#my little stories

[karlakattz]

What happened in the night before the wedding…

(Sorry, not beta read 🙈, all mistakes are mine)

He’s tossing and turning and tossing and turning. It’s too hot and when he pushes the blanket down it gets too cold. Nothing’s right here, the bed too small, too hard, somewhere is a clock relentlessly ticking and it drives him mad. Aaron is ready to jump up and throw the goddamn thing out of the window.

He’s back in the flat above the pub. In the guest room, mind you, because his old room was supposed to be Gracie’s nursery.

Aaron sighs and rubs his face exasperated. Now he’s thinking about her and his heart aches. The little sister he never met, but is going to miss forever.

His mum’s a mess. She tries to hide it, the attempt is bad though and his dad isn’t doing much better. Aaron’s not sure how they’ll make it through tomorrow if he’s honest.

Bloody hell, he isn’t sure how he’ll make it through tomorrow!

Marrying Robert.

He’s really going to marry Robert?

It seems so unreal after all that happened. Sometimes, when he thinks about it, like now, it’s a little overwhelming. The thought of how far they’ve come. What happened in those past three and a half years was the stuff of those stupid soaps Diane loves to watch. And yet, here they are. In only a few hours he’s going to meet Robert at the altar.

He’s really going to marry Robert.

Like, for real this time. With a vicar and flowers and matching suits and all. Aaron folded invitation cards and table decoration. This is happening. And in front of the whole village no less. A gay wedding in Emmerdale. With Aaron Dingle and Robert Sudgen as grooms. Who would have seen that coming, eh? Not Aaron, that’s for sure. His mind wanders back to his teenage years, ten years back, when he was that terrified kid, lost and confused and so damn angry at the world.

I’d rather live a lonely life than a gay one, he once shouted into Paddy’s face. The memory brings a sad smile on his face.

If he’d only known then what he knows now.

Love isn’t scary, love isn’t a mug’s game. And in the end it doesn’t matter if it’s a gay love or not. Robert is his friend, his home, the anchor that keeps him from spiralling and ultimately the reason why he’s still here.

And Aaron is going to marry Robert.

How is supposed to sleep when his heart keeps hiccuping in his chest, his hands are clammy and his brain won‘t give him a break? Aaron groans in frustration, tossing and turning once more, rearranging the pillow, but it still doesn‘t feel right.

He‘s missing Robert.

This is pathetic, seriously, it’s only night! Aaron knows that, technically, he can‘t change the feeling though. There is no pillow like Robert‘s chest and no godforsaken ticking watch can replace the steady thumping of Robert‘s heart.

Minutes turn into hours, stretching endlessly.

At some point, Aaron hasn‘t even noticed, he must have dozed off, because the next thing he notices is that his head is lying on something solid, something warm and moving. Something familiar.

Long and strong arms are wrapping around him, holding him tight and Aaron grins. They are supposed to stay the night apart - his family insisted, because of bad luck or whatever and he thinks if this is a dream, it‘s a very pleasant one and he doesn‘t want it to end.

“Are you real?“ he mumbles.

“Couldn‘t sleep without your stupid beard giving me a rash,“ Robert mutters and yawns.

“Shut up,“ Aaron smiles and rubs his head contently against the body underneath him.

This is so much better.

“Go to sleep, Mr Sugden,“ his fiancé says. His soon-to-be-husband. He sounds like he‘s smiling himself.

“…‘kay.“ Aaron pauses.

He‘s going to marry Robert.

"Mr Dingle.“

[asteriasgarden]

ao3’s been trending since it went down and came back up and every time i get on here and look my heart sinks

[puppyeared]

filipina miku!! my mom helped me with her outfit ^_^

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[camilleflyingrotten]

[bamsara]

I think that one thing people fail to understand is that unsolicited literary criticism coming from an online stranger who is reading with no knowledge of what the authors intended goal is, is not going to be received the same as say: the authors beta reader or friends who know what the authors intended goal and has the sufficient knowledge and input to help the author reach that desired outcome.

"But I'm only trying to be helpful" How do I know you have the knowledge and literary skill for you to be able to actaully do that when we don't know each other and you are essentially a stranger to me? Are you applying this criticism based out of personal biased experience and desire to see the story or characterization be driven in another direction or tweaked, or do you know the author's intentions for the character? If the story is incomplete, are you basing your criticism of a character on the incomplete narration with only partial information available of them or are you building up a report until the story's completion? Did the author provide you with the information needed to make a fully informed criticism?

Have you discussed with the author what their plans are or are you assuming them based off the narration, especially if the narration is proven or implied to be unreliable or missing key points of the plot? Are you unbiased enough to help them reach their desired outcome for the characters and story regardless of your personal feelings towards the characters/antagonists and setting? Can you handle being told your specific input isn't wanted because you're a reader and/or have no written anything relating to their genre or topic? Do you understand and respect that the author's personal experiences might influence their writing and make it different than how you would have done it personally? Do you understand if an author only wants input from a specific demographic relating to their story?

If it's for fanfiction or other hobby media, are you holding a free hobby to a professional standard? Are you trying to give criticism because you feel like the author has produced 'subpar job performance' of their fic? Are you viewing their work as a personal intimate outlet or something that must conform with mass media? Are you applying rules and guidelines when the fic is shared for simple sharing sake? Is your criticism worded appropriately and focused on the parts where the author has requested input on rather than a general dismissal and or disapproval?

Have you put yourself in a place where you assumed you have the input needed for the story to evolve better, or have you asked what the author needs and what they're having trouble with? Can you handle having your criticism rejected if the author decides their story doesn't need the change and not take it as a personal offense against your character? Are you crossing that boundary because you think you are doing the author a favor? Are you trying to be helpful, or do you just want to be?

I think sometimes when people hear authors go 'please don't give me unsolicited writing advice or criticism' they automatically chalk it up to 'this author doesn't want ANY constructive feedback on their stuff at all' and not "i already have trusted individuals who will help me with my writing goals and- hey i don't know you like that, please stop acting so overly familiar with me'

[tooquirkytolose]

~The Most Beautiful Woman in The World~

Download on itch.io for extra content!

[noodles-and-tea]

"STANLEY WITH BABY FORD ON THE OTHER HAND" (from tags)

Noodles? What are you planning to do to us? Should I get a dust pan to sweep my heart off the floor now?

It’s goING GOOD NO PROBLEMS HERE NOTHING CAN GO WRONG!!!

[inbabylontheywept]

the house i grew up in was a little bit of a fixer upper. for the first 19 years, my dad just sort of slowly fixed it, but pretty early on in college, he came into a large amount of cash and decided to just do the whole thing at once. so he rented a different house for like, 2 months that was just a block down from us, and then got a bunch of contractors to fix original house ASAP. it was kind of crazy, but it compressed many years of work into like, three months.

the sitting in a new house for three months was actually pretty fun. and i shouldnt really complain at all (staying at home while in college is a sweet deal)

but.

but. my parents are fairly hard of hearing, and their bedroom in the old house was in the furthest possible annex from everyone else. wheras in the rental it was just in the middle of the house. so without going into details, i was extremely aware that my parents were having sex like, eight times a day. my dad had just retired and i guess they were celebrating, which is great i guess, having parents that really like each other is way better than the alternative, but also, it did make me envy their deafness. i kept headphones on for so long that year i got literal ear calluses.

at the same time, the house my buddy from the shoe incident grew up in flooded. turbo flooded. they burst like, two pipes at once and the damage was so severe they had to redo all the flooring and all the drywall. his family actually had homeowners insurance, which is either incredible or suspicious for a family that used the drained pool in their backyard to store rusty scrap metal. so insurance was handling the work, but in the meantime, they were crammed into a very small hotel room space. we did the math on it then, it averaged about 80 square feet a person.

so one day i got home, and i was chilling, and then six rolled around, and apparently six o'clock was sex o'clock because my parents decided to flex their cardio. i grabbed my headphones and prayed that god would do for me what he did for beethoven, but that failed to work, and then seven rolled around and my parents were still at it, which again, very impressive, but was pushing me to swap out judas for mozart in those prayers. there's a definitive point where you stop praying to be deaf and instead pray that god could take you to a nice field and pop you like a gore-balloon.

i was about five minutes away from that point when my friend called me and basically said i have been stuck in a 500 square foot space with 6 people and i didn't have many marbles to start but what few i had are gone. please. if we are friends, if we were ever friends, take me out of here just for a moment.

and i was still pretty mad at him, but i had pity on the poor guy. also helped that i was desperate to leave the house. so i drove the chickenshitmobile to the hotel and i picked him up, and then we did our normal hangout activity, which was go to food city and buy produce. his normal house was, on a good day, nasty, and his backyard was, as i stated before, mostly used to store mosquito larvae and rusty metal, so what we'd always done before was just walk to the grocery store a half block away and leer at vegetables.

so we did that and it was like old times again. they had some radishes that were expired, so i could buy like, literally an entire grocery bag of them for about $5. so i did. i really like radishes. he got a coconut because he liked fruit and beating things with hammers.

which probably would've been great except we didn't have a hammer, so instead we spent about 30 minutes stomping itike it owed us money. when it finally cracked we cheered like we just got the winning touchball at the superdome and then he ate some of the flesh, and i ate some of the radishes, and we admired the black, starless sky of the city before i took him back to his hotel room.

and then we got pulled over.

i forgot to turn my lights on because the street all around the food city was ludicrously well lit. so it went from being pretty bright, to pretty bright and flashy, then i pulled into a parking lot and a cop came to ask us for IDs which is where everything went to shit:

i’d forgotten my license at home. 

the cop was was actually kind of chill about it - he said he could get by with just an address. except i did not know my address. i hadn't memorized the new one yet. so i told the cop, my house is getting remodeled, i don't know my address right now. and then he went to my friend, and my friend said the exact same thing. house getting remodeled, staying somewhere else, no address, sowwwwwwy.

now the cop genuinely didn't know what to do. he went back to his car, and i was stressed that i was about to get into HUGE trouble so i started eating the radishes and my buddy started eating more of his coconut, and we actually managed to eat like a quarter of both before the cop came back. we ate enough produce that he could smell something weird in the air, and he asked what the smell was, and i said radishes, and my buddy said coconut, and the cop said which, and then we produced a large bag of droopy radishes and an absolutely brutalized coconut, and the cop was just like

so my buddy tried explaining how he was sharing a 500 square foot apartment with 6 people and wanted a fruit he could fight with power tools, and i tried explaining how i'd actually tried buying my parents like, board games and puzzles and stuff but nothing worked - the only thing my parents seemed to like doing right now was each other, and we both went on long enough and pathetically enough that the cop eventually went:

ok. stop.

and we stopped.

and he said do you know why i pulled you over?

and i said, because of my headlights, and my friend (who is hispanic) and the cop both looked at me like like i was the dumbest person in the entire world. and then the cop said no. that's why i'm allowed to pull you over. i checked your car because this neighborhood has a terrible sex trafficking problem, and i pull over every car i can to make sure no one is buying or selling sex. and you two are obviously doing neither. now i could give you, like, four tickets right now, but that would do nothing to make this area safer, so just turn your lights on, go home, drive safe, and try to be less stupid in the future.

and i said okay but i was thinking, you know, damn, this is just how i live man, i don't have a hidden third gear i can shift into. people can't just get smarter because it would be convenient. it's always convenient to be smart. i am literally trying my best.

but i didn't say anything because i was, slowly, learning how to filter what i said. instead i nodded and the cop left then i dropped my buddy off, and the last thing he said was said he owed me for responding to his SOS. I said he owed me for a lot of things, and he agreed that was true. then i drove home with my lights on, 5 under the speed limit, and arrived to a peaceful quiet home. I could’ve wept with relief but instead I went to bed.

the relief was short lived. i was woken up at 6 am by my parents. i swore, and then i prayed, and when i did not explode, i swore again. then i got up to make breakfast before my first class.

[tiredofsatansbullshit]

WHAT DO I DO NOW??

[egophiliac]

was this anyone else's first thought, or

[bizarrelittlemew]

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

[deamortis66]

why does every farming/life sim game have a different fishing mechanic and no tutorial for it. you pull out your fishing pole and click on the water and the next thing you know hieroglyphics are flying around everywhere, there's a timer in the bottom right counting down from 47.4, and the whole screen is shaking violently and flashing red every time you move your mouse

[rendevok]

Act I ~ The Prince

A tapestry for Let No One Sleep by @azalawa-scroggs on ao3

[peaceforpeople]

!!! WARNING !!! I don't intend to offend or humiliate anyone!

Yes, as you probably already understood, I live in Russia.

But despite everything, I like other countries, and also learn a lot of interesting things about other nationalities and cultures.

Plus, I'm a bit like foreign songs more than songs from my country.

Although my family are patriots, and I used to be one, but now I’m not so patriotic.

And besides YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, I want to use other social networks, like TikTok and Wattpad.

Of course, I really want to use them, BUT... now in Russia for some reason it’s so easy to see foreign videos and works.

Of course, my older sister tried to make it so that I could watch foreign TikTok, but for some reason it doesn’t load on my phone.

But Wattpad is a slightly different story...

I used to read it through Google, but one day I decided to download it so as not to go to Google every time, and that was a mistake...

After I downloaded it, I didn’t find what I wanted and deleted it, thinking “It’s probably better through Google”

And as soon as I deleted Wattpad and wanted to use it through Google, I realized that now I wouldn’t be able to read foreign works, and this really upset me!

I don’t understand why they do this at all, but I think that whoever decided to block access to foreign content had muck instead of brains at that moment!!

As for Twitter and Instagram, the problem is that now in my country it is impossible to register, let alone use these social networks!

Now I just wanted to share my opinion about my small problems with social networks.

[mobius-m-mobius]

#my man was NOT subtle 🤣😉

+ bonus: message received 😅