wonder Woman uses the gauntlets to protect herself, deflecting bullets and other weapons. We can see a careful threading of Marston’s motif on the struggle of women. A paradoxical situation of a shackle turned into a shield can be connoted as the remainder for women that they have broken free and they are powerful, but if they submit to a man, they will lose all their power. (Lepore, 2016: 220) Wonder Woman’s lasso is also a reference to a real-life phenomenon, specifically the lie detector. Its invention has fascinated Marston and on more than one occasion he has offered his services as the operator to the US Army (Lepore, 2016: 61). For him it has been a turning point in history of science and politics, and of course, Wonder Woman needs such a device in her adventures.

Opposed to Fox’s portrayal, Marston’s Wonder Woman stands against the International Milk Company that has been overcharging for milk, “an essential element of American children’s lives”. It has been a direct criticism of politicians such as Al Smith. On the pages of the comic books, Al Smith turns into a Nazi secret agent Alphonso De Gyppo, the evil president of the International Milk Company. Twice he tries to kill Wonder Woman, but she manages to escape him and lead a political rally. She captures his evil boss, Baroness Paula von Gunther, and the prices for milk drop, to the gratitude of American children and everyone concerned. Another example involves a fictionalized social critique of the working conditions in America. A textile workers’ strike in Massachusetts, in 1912, is retold as a strike against Bullfinch’s Department Stores, as the workers are underpaid and exploited. The real villain is the fiancé of the lady, who is owning the Department Stores, and when she realizes his true evil nature, she punches him and takes over, doubling everyone’s salaries as the first order. (Sensation Comics #8, 1942)

Everything feminine and girlish had been considered (still is) weak and boring (Lepore, 2016: 187). Marston, on the other hand, believed that men confuse desire with pleasure. They desire domination, while women can receive pleasure from both domination and submission. He felt that if there had been a strong beautiful woman (Marston wanted Wonder Woman to look like a Varga Girl), men would submit to her willingly and she would teach them love and peace. Never before such a character has existed (191). Submissiveness became power.

(georgia peach, alberto vargas, esquire, 1940s)

The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps are formed in 1942 by Roosevelt. Each issue of the solo Wonder Woman comic book has praised women, who have also been scientists, writers, politicians, social workers, doctors, nurses, athletes, and adventurers – or, in other words, Wonder Women of History. (Lepore, 2016: 220-222) Chained, tied up and gagged women are an allusion on the suffragist movement. Women seemingly reclaim the imagery of bondage and bound, giving it the implication of the struggle, the defiance, and resistance. Moreover, the idea of submission has been the new display of feminine supremacy. (236)

Fretheim suggests noting that Wonder Woman’s weapons form circles and defines them as ‘vaginal weapons’ (Fretheim, 2017: 24) as opposed to phallic weapons such as guns and swords. That it, I must correct myself, until recently. As can be seen in Chiang reimagination of Wonder Woman, she is often depicted on the comic book covers with swords, axes and other weapons.

As if drawn phallic weapons also raise the levels of testosterone, to match her updated apparel, new Wonder Woman is also more short-tempered, aggressive and has actually become the new Goddess of War after defeating Ares. (Cocca, 2014) However, some, like Walter J. Ong, have argued that even the earliest version of Wonder Woman has been ‘too much like a man’. (Lepore, 2016: 255) He criticizes her resistance towards marriage and family life, accuses her of sustaining only on the anti-social pure sexual allure, by standards of the men. He goes on to develop an argument that comics have been fascist propaganda, with the concept of ‘supermen’ directly borrowed from Nietzsche, ‘the herald of Nazism’. (256) If you are not sure who Walter J. Ong is, it is that same man who concluded that Batman and Robin promote homosexuality and we can say thanks to him for the Comics Code nonsense. So, we can see that Wonder Woman has constantly faced accusations of being ‘too masculine’. It is a hard job of being a girl in the boys club: you’re either the lady-friend who inevitably becomes the love interest or you’re a tomboy. Wonder Woman tries to be both, to be neither, to be something else entirely.

Nonetheless, in 1944, out of all comic book superheroes, it is Wonder Woman, who becomes a newspaper strip. There is a considerable difference in exposure between comic books and daily newspapers, opening a whole new audience to Wonder Woman. She joins Superman and Batman as the first trans-media superheroes and thus the Trinity is formed. Marston has always been quite open about Wonder Woman being feminist psychological propaganda for the new type of strong and courageous womanhood. (220) The message of Wonder Woman transcends the comic books and becomes a social commentary on the gender politics and economic environment of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, this is the temporary liberation. The most sinister villain of them all turns out to be the peacetime. Once again, the comic book works as a mirror, reflecting the changes on the political and socio-cultural stage. With the end of the Second World War, there blooms a daunting realization that the service of women is no longer required. The period of high threat is relieved by the period of low threat and the decisive, tough heroes can loosen up. Not to undermine them and the returning soldiers, women all over the country are fired and urged, those unmarried, to tie the knot, and those married, to hurry up and procreate. Wonder Woman is stripped of her kinky red boots, of her position at the Justice’s Society and ultimately, her powers. She becomes a friendly guide for young ladies, who dream of fairy tale romance, a handsome husband and a multitude of little pink-cheeked copies of him, running around their little cozy house. (271)

Feminist movement gave birth to Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman has become the symbol of the feminist movement. When Wonder Woman has appeared to be chained and depowered and forced to fit into categories she has been fighting against since her creation, “fellow sisters” has come to her aid. She is put on the cover of the Ms. magazine and once again blazes the fantasy of the female superhero, equal to Superman and Batman, and of the all-women culture, glorious in its isolation from the discrimination and oppression of the male imposition. (Lepore, 2016: 283; Fawaz, Hall, Kinsella, 2017: 8)

Wonder Woman returns to peaceful protests on the pages of It Aint Me Baby and feminist newsletters. There starts the try and miss of the comic industry with the female characters. Wanting to cash in on feminists, Marvel attempts to introduce new female characters, but they all fail spectacularly after just a handful of issues. (Lepore, 2016: 289) Forty-five years later, the situation is not much better. Marvel executives even try to put the blame on the readers, because apparently the stories about diverse characters are not selling. (Cain, 2017)

To be fair, in 70s it has been a real issue. Nothing has been selling. Even Wonder Woman. The feminist movement is divided. Radical, liberal and intersectional movements emerge, at odds with each other. The Second Wave supports a predominantly white, heterosexual view.

In 1987, Wonder Woman is rebooted. Pérez and Wein make her more ethnic, acknowledging her origins. They finally bring up the fact that on an island with 100 percent female population, homosexual relationships take place. (Wonder Woman Vol. 2 #38, 1990) In the #180 issue Diana is in a relationship with an African American man, Trevor Barnes. She gains her powers back. She addresses the issues of race, sexuality and gender. Wonder Woman rises again on the crest of the Third Wave of Feminism: a struggle for equality, diversity, complexity, inclusivity, individualism and cultural critique. (Cocca, 2014) However, due to historical processes, as history does not evolve in a linear, progressive fashion, the maturity and growth call for a major backlash (Cocca, 2016: 10). The comic books are then overflowing with hyper-masculine men and hyper-sexualized women. The new Wonder Woman, Artemis, has been criticized and remained unaccepted both by readers and by the characters of the comics themselves. For instance, Batman is openly dismissive of her and objects to her presence, going as far as forbidding Artemis to even sit in Diana’s chair in the Justice League Headquarters. (Wonder Woman Vol. 2 #90, 1994) The problem with Artemis is that she is too aggressive, too rash, and therefore, does not fit the norms of femininity, imposed by the predominantly male audience.

Wonder Woman is rebooted anew in 2011, as mentioned before. Contrary to the critiques that Artemis has received, this Diana is also aggressive and ‘male-like’. Here we can notice a similar pattern. Because female empowerment associates in men’s mind opposite proportionately with male disempowerment, a strong female superhero that challenges the social structures terrifies the reader. Hence, Amazons are both objectified and dehumanized. They are no longer peaceful immortal protectors – after the reboot, in order to maintain their population and quench their sexual thirst, they engage in sexual intercourses with sailors, who have expressed dubious consent and are often killed off afterwards. Newborn girls are to stay on the island, while boys are sold into slavery to Hephaestus in exchange for weapons. Amazons’ queerness is erased from the narrative. Wonder Woman discovers that she has a brother, who is somehow more powerful than she is. (Justice League Vol. 2 #50, 2016)

She also pursues romance with Steve Trevor. Their relationship is truly a double-edge sword. He has appeared in the first issue of Wonder Woman and has remained her supporting character since. The polarity of his character lies in the interpretation. From one side, he is a ‘token boyfriend’ (Robbins, 2006), from the other, he is a lonely boy in the refrigerator. Robbins argues that introduction of Steve Trevor should ensure the reader in Wonder Woman’s heterosexuality. Therefore, he is the political instrument that positions Wonder Woman in the framework of heteronormativity. On the other hand, it is an interesting subversion of the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Steve Trevor gets in trouble and Wonder Woman rushes to his rescue. His suffering propels her plotline and he is secondary to her character, not having much of a distinct personality, changing with the trends over time, reflecting what kind of man is popular at that instance. The only constant is the mesmerized ‘Angel’ to Diana, which, in fact, either baffles or irritates her. (Sensation Comics #2, 1942) Either way, the existence of the character of Steve Trevor restricts Wonder Woman from exploring her diverse sexuality, but on the other hand constructs a new meaning for visual representation of Wonder Woman in the comics.

During the Second World War, people have been constantly bombarded – by standardized imagery. With the rise of Communism and the National Socialism, the rhetoric of good and bad has returned to the military conflict. One side is morally right; their opponents then must be immoral and wrong. One side is the hero and the other side is the villain, aiming to oppress, torture and destroy. As we know from the fairytales, from everything we have been taught, the good side always wins the evil. The hero always arrives just in time and saves everyone. This stream of non-stop visuals from the media has produced something Alvin Toffler calls a ‘mass-mind’. (Toffler, 1980: 176) The comic books promote All-American ideology and the image of the superhero that defends the world with the help of the good sports from the American Army. It is a ready-to-wear moral certainty. The movements are represented by a particular group: the feminist movement is predominantly white and heterosexual; the LGBT movement receives one-dimensional representation of the G.

In the late 70s the stream gradually becomes less uniform. Toffler introduces the concept of ‘a blip culture’ (177), a culture of confusion, feeling of abandonment and anger, because now the visuals are fragmented, contradictory, people are left to give these ‘blips’ their own meaning. The system pulsates with bigger and bigger amounts of data. Today we want out information fast. Faster. Memes, photos, tweets, and headlines of the articles we are never going to open to read in full at the top of the IPhone screen. We prefer to digest information through visuals. It does not matter where we live, in a developed or a developing country, in a metropolitan city or in the countryside, we stay up to date with the pop-culture. It necessarily consists of the modern and old media, which become another ode of propaganda and promotion of the ideas, people and trends that just ought to become popular. The power of textual is substituted by the power of the visual.

Comics are the low genre of entertainment. It is primarily identified as being strictly for children and youth (Ndalianis, 2011: 113). And yet it has victoriously invaded the mainstream media. No matter how much so-called nerds desire to maintain the illusion of an exclusive boy-club, who are socially awkward and misunderstood by everyone, it is no longer a niche. The comic book characters’ faces decorate lunch boxes and backpacks; they become a new type of celebrity, symbols of the generations. It is no longer the comics in itself that is important – but the superheroes. The phenomenon of the superhero has transcended the medium of the comic book. Pop-culture turns politics into another component of the field of entertainment, and brings it on the transnational level. It becomes a performance, where the spectators are the citizens, divided into the politically charged individuals and apolitical witnesses. The superheroes are a fiction, but the borders of the fiction and the reality blur. With appearance of the superheroes on the screen, the audience starts associating the character with the face of the actor. Because the superheroes are already surrounded by myths, different interpretations and fandom, the figure of the superhero can become more real than the person, playing him or her. The imagery and simulacra, which are the foundation of the society, create a model of the prevailing life style of the said society. It is not the aggregate of the characters, but the social relationships between people, intermediated by these characters. (Baudrillard, 1994)

To support my argument about how the superheroes received the status of celebrities and how Wonder Woman has become a simulacrum of the political figure, we need to break down the process into five stages. I shall bring some examples to build a case to explain how the superheroes have evolved in our consciousness and from mirrors have transformed into active agents that represent and influence masses.

In 1996, a special edition comic book has been released, featuring Superman, to promote the landmine awareness among children. The comic has been distributed to Bosnia and the territories of the former Yugoslavia. DC has published the comic book in cooperation with the Department of Defense and UNICEF. So, exhibit one: the superheroes, as the role models, are suitable to educate children.

In 2016, a certain video has gone viral under the name Avengers Against Trump. In reality, it has little to do with Marvel and its team of superheroes, but it has starred some of the actors from the cast of the Avengers, such as Scarlett Johansson, who have been emphasizing the importance of each and every vote. Their disdain for Trump becomes the disdain of the superhero they play. Exhibit two: the process is started, the reality and the fiction begin to merge, the figure of the actor is perceived not as a celebrity of interest, but as the avatar of the superhero.

On February 7, 2016, Turkish Airlines has released a commercial, where they have been ‘pleased to announce the new destination: Gotham City’. Ben Affleck appears during the commercial, credited as Bruce Wayne. Exhibit three: real life companies utilize the superheroes as the ambassadors of the brand. The line between performers and the superheroes they play becomes even thinner. The superhero becomes more real.

In this fashion, Wonder Woman is no different. Maybe even more exemplary, as she has been created specifically as feminist propaganda. The artwork in Mural, Philadelphia, depicting Wonder Woman landing a punch on Donald Trump, illustrates quite well the extent to which the reality of our social and political consciousness and superhero narratives influence each other.

Wonder Woman is a superhero, which defends all defenseless and openly stands against discrimination and oppression – and there she stands against Donald Trump, a person in a position of power, who is infamous for his racism and sexism. Exhibit number four: gathering information and background from the comics, TV-shows and movies, we analyse it and draw our own conclusions and assume that the superheroes have certain opinions about the realm of noumena, to which they do not belong, and what these opinions would be. Most people would agree that Batman is – notice how the conditional would be is dropped – for gun control. Harley Quinn is crazy about Comic-Cons. Wonder Woman is anti-Trump.

Wonder Woman has become a symbol and a spokesperson of modern feminism through this fusion of fiction, politics and personalities of the actresses. Wonder Woman has become a simulacrum of a celebrity and by extension a political figure. She makes choices, supports some politicians and publicly disapproves others. The critical point of this development takes place on October 21, 2016, when the UN has decided to use Wonder Woman in an honorary role in the empowerment campaign to fight for gender equality, and thus, Wonder Woman is appointed as the UN ambassador. The final exhibit: it shows that the superhero is treated like a real person and has been given exercisable political power. One might point out that she has been demoted from the position two months after, but the case rests. We live in a world, where Wonder Woman has become an ambassador of the United Nations, even if only for two months.

(Wonder Woman design art, Harry G Peter, 1942)

Bibliography

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Robbins, T. (2006). Wonder Woman, Lesbian Or Dyke?: Paradise Island as a Woman's Community. Available at: http://girl-wonder.org/papers/robbins.html [last accessed on 15 April, 2018]

Toffler, A. (1981). The third wave. London: Pan in association with Collins.

Ndalianis, A. (2011). Why Comics Studies? Cinema Journal, 50(3), 113-117.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Fly to Gotham City with Turkish Airlines! Super Bowl TV SPOT (2016) Available at:

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Avengers Against Trump. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnK9tEdNjX8 [last accessed on 8 May, 2018]

#Wonder Woman #Diana Prince #DC comics #dc girls

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