#not even gonna add the slash j

[don-a-tron9000]

ok just not gonna think about it and make an intro post in one sitting (will probably edit and add stuff later but who cares)

Greetings, internet!

oh gasp! how shocking you might be thinking! another donatello rise of the tmnt fictionkin! (what am i even saying anymore, i'm just rambling at this point)

hello! i'm donnie. slash crow. slash dee. slash dontron. slash [insert another thousand nicknames you could come up with]. as i've already said, i'm a donnie fictionkin and i use they/it/he + neos pronouns (i'm also a fox and crow therian (oh my god i said the name of my main account (it's @crow-the-fox and you should check it out because i post most of my art there and i'm so cool /j (shameless self promotion has now left the chat))))

under this is my kinfam, as leo called it

the one and only future boy, CJ! -> @apocalyptic-future-boy

my annoying twin dressed in blue! -> @anezian

peepaw leo -> @dis-in-disaster

the old tello -> @aster-in-disaster

technically not in the kinfam but my brain twin gets a mention too SHUTOUT TO THE BLOB THAT LIVES IN MY WALLS! -> @randomcerealbrand

uhhh there will be boundries and tags and stuff under the cut but not right now cause i'm tiiredd

oh hey you passed the barrier before there was anything, you get a comically large lollypop

[thecoolblackwaves]

Another Fic for @candcweek !!! This one is independent to the "Kiss and Marry" multi chapter one I've got going -- in fact, it's part of a different universe. A modern AU I'm calling Family Of Nerds (I made a post a post it). Join C+C as they have a little picnic date at sunset.

Fandom: The Silmarillion

Pairing: Tyelkormo/Curufin (implied)

Tags/Warnings: Modern AU, Family Of Nerds AU, Motorcycles, Stargazing, Implied Incest, Ambiguous Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff

Word Count: 1k

Summary: “At about eight years old, Tyelkormo had become obsessed with outerspace and astronomy, spending many hours in their backyard with a small telescope. Little Curvo often joined him - sometimes even sneaking out past his bedtime - to observe the twinkling lights and listen to the history his brother read about in his library books. Stargazing had become a private tradition for the two of them.”

AO3 A/N: This is set in my “Family of Nerds'' universe. My Tumblr blog @thecoolblackwaves has a post explaining it - basically, it’s a modern AU where Feanor, a philologist, and Nerdanel, an arts professor, have raised their kids to be their fully authentic, artistic, nerdy selves. Tyelko is a bow and arrow wielding forest ranger and gym bro, Curvo is a ballet dancer who failed to go professional and now creates jewelry and accessories for dance companies instead. I’m hoping to continually add to this universe! Not all installments are slash/incest, neither are they linear, but with this one it’s implied. Also I know absolutely nothing about motorcycles or astronomy so sorry for any inaccuracies.

……….

Tyelkormo’s favorite brother needed cheering up, and by god was he going to do it!

He wasn’t sure what exactly had happened between Curvo and Angrod, but whatever it was, they had both stormed out of their grandfather’s house visibly upset. While he generally got on with that particular half-cousin, Curufin always came first for him. Always. So he tailed him home and watched closely as his little brother sulked around the kitchen - not eating anything, though he eyed some chips - and then took a rather violent sounding shower.

Curufin tended to deny himself food when his emotions were in turmoil. A leftover habit from ballet classes, he suspected. Even though he wanted nothing more than to eat away his feelings, and was no longer required to maintain a ruthlessly flawless physique, he would instead choose to punish himself. Tyelkormo wasn’t having it.

He snuck around the house to gather his supplies, careful not to alert his brother to the opening and closing of doors. He then went into Curufin’s bedroom and laid out warm, comfortable clothes, along with his own leather motorcycle jacket and spare boots.

“What are you doing?”

Curufin’s voice, though flat, held no malice as he moped in with a towel around his waist. Tyelkormo considered this a private victory. Even when he felt like shit, Curvo awarded him and him alone his patience and the softer, more vulnerable sides of his personality.

“I thought I could take you on a ride for a while. It’s a beautiful night, and I want to spend time with you.”

“Are you gonna ask me what happened once I’m trapped next to you going eighty miles an hour?”

“No, I won’t ask unless you want me to. And only seventy-five, don’t wanna deal with state troopers.”

Curufin snorted, then he nodded. He shut the door and dropped his towel, casual nudity not bothering him, and got dressed.

They wheeled the bike out of the garage, Tyelkormo giving it a kickstart. Curufin secured his helmet and sat behind him, holding on tight as they peeled out of the driveway. Sharp winds whipped around their bodies and twilight glittered across the horizon.

Tyelkormo pulled into a fast food drive-thru despite his brother’s feeble protests. He also paid for their meals, despite louder protests, and drove them down scenic country roads to a secluded field.

He unpacked a picnic blanket from one of his saddle bags and heard Curvo snort in surprise. Grinning to himself, he also pulled out the candle he had nicked from the dining room table and lit it with a flourish, setting it safely within a wide metal dish and laying it in the center of their blanket.

Curufin was giggling uncontrollably now, pink in the face, looking light and happy. He gracefully fell into a seated position and divied out their cheeseburgers and french fries.

“Sorry this isn’t chocolate covered strawberries and wine, or anything, but I was starving,” Tyelkormo said, laughing as well.

“It’s fine, I prefer this anyway. When did you come up with the idea for a picnic?” Curvo asked curiously as he drowned his fries in honey mustard sauce. Tyelko wrinkled his nose.

“While you were showering. I wanted to take you out to dinner, but I also wanted to be alone with you, and it’s so nice outside today. Seemed like a good compromise.”

“It is,” Curufin reassured. “This is nice. Peaceful.”

They fell silent for some time, admiring the last streaks of sunset while they finished their food. Around them, insects chirped and buzzed, and a few fireflies emerged from the grasses.

Curufin laid back with a sigh, arms crossed behind his head. Tyelkormo quickly joined him after blowing out the candle, cuddling close to his side.

“Will you tell me about the constellations?” his younger brother asked.

It was a question he’d heard many times over the years. At about eight years old, Tyelkormo had become obsessed with outerspace and astronomy, spending many hours in their backyard with a small telescope. Little Curvo often joined him - sometimes even sneaking out past his bedtime - to observe the twinkling lights and listen to the history his brother read about in his library books. Stargazing had become a private tradition, the vast night skies had witnessed the making of many intimate memories between them.

“Well, there’s Orion-Orome, the Hunter. He rides a white horse, Pegasus-Nahar - the one right there, to the left - and leads the hunt for evil creatures. Sometimes he’s accompanied by a pack of dogs led by Canis-Huan Major, the one stretching out its leg.”

“That’s who you named Huan after, right?” Curufin asked, curling into his side. Tyelkormo put his arm around his shoulders and played with the ends of his hair with his free hand.

“Yeah, that’s right! The best boy in the whole world. You know, he once helped the big constellation, Andromeda-Luthien, to defeat Cepheus-Morgoth. She was said to be incredibly beautiful, and sang a song that enchanted him so she could steal the jewels from his crown, and rode away on the dog’s back with her husband Perseus-Beren. It’s that one to the right straight ahead.”

“Sounds unfair to me,” Curufin muttered, “Stealing someone’s symbol of power. Where did she go?”

“No one knows, they disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. Some say that when great heroes die, they turn into stars themselves. For example, Cygnus-Elwing. She sacrified herself to save her people and turned into a bird flying the skies, then became a star with her husband, Auriga-Earendel. There’s a myth that once a year, they board his ship and sail across the skies as a bright shooting star.”

Curufin hummed, cuddling closer. He kissed his brother’s cheek.

“I don’t know how people come up with this stuff. I just like the way the light shines from them, it’s beautiful.”

“It is,” his brother agreed. “Like you.”

“Oh, sap. Knock it off.”

“Never. Oh look, Curvo, there’s a shooting star now!”

Closing his eyes and smiling, Curufin rested his hand over Tyelkormo’s heart.

“I’ve got everything I need.”

“Oh, my god. You call ME sappy?”

The End :)

[kuroecchy]

the pic in the list are not mine, I just found the pics from pinterest

fair warning the theme i chose for my october prompts are completly randome so I have nothing planned for any of them.

English is not my first language and no beta.

All of this is cross posten on AO3

Day 3 - Late

Everyone knows that Tony Stark never arrives on time. Especially to meetings (both board and Avengers), he usually gets late on purpose for those. Mostly because he hates them but still. Late.

Sometimes it was genuinely because he's late. He often loses track of time when he's in the lab.

Sure, JARVIS tries to remind him, but when the engineer is engrossed in his work? Nothing, and I say nothing can distract him.

He's off on his own little world!

Everyone who knows the engineer long enough knows that.

Only few people can get the man to stop; Harley, Peter, and of course his boyfriend Stephen Strange.

Well the point is, for whatever reason it may be, Anthony Edward Stark is always late.

Well it was never really a problem before. Stephen even found it amusing when his boyfriend is late to the Avengers meeting only to make a grand entrance each time. Stephen particularly found it funny to see the others' exasperated looks.

So of course Tony never tried to fix that particular bad (according to others minus Stephen) habit of his.

So it had hit him harder when it had happened.

Tony had been down in his workshop as usual, engrossed on his current project while blasting his favorite song on full volume.

He had told JARVIS to not disturb him and to turn away any calls. Well except for calls from Peter and Harley (cuz they're his kids), Rhodey and Pepper (cuz if not they're gonna give a lifetime of scolding), and Stephen (his boyfriend obviously).

Incase of an emergency he had expected them to call him, even though he's technically retired (though no one really believes a hero can retire voluntarily like he did).

On another note he was informed by Peter of what had happened.

It started like this :

'Sir, Peter has entered the tower and is now rushing to the workshop.' That was the first clue that something wrong had happened.

But Tony, being engrossed in his own little world, simply hummed in dismissal.

'Sir, may I warn you that Peter is not in the best of moods.' and that's the second tick.

At those words Tony paused, "is he injured?" Worry laced his voice.

But before JARVIS could answer the door to his workshop slid open.

"Mr Stark! Where were you!" Came the voice of his young apprentice.

Tony turned out to see a red face. Eyes swollen, tear tracks still visible.

The father figure rushed to the boy in an attempt to check for any visible injuries that could cause his son to be in this state, "wh-what happened? Peter are you-"

"I'm Mr Stark." He spoke with a shaky voice, "it's Doctor Strange…"

…What? Stephen what happened to him?

Suddenly the retired hero felt like he had just taken an ice bath.

"everyone's been calling you…" said the young hero in a weak voice.

"J-Jarvis…?"

'There have been 132 missed calls in the past hour, Sir. Mostly from Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff. Other calls had been from other currently active members of the Avengers, Sir.' His faithful AI spoke quietly.

And that's another cold bath. Add the feeling of a rug being pulled from under him.

“You really haven’t been paying attention have you…”

Horror creeping into his voice, “Where is he now?”

“Metro general. He’s been undergoing surgery for his injuries.”

“I-I need to-”

Tony took off to his balcony not even bothering to finish his sentence. Jumping off and feeling as the nanites surround him. He quickly blasted to Metro General Hospital.

Not caring about how others looked at him in awe, he walked straight to the receptionist’s desk.

“Stephen Strange. Where is he?” he said rather harshly.

The shocked slash scared the receptionist who could only point out the direction to the emergency room. Tony mumbled out a quick thank you before running to where the receptionist had pointed to.

When he finally saw the heroes sitting outside the operating room he was panting.

The atmosphere was somber and when they looked at him Rogers was the first one to speak.

“Tony… you're late…”

~ END ~

Note :

If y'all noticed when Tony got the news of something bad had happened to Stephen, Tony called for JARVIS. As y'all can see I usually wrote JARVIS’ name in all capital but there I used lower case.

It was only to add to the dramaticness of it all, showing that Tony had spoken it in a weak voice.

[flautistsandpeonies]

Not about MDZS, so skip if you want.

So, I somehow managed to stay oblivious about The Last of Us part II for all this time, but now I’m all caught up and I have some shit I wanna get off my chest so hit the j key or scroll cause it’s gonna be long.

The game is still anti black as fuck, and Druckman’s zionist fantasy is all over the game. It’s toted as an LGBT game, but is anything but.

The first thing I noticed from the first last of us is that the true gameplay starts with a white woman shooting a black man in the head and ends with a white man shooting a black woman in the face. There is an overindulgence in black death in this game compared to the white characters and that carries over into the sequel.

I’m supposed to believe that Ellie, whos first love was a black girl who she watched die slowly from a zombie infection and was left behind due to her immunity that she didn’t know about at the time, who befriended Sam and was attacked by his zombified form and was forced to watch not only as his brother shot him down but also forced to watch as Henry blew his own brains out, whos closest bond she had before meeting Joel was Marlene, her mother’s best friend, and only learned about her death at the hands of her surrogate father years later would watch another black woman gasp for breath from fungal spores and then torture and beat her to death with a metal pipe.

--------------

Abby’s reaction to her father’s death is to join a fascist militia, get her kicks by torturing seraphites (who are supposed to represent Palestinians), and become a top killer in their regime against said religious group.

Yara and Lev are juxtaposed as the “good ones” because they want to leave their religious group (the seraphites/Palestinians are depicted as a transphobic group who hang and disembowel people). Abby does not care that the WLF is going to raise down the seraphites’ home- as she still carries their beliefs- she just wants to save the two good seraphites because they “are her people” despite only “knowing” them for not even a week. In fact, had Owen not gone AWOL, Abby would have happily killed Yara and Lev along with the rest of the seraphites when the WLF attacked their home.

-------------

A pregnant bisexual, Jewish woman of color is brutalized twice on screen and almost has her throat slashed. The father of her baby, an Asian man, is shot in the face. In the end of the story, her partner abandons her and her baby.

A lesbian has her fingers chewed off, a member of her community was openly hostile towards her, and in the end all of her close relations are either dead or have left her-her one greatest fear.

---------------

Okay, I’m done. If I get heated again I might add more, but right now I just want to wash it from my memory. I hope Druckman’s racist, zionist ass chokes.

[throwaway-yandere]

HELP that ANONS idol group lmaooooo i have more things to add in if i may:

-the member uses codenames to refer to each other whenever needed

-they all use one vtuber model and they offer no intros, so only hardcore fans knows the telltales of who's currently streaming based on how they talk and vague stuff like that. even then they're sometimes completely off the mark

-they use voice changers or tts so literally they're unidentifiable via voice either

-the topic they talk about varies from snail facts, praises about a certain... person, who apparently brought them together, idols, art, games, etc.

-teyvat production has tried to reach out to them (because some members seem to like certain idols under their management) for a collab, but ANONS' management keep rejecting the offer

also ESTH- i mean- kaeya's pd, kindly report to the ceo's office at once please and thank you

- ✾

And I'M the manager slash CEO /j. Watch yourself Alhaitham–

I'd probably binge the crap out of these. I am OBSESSED with the idea that they only use one model and there's like 22 different people using said model duajisoaoa.

Heizou's probably the only watcher who's spot on when guessing who's who and subtly teases his producer that he knows what's up. Kazuha who has one favorite whose quotes he puts in his scrapbook sometimes. Xiao who's in denial but was apparently the first person that bought their merch and have been keeping the thank you letter in his closet. And Venti being the one who won't stfu begging for a collab that's never gonna happen.

Zhongli still thinks it's one person and barely watches anything. (Diluc who doesn't watch it at all cause he's always busy). Ayato and Childe LOVES gifting subs. Thoma had to pay for Ayato's expenses cause he forgot to set up an online wallet. Kaeya probably sends comments that can lowkey get him banned and he's always on thin ice, the mods find him funny af. Itto being the weirdo who spams ANON reaction images in the ADDICKTZ group chat in the middle of a brainstorming session. And then there's Dainsleif who's hoping that whatever Venti's planning won't work cause he accidentally found out who's one of the anons and he'd rather not work with snai–

Albedo's probably down for a collab. He thinks having a Vtuber model would be interesting and "less work to maintain fan-idol relationships." Gorou, his sweet apprentice, probably crashed Albedo's computer when they tried to set it up lol

Oh, and Aether and Lumine knows who everyone is but keeps it a secret because they pity the ANONS' mental state.

"This is their only stress relief, huh?"

[nokturneop55n1]

Week 3

Postmortem on platformer

I got sick this week and didn't have the energy to continue with my platformer prototype…But this is what I've done before I got sick (This is actually made in Week 2, but whatever, I just need to put something here)

This game is supposed to have one protagonist/player with 3 forms (types of weapons) but I don't have the time and sense of art for this. Hence, I downloaded three assets from Game Art 2D (https://www.gameart2d.com/freebies.html). The Cowgirl, the Bot and the Ninja. (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) Each one of them represents a unique weapon form (Gun/Slash/Strike).

Figure 1. Free Asset Characters

Note. From Game Art 2D by Alfitra, 2024 (https://www.gameart2d.com/freebies.html)

I added an attack function for the gun (cowgirl)

Gameplay Demo:

Yeah, you can't do anything other than move left/right, jump, and shoot bullets that do no damage.

The Slime doesn't even take damage, not to mention to move around the map.

Form switching

Actually, there is one more thing. The characters are stacked together so that whenever character 1 moves, character 2 follows, the same goes for character 3. When the player presses 1, it switches to cowgirl and sets the camera on her, simutaneously, when 2 is pressed, it switches to the bot form and sets the camera onto it.

That's the early solution for switching between 3 different forms, I thought about moving not-in-use character forms to different y-axis but that's gonna cost more time to investigate, thus, this is the quickest way of implementing it. I would consider using some more commands or modules to bond the characters together so they don't shift due to unknown reasons.

For the design part, I prioritized playability: I didn't want to set only one key for switching the form, because that would reduce the gameplay experience and combo possibilities, plus, having number keys to switch would be more convenient as well. To finish off the solution, I just need to get the slime to move within a designated area and create two deviants of it with different weak and resist attributes.

What I would've add:

Have a working health bar

Have three different terrains in the tutorial part and get the player to try out three types of weapons

Add damage feedback to characters and enemies

Add a combo display

Add checkpoints

Add energy bar (to constraint the turns of movement and get players to maximize their damage before reaching the checkpoint)

Add more types of enemies like Hollow Knight:

Note. From Incremental Enemy Design In Hollow Knight by J, De Heras, 2021 (http://jasondeheras.com/gamedesign/2021/3/6/early-game-hollow-knight-enemies)

Bibliography

Alfitra, Z. (2024). Game Art 2D. Retrieved from Free Assets For Everyone: https://www.gameart2d.com/freebies.html

De Heras, J. (2021). From Incremental Enemy Design in Hollow Knight from JasonDeHeras: http://jasondeheras.com/gamedesign/2021/3/6/early-game-hollow-knight-enemies

[jasonbehrs]

i wanna read every word, chapter 2

by airauralintensity (aka me, jasonbehrs!)

“Have you ever fallen in love with someone you’ve never met?” “Uh, do you mean like we’ve-been-doing-long-distance-slash-online-dating or like I’ve-been-crushing-on-the-cute-barista-at-the-library-cafe?” “Ummm, more like I’ve-read-their-poems-and-sure-they’re-very-talented-but-their-handwriting-alone-makes-me-smile.” “… That’s oddly specific.”

fandom: kpop, super junior characters: eunhyuk, ryeowook; guest appearances by the rest of sj-m and yesung ship: eunwook genre: romantic comedy themes: alternate endings, strangers to lovers, handwriting, identity reveal setting: college chapter: 2/4 word count: 5.2k

read it below or on ffnet, aff, wattpad

A/N (6.6.2021): Welcome to the next installment folks! Some clarifying things:

- This is the first of two alternate endings to the story, which answers the question, 'What if Ryeowook finds out first?'

- I got some interesting reviews/PMs about the last chapter? Eunhyuk isn't pining after Yesung or anything, and I didn't mean to indicate that would be an aspect of the story. If you were looking forward to it, I'll be disappointing you today haha. Feel free to let me know how much you hate me in a review ;)

Also, today would have been my grandmother's 102nd birthday, so I'm dedicating this chapter to her since she always loved seeing me write. Love you, Nanay!

~~~

He and Hyukjae haven't hung out alone before, but he's sure this won't be awkward. Their only real link may have just been Yesung, but Hyukjae successfully ingrained himself into their entire friend group in the short weeks since they first met. Besides, even if Hyukjae weren't so willing to help him with his twisted scavenger hunt for love, Ryeowook thinks he'd like to hang out with him some time anyway. He's grown to like Hyukjae, really.

At least, that's what he tells himself when he turns the corner and sees Hyukjae sitting alone on a bench in the quad with his legs crossed, a laptop over one knee and an open notebook on the other, waiting for him to arrive.

Ryeowook takes a breath to steel his nerves then heads over to plop himself right next to the other. He doesn't say anything and takes out his own work instead. They don't have to start with the crush thing.

"Ah, my favourite person under 5'2". How do you do?" Hyukjae snarks without pausing his typing.

In response, Ryeowook uses a single finger to tip Hyukjae's notebook onto the ground without remorse.

"Ya!" Hyukjae picks up his notebook and slaps Ryeowook with it.

On the downswing, Ryeowook freezes.

"Oh shit, did I hit you that hard? Sorry, I didn't mean to," Hyukjae hurriedly apologises, but that's not it at all.

Ryeowook had caught a glimpse of the notes hurriedly scrawled across the open book. He would recognise that handwriting anywhere.

"Why don't we get started then," Hyukjae offers uneasily, eyeing how Ryeowook's stance hadn't relaxed yet. "Um, did you bring a copy of one of the notes like we discussed?"

Of course he did. Ryeowook was so excited to be one step closer to identifying the person behind the song lyrics that took up as much space in his brain as his Food Sciences lecture notes, he had brought the whole ass scrapbook with him, eager to show off his favourites to a new and willing audience.

But now, Ryeowook is panicking. He found the object of his affections much sooner than for which he was ready; and said object is sitting right next to him, staring at him expectantly and eager to help.

Not letting himself think it through, Ryeowook rummages through his bag looking for viable scraps of paper. There is no way he is going to hand Hyukjae's own work to him, so he makes do with what he's got.

He bypasses the lyric samples he actually prepared for today's meeting and found ones of his own making which he had intended to recycle weeks ago but never got around to. He silently thanks himself for this terrible habit as he frantically smooths out the small squares of paper before handing them to Hyukjae.

The other raises his eyebrows as he reads through the papers. "Damn, I was hoping that maybe one of these things had even a little similarity to an assignment we've heard so far, but no dice."

Ryeowook nods, affecting understanding disappointment even as he privately rejoices.

"Do you mind if I keep these? I can, like, surreptitiously check people's notebooks during group assignments," he offers with a laugh. "Pearl blue sticky notes can't be that common in a class of 50, right?''

Ryeowook smiles, wide and fake. "Fingers crossed!"

~Even though we're making awkward conversation, it's clear that we're happy to be together.~

Thus proceeds their search for Poem Person. (The gender-neutral nickname Mi had come up with stuck even after Hyukjae revealed those were not actually poems being left behind. Alliterative nicknames are just so catchy.)

"Okay, what if we tie a balloon to your chair and hope Poem Person likes balloons enough to take it with them around campus?" "No way, they won't take it." "How could you possibly be so sure?"

Sometimes, it's Hyukjae coming up with ridiculous plots.

"Trust me. They curl their lowercase L's." "I'm gonna let this go, but I want you to know that makes zero sense."

Plots which Ryeowook foils with equally ridiculous reasoning.

"''We might have never known each other, but we crossed faraway paths and came together. We crossed the distance of a stranger that's farther away than space.' Huh, not bad." "You think so?"

Sometimes, it's Hyukjae asking to read more of the scraps that Ryeowook collects, partially so Hyukjae can make fun of him, but mostly so that he has more clues.

"Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help me at all, but your man's got a way with words. I wonder why he doesn't submit any of the stuff you've shown me for class. It's worth critiquing."

An ask which forces Ryeowook to wrack his brain for passable imitations of song-lyrics-that-could-be-mistakenly-construed-as-poems and to get used to writing with his nondominant hand.

"Pass. Pass. Pass. Pass." "Really? You're passing on Park Hyungsik?"

Today, neither of them are feeling very motivated, so Hyukjae pulls up the Facebook profiles of his classmates and let Ryeowook play smash or pass because "it's fun to hear strangers' opinions on people you know."

"Oh, absolutely. Does that guy look like he cares where he dots his i's and j's? Hard pass," Ryeowook maintains.

Hyukjae shakes his head in amazement as he pulls back his phone. "You'll meet him one day, and you'll regret this moment; mark my words. Hyungsik is universally loved. Honestly, I'm not convinced yet Poem Person isn't him. He fits basically all of your criteria."

Ryeowook has to actively smother a knowing smirk. "What a shame."

He didn't come clean to Hyukjae in the quad that day because he panicked. Ryeowook was not mentally ready to meet the object of his affections so soon, much more confess, so he acted on impulse to buy himself some time.

Once he had it, he got curious.

It's no secret that Ryeowook had built up an idea of what Poem Person is like. The lyrics provided some insight, of course; but most of his intuition came from the handwriting itself. From what he could see, Poem Person was supposed to be intensely passionate, excitingly impulsive, and almost sickeningly romantic.

"Okay, how about this guy?" Hyukjae asks as he passes his phone over again.

Ryeowook takes one look at the screen and snorts. "Very funny. Pass."

The app is opened to a photo of Hyukjae himself posed unnaturally on a couch wearing a forward-facing snapback perched atop his head and an awkward half-smile, and Ryeowook refuses to look at it any longer before he does something he'll regret, like coo affectionately.

"Pass!?" Hyukjae repeats with mock-incredulity. "Don't you think he looks charming and witty and oh-so-loveable?"

Ryeowook indeed had a lot of thoughts about what Poem Person would look like, and 'charming,' 'witty,' and 'oh-so-loveable' have indeed flitted through his mind. Actually, Ryeowook finds that Hyukjae and Poem Person aren't altogether dissimilar.

Hyukjae is passionate about his craft, to be sure, but it doesn't occupy every one of his waking moments like Ryeowook expected. He is as much of a romantic as the next person is, but really Hyukjae is poetic, a distinction Ryeowook learns and appreciates very early on. Hyukjae is a little too thoughtful to be so impulsive, but his quick wit and ability to do/say/become whatever a situation calls for more than fulfill the quota for chaos that underlay Ryeowook's original supposition.

So yes, Ryeowook is withholding the truth so that he can slot the person he made up in his head into the person Hyukjae is, but it's been worth it.

"He looks like a brat and like his feet smell." "YAH! My shoes don't breathe!" "Get better shoes, then." "Give me the money, then." "Get a job, then." "That's not fair! Helping you find Poem Person is basically my part-time job!" "Consider it more of an unpaid internship."

Before Hyukjae takes his turn to volley back, his phone rings in his hand.

"Ah, as much fun as this was, I gotta go. I have a mini-showcase coming up, and I've been slacking on rehearsals." He shakes his phone towards Ryeowook, and the latter could see an alarm screen that reads "get your dumb ass to the gulliver center!"

Ryeowook's heart beats a noticeable thump thump all of a sudden. "Can I come with?"

"S-sure," Hyukjae says, shocked by the offer. "But why?"

That's a great question. For now, he says, "Because your internship is getting in the way of your studies, and I feel bad," but later, he'll know it's because he didn't want his time with Hyukjae to end so soon.

A grateful grin spreads across Hyukjae's face, and Ryeowook will add that onto his list of reasons later as well. "An audience is always welcome."

In no time, Hyukjae is in a practise room in the athletic center stretching his limbs every which way while Ryeowook watches as intently as possible while feigning interest in literally anything else in the room.

The bass-heavy noise music that Hyukjae puts on startles his attention back onto the dancer, and Ryeowook can no longer hide how blatantly he stares.

Hyukjae moves through the choreography so fluidly it almost looks lazy. He goes from jagged angles and harsh lines to sinewy curves and rolling waves to strong stomps and high jumps with no hesitation. He plays with the rhythm of the music, and he makes full use of the space available to him. Ryeowook is barely processing one impressive move when Hyukjae executes another one; and before he knows it, the performance is over.

"So," Hyukjae pants, "what'd ya think?"

"It's…" Jaw-dropping. Powerful. Hot. "… impressive," Ryeowook says at last.

Hyukjae smiles tightly. "Thanks. It actually needs a bit of work for the showcase, but I don't think the routine is all too shabby."

Ryeowook watches as Hyukjae watches himself through the mirror, redoing parts of the choreography over and over again at different tempos just to fine-tune his movements, and he can't help but feel like Hyukjae needed more from him.

"Um, I wonder if maybe it's lacking emotion?"

All movement halts. "What?"

Ryeowook didn't mean to say that; but now that it's out, he finds himself needing to continue. "You move well, um, obviously," he gestures awkwardly to Hyukjae's person, fighting a blush. "It looks physically difficult, sure, but what is it that you're trying to say? Like, I'm guessing you chose that song, too, right? So, why?"

Hyukjae stands in the middle of the room, arms limp by his side, and staring at Ryeowook with an unnervingly blank look on his face. Ryeowook hastily backpedals, "But hey, what do I know? I'm sure your professors will watch you and see all the nuances I can't with my untrained peon eyes. I was just… talking to talk, I guess."

"No, but I think you have a point," Hyukjae interjects.

Ryeowook perks up. "I do?"

"Yeah, like… I was so focused on trying to show what I can do with something only I could do, but that means basically nothing when any one of my classmates could learn my routine with only a week of practise. The only way I would be able to stand out is from whatever I put into it, but you made me realise I didn't put anything into it." He plops on the floor, eyebrows furrowed in consternation.

Ryeowook shakes his head adamantly. "No, no! There's clearly something there! You just need to, like, bring it out more. You have that whole idea—that this is something only you can do. You can take that, morph your routine into a testament to your need to prove yourself. Start with some trepidation, throw some desperation in the middle, and end with triumph. Honestly, I think I saw a little bit of that in your performance already. Maybe it was an accident, but now, just… do it on purpose."

"'Do it on purpose,'" Hyukjae repeats to himself. His head is down, so Ryeowook can't immediately tell what he thinks of the idea. He's ready to apologise again, even offer to go home so that Hyukjae can concentrate better, but then Hyukjae raises his head. "Alright, let me give that a try."

His eyes are filled with will and determination. Ryeowook, of all people, put those there.

He sits back and watches Hyukjae rehearse his routine over and over again, getting better and more evocative each time.

The Hyukjae before him is not a Hyukjae Ryeowook would have been able to guess based on his handwriting and lyrics alone.

Ryeowook knows basically nothing about dancing; but over the past few weeks, he's really come to know Hyukjae. He's noticed how the other is prone to express himself through movement, like when he accentuates his stories with body language and physical reenactments. It belies a comfort and confidence with his body and what it can do with which Ryeowook could never empathise. It's a subtle thing, but impactful nevertheless.

He smothers it down because he doesn't want to give Hyukjae the wrong idea, but he wants to laugh.

Only he could fall for a dancer's words first before anything else, and only he could fall for the same person twice.

~Where should I start? When should I say it? Darling, our seconds, our minutes together were beautiful.~

"Ryeowook, why haven't you asked to see my handwriting yet?"

"What?"

They had commandeered a study room in the library, but honestly neither of them are making a lot of headway in their respective assignments. Ryeowook didn't want anything to do with Organic Chemistry, but this conversation is making him reconsider his previous stance.

"Isn't that what you're into? Trying to infer people's personalities based on their handwriting?"

"I'm not into it. It just happened."

"Okay, sure, but aren't you, like, good at it now? Read mine! Tell me what it says about me."

Ryeowook, desperate to squash this idea immediately, blurts out. "It… It won't work!"

"Why not?" Hyukjae pouts.

Ryeowook scrambles. "Because I know you already. Yeah. I'll see and interpret things in a way that confirms what I already know."

Hyukjae eyebrows furrow in what Ryeowook can presume is consternation. "Sorry," he offers feebly.

Some more time passes, and Ryeowook makes mild progress on his O-Chem work, before Hyukjae speaks up again. "So if you can't do me, can you do my friend?" he asks with an excited tone that makes Ryeowook wary.

"I do not want to do your friend." You, however…

"NO! I mean: can you interpret my friend's handwriting? Here. He left it at my place last time we studied together."

Hyukjae's smirk radiates smug self-satisfaction, and with one look at the paper, Ryeowook understands why. He actively controls every muscle in his body to prevent the facepalm that's threatening to break loose.

He has to give Hyukjae props, though. If Ryeowook weren't already so intimately acquainted with the handwriting on the page before him, the other's ploy could have worked.

Regardless, he still finds himself in the position he was trying to avoid in the first place.

All the best lies are based in truth, right? "So I can tell your friend has a very high-stress major. The handwriting is cramped and small, like he can't waste a single stroke or else he'll miss something he needs to write down. Ah, see how he doesn't fully cross his t's and dot his i's? He thinks he'll be able to read his own handwriting later. He probably has decent memory or just has a lot of faith in himself."

Hyukjae nods with an impressed frown. "Huh, not bad."

It would be so, so easy to stop there, but Ryeowook can't. He loves Hyukjae's handwriting too much. "And look here," he points excitedly to a cross-out near the center of the page. "He could cross out his mistakes with a single line or a little squiggle, but he completely blocks it out instead. It suggests he has more confidence with the obvious; but really, I think he needs the reminder. Like, 'Yeah, I made a mistake. I'll move on, but I won't let myself forget. That way I don't do it again.'"

A moment later, Ryeowook realises with a jolt that he had been holding and smiling at the scrap paper a little too tenderly. He whips his head up in embarrassment, an explanation-slash-apology at the tip of his tongue, but Hyukjae doesn't seem to notice.

In fact, Hyukjae has been silent the whole time. Ryeowook chuckles awkwardly. "Am I right?"

"Huh?" Hyukjae intones as he's brought out of his reverie. Ryeowook thinks he sees something in his eyes when their gazes meet, but Hyukjae blinks and it's gone. "I'm sorry, what did you ask me?"

"I was wondering if I was right. About your 'friend,'" Ryeowook reminds, air quotes clear in his tone.

Hyukjae shuffles uncomfortably in his seat. "I think you're more right than even he's ready to admit," he says with a hand at the back of his neck and a sardonic quirk of his lips.

The sight causes an unexplainable swell of affection within Ryeowook, and he turns away. "He can take his time," he assures, eyes trained on his textbook even though he can't read a damn thing.

Hyukjae nods his thanks and turns back to his homework, but Ryeowook doesn't feel right letting it end here.

"Hey, wanna give my handwriting a try?"

~You always lift your head to look up at me. I want to take my big hands and cup your small cheeks.~

Next time they're meant to hang out, it's the weekend; and Hyukjae texts him to meet him at Bomnal.

"Both of us were here just two days ago, and we have to be here again in two days. Don't we spend enough time in Bomnal as it is?" Ryeowook complains as soon as he enters the atrium of the academic building.

"Think of it like a field trip. Come on, Wook," Hyukjae says as he leads them to the second floor lecture hall.

"Pretty sure field trips are meant to take us out of the classroom, but sure, whatever," Ryeowook grumbles as he follows along.

He's testy. He knows it, but he can't help it.

This is the first time both of them will be in Bomnal 235 at once. It feels like a turning point, like he's going to learn something today whether he wants to or not. He wonders if Hyukjae feels the same sense of impending that he does, or maybe it's just worse for him because he's in love.

As soon as they open the doors, the automatic lights flick on and douse the room with a very awake yellow.

"So… where do you normally sit?" Hyukjae asks as he motions to the empty seats before them.

Ryeowook freezes. Now that it's upon him, he can definitively identify this as the thing he was anxious about.

What if he tells the truth, Hyukjae realises Poem Person is him, and he feels awkward about it? Their comfortable but still-very-new friendship would evaporate on the spot, and Ryeowook won't have him in any capacity, much more a romantic one.

So, in another impeccable display of judgement, he decides to lie again.

"Oh, you know… I change it up," he mildly comments as he moves to somewhere near the middle of the first row. He sits down and gives an unassuming grin to his friend, who makes a face. "You're one of those people? Haven't you heard of the same seats code of conduct? You fed me some crap about curling L's when really it's your fault the balloon trick wouldn't have worked," Hyukjae jokes in that way where he's completely serious but is phrasing it with humour.

Ryeowook feels a genuine, fond grin spread across his face before he can help it, and he quickly ducks his head. "Why are we here, again?" he asks instead of dwelling on the validating comfort of being known.

"Why not?" Hyukjae asks as he moves to sit down. "This is the place it all began, right? Might as well."

Ryeowook, for his part, only stares.

Hyukjae went up to a seat in the rear right quadrant of the lecture hall. Ryeowok's own, real seat is directly in front of where the other is sitting. That can't be a coincidence.

"Um, I'm guessing that's where you sit?" he asks as casually as possible.

"Huh? Oh! Haha, yeah. It's funny, I didn't even think of sitting anywhere else. My feet just automatically guided me here."

"So funny," Ryeowook squeaks out.

"Yeah, my friend in the class actually used to sit with me, but it became very apparent very quickly that we would never get anything done if we did, so he moved down there." Hyukjae points with his foot to Ryeowook's seat, and Ryeowook's breath hitches in his throat. "Sometimes when I'm bored, I just can't help but throw stuff onto his desk just to annoy him." Hyukjae mimes a free throw shot towards the desk and smiles.

Well, if there were any doubt before in Ryeowook's mind that Hyukjae was Poem Person, it has summarily been erased.

Ryeowook hums but says nothing else, letting a companionable silence stretch between them as he acknowledges the warmth that settles into his chest when he confirms with himself that yes, he is glad that Hyukjae is Poem Person.

"Why are you helping me?" he asks, curious and without judgement. The abrupt question startles the other out of whatever reverie he had settled into during their respite, but Hyukjae bounces back quickly, as he always does.

"You know, I had to figure that answer out myself," Hyukjae answers with a laugh. He leans back in his chair with his hands folded behind his head, staring out at the empty lecture hall. "I told you I would at first because it was obvious that I was the only one in a position to actually help. It wasn't even an option in my mind that I wouldn't… But even after my sense of obligation ran out, I wanted to keep going.

"You're cool, Ryeowook. You're fun to be around, you're sassy, you're down to try anything once. You're totally comfortable being yourself, and your 'self' is crazy. Like, who else trusts in their gut enough that this person you're chasing after is worth the effort? Who else would go to the lengths to which you're willing to go just to meet him? Honestly, I think that's pretty awesome. I don't know if I could have that same confidence you do."

He tilts his head towards Ryeowook then and gives a close-lipped, self-convinced smile. "If anyone's gonna find love based on a few scraps of paper and a dream, it's gonna be you."

Ryeowook nods mutely. He hopes the distance between them is enough to disguise the blush on his cheeks.

Hyukjae faces forward again. "If I think about it, I guess I'm being selfish, too. I want to believe a love like that is possible; and if I help you find him, I'll get to see it happen for myself… I really hope this guy is worth it, Ryeowook. I think it would break my heart as much as yours if he weren't."

He is, though. He's so worth it. "Me too."

~Longing is a beautiful pain I thought I could endure.~

Ryeowook walks out of the campus mail room, and life couldn't get better.

He just picked up a care package his mom sent him; he got a 94 on his last Nutrition Essentials quiz; and Hyukjae loves the new low-fat, protein-enhanced strawberry scones recipe he tried out yesterday.

Speaking of whom, he thinks this whole Poem Person plot is going to wrap up soon. The last time they must have actually worked on a strategy to find out who Poem Person was, like, two weeks ago at least; and Ryeowook's glad he can stop pretending he has any interest anymore.

Their friendship has wholly evolved beyond the point of needing a project to work on in order to spend time with each other anyway. Why pine after a fictitious man when he has a whole Hyukjae right there, who buys him coffee lattes simply because he's Hyukjae's dongsaeng and who helps him study for his quizzes even when Hyukjae himself is stressed.

Ryeowook tells himself that with some more time, the whole mystery will just fade into an inside joke between the two of them, a white whale they can reminisce about when they're sipping soju and reminiscing… preferably cuddled on a couch and with his head on Hyukaje's shoulder.

However, his friend group did not get the memo.

"So, uh. What happened to Poem Person?" Henry asks one weekend while everyone is at Ryeo-Mi's apartment.

"Shut up!" Kyuhyun admonishes with a slap to the back of Henry's head. "Ryeowook hasn't annoyed us with that in weeks. Aren't you grateful?!"

"I actually am very curious about what happened there. Weren't you and Hyukjae supposed to find him together?" Yesung asks.

"The gen—" "Maybe I'm manifesting, Mi! Ever think of that?"

Ryeowook cuts in before Mi's feelings get even more hurt. "Yeah, we were, but honestly I've kinda given up on the whole thing."

He expects some shock, but he couldn't have predicted who would be the most affected. "You're just gonna give up on finding love!?" Mi despairs.

"Actually, the potential for a romantic relationship was never confirmed," Henry quips. Yesung gives Henry a high-five.

"It was just a little crush," Ryeowook defends. "I've moved past it, as I was bound to do eventually." He says this last part to Kyuhyun, who he knows was the most annoyed with his actions back then.

"'Eventually' doesn't end in time for finals week, Wook," Kyuhyun retorts.

"Well, now you never have to worry about it, Hyun."

"Is love dead?" Mi desponds aloud, but no one pays him any mind.

Ryeowook pats his roommate's shoulders in a half-hearted attempt at consolation. If Mi turns out to be the only casualty in this whole ordeal, Ryeowook will count this as a win.

What he doesn't count on is the fact that Hyukjae would invariably hear about it.

"Is it true?" Hyukjae corners him after Ryeowook picks up his order from the on-campus cafe.

"You know, I don't think so. I think she's just Henry's accompanist for rehearsals," Ryeowook responds genuinely, certain that the latest gossip about Henry's potentially secret girlfriend is what Hyukjae must have been referring to.

"What? No!" Hyukjae stops in confusion but stomps after Ryeowook once he gets his bearings back. "No, I heard that you gave up on finding him, that you gave up a while ago. Is it true?"

Ryeowook hesitates to sit down at the open table he found, and Hyukjae's entire posture seizes in betrayal. "Alright, got it," Hyukjae says with an edge to his tone. "Do me a favour, yeah? Never talk to me ever again."

"Wait!" Ryeowook calls once Hyukjae turns on his heel and storms off. "Hyukjae, wait!" He pays no mind to the fact that he's abandoning his belongings as he chases Hyukjae outside. "I get that you're angry, but don't you think this is a little much?"

He reaches out for Hyukjae's upper arm, but the other immediately shrugs it off. Ryeowook flinches and retreats slightly. Despite the other's obvious fury, Hyukjae is stopped in place and seems willing to actually talk to him, and Ryeowook holds onto that hope instead.

"No, actually," Hyukjae sneers. "I think this is the perfect amount of much when you find out your best friend has been wasting your time for who knows how long!"

Of all the things Hyukjae could have said in that moment, Ryeowook didn't expect that reaction at all. It stings more than he expects, cuts through his defensiveness; and despite his position in the situation, he can't help but need comfort. "What do you mean?" he asks in a confused, desperate voice.

"What do I mean?" Hyukjae repeats exasperatedly. "Ryeowook, we spent weeks together trying to figure out how to get you your dream guy! We never even got anywhere, and, and… And it's all because of you! You shot down basically every one of my ideas practically from the beginning, even after I told you how much it would personally mean to me. That is, like, the textbook definition of a waste of time!"

"You weren't having fun?"

"What?" Hyukjae demands incredulously.

"All that time we spent together," Ryeowook clarifies as he steadfastly meets Hyukjae's angry gaze. "You didn't have fun?"

Hyukjae is silent, and his body posture screams obstinate defiance, but his eyes remain trained on Ryeowook.

"You didn't come to look forward to spending time with me? You didn't spend your free time thinking of ways to make me laugh?"

Hyukjae rolls his eyes. "So what? What does any of that mean when you were just stringing me along? You… you weren't even using me!?" he exclaims, voice rising in a hysterical question. "That was literally the whole basis of our friendship, and you couldn't even do that? Like, what could you have possibly gained from lying to my face like that for all this time?"

Ryeowook gives a watery smile at the non-answer and looks down at his fingers fidgeting together. "I did, too," he says in a voice so quiet it was like he intended to keep that to himself.

It's silent for a long time after that admission. Hyukjae's lividness has dissipated, and he is only left with a disappointment so painful he doesn't want to dwell on it any further. He moves to leave Ryeowook alone outside of the cafe, but Ryeowook's voice stops him.

"W-What did you say?" Hyukjae asks with apprehension.

Ryeowook ignores the tears falling from his eyes as he repeats himself. "I'm in a rush to catch you, but you're in a hurry to leave. Should I just surrender? Now we're like an old and worn notebook filled with scribbles."

Hyukjae simply stares, and Ryeowook takes that as his cue to keep going. "Take your beautiful smile with you. Don't leave it here. You saw me with tears in my eyes."

By heart,

"I was a selfish man, but my life is divided into before and after I knew you."

Ryeowook recites lyric,

"When I first saw you, it felt like a miracle."

after lyric,

"I'm thinking of you more today. I wonder how tomorrow morning will be. Will I miss you more than I do today?"

after lyric;

"I'm honest because I don't know lies before love."

and before he knows it,

"I'd place my feelings on the thawing snow. I'd hang my wish on a disappearing star, but only if you ask me to."

Hyukjae is within arm's reach.

"It's me?" Hyukjae whispers into the scant centimetres between them. "It's really me?" he asks again when Ryeowook had simply nodded.

Ryeowook can't even help it when he recites, "Even when you ask me again, for me, it's only you." with a breathy laugh as he shyly looks away.

Hyukjae moves to gently hold Ryeowook's hand. "And you're okay with that?"

Ryeowook wants to laugh and melt and cry and run away, but instead he settles for an earnest nod and a hesitant smile. "Are you?"

Hyukjae answers him with a kiss, and it feels like a dazzling melody.

~Together, we can make all our unfulfilled dreams come true.~

[xxisxxisxxis]

Gateway Drug | Part Seventy-Two--Part 2

Part Seventy-Two--Part 1

"Good girl." Nikki praises me when I move up and down on his cock, my back arched while he stands on his knees, fucking me from behind--well, technically I'm fucking him, he's at a standstill watching in awe. 

I look back at him, tugging my lip into my mouth to keep from screaming when he grabs at my hips and goes back to pounding into me, evidence of me already coming twice, running down my thighs. 

He continues to hit that spot in me that makes my eyes roll back and my hands ball up in the sheets. 

"Nikki, I--" I can't finish, a tear rolling down my cheek because of how good I feel right now.

His hand reaches down and his fingers brush against my clit, making me tighten around him even more, my face burying in the sheets as I cry out in ecstacy.

"Are you gonna come?" He asks me and I nod, spreading my legs as wide as I can, my soaked pussy hungry for every inch. 

He chuckles to himself before he pulls out of me, making me whine.

Before I can ask what's wrong, he's pushing me over to face me, holding my thighs apart as he goes back to fucking me, picking up where he left off, making sure he's hitting that same spot. 

I dig my nails into his wrists, looking at him as he smirks down at me, sweat rolling down his chest, hotly. 

"I had to watch you when you did it." He tells me in reference to watching me come.

I don't say anything, instead, grabbing one of his hands and guiding it to my clit.

He catches on and his other hand suddenly grabs my throat making me grin as more liquid coats him in my pussy. 

"It's mine, isn't it?" He asks me, calloused fingers beginning to rub at my sensitive nerves, making me moan out, my lids half shut as I nod.

"All yours, daddy." I purr out, and he goes even harder into me, keeping his fingers on my clit before I tighten around him so hard he groans, my cum running out of me, and he leans over me, continuing the beating between my legs, his tongue meeting mine hotly as he starts to near his end, too. 

"Face, tits, or mouth?" He asks me.

"Surprise me." I reply, my chest heaving.

"I know what my dirty little slut wants." He tells me and I read his mind, nodding. 

Within a couple minutes, he's burying himself in me and finishing, making my eyes close as a satisfied moan leaves my throat. 

He collapses beside me, taking deep breaths until he calms down, while I immediately feel sleepy.

"Will you quit it?" I grumble in a few minutes, half asleep, unable to feel my legs as Nikki let's out yet another loud breath, obviously not tired...and obviously not wanting me to leave him awake by himself. 

"Don't go to sleep yet." He tells me and I groan, turning to face him. 

"You just screwed me into next week, Nikki, I'm going to bed." I reply and he looks at me, unamused. 

"Vivian, I'm not tired." 

"Because you were snorting lines off of me earlier tonight after I told you not to."

"I think a blowjob will put me to sleep." He informs me when I close my eyes again and I scoff. 

"Better learn to suck your own dick, then, because I'm not giving you a blowjob right now. I just gave you one during foreplay." 

"Okay, then let me eat you--"

"--I'm about to go get in the guest bedroom." I state. 

"Fine, fine." He sighs out...before he starts moving his legs constantly, which in turn makes me squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. 

"Nikki." I grit out. 

"I'm trying to get comfortable, Viv!" He says innocently and I groan out in frustration. "Alright, sorry." He mumbles getting still again. 

Right before I'm dozing off, he says:

"Why do you always get to be the little spoon?" 

I huff out a breath and sit up, shoving him so hard he rolls over onto his other side. 

"Hey, hey, don't be so rough or I'm gonna get turned on again and you'll be in a coma by the time I'm done with you." He tells me.

"At least I'd be asleep!" I reply before laying back down, wrapping my arm around his bare waist, my forehead to his back.

We lay still for a moment, the noise of nothing but people talking in the street, filling the room as the street lights cast a relaxing glow through the window. 

"Vivian." He says quietly.

"What?" 

"I haven't hooked up with any other chicks in a while...ya know." He informs me.

"I'm having to keep up with your unspent libido. Trust me, I know you haven't." I hum, welcoming the incoming sleep. 

"It's not that it's unspent, it's just that I'm always in the mood when you're around." He tells me.

"You are so full of it, Nikki." 

"You play all innocent and then BAM! You're in a split on m--"

"--I'm not having this conversation." I pinch at his back to get him to hush. 

"Okay, then we can talk about the period sex because that was--"

"--Completely your idea because 'it's just blood, it's no big deal'." I quote him. 

"You seemed way too into it, though. Makes me wonder, really." He smartly replies. 

"Because it felt good, now go to sleep." I mumble.

"Is that not weird, though?" 

"Nikki, you wanted to do it--"

"--No, I mean, we're polar opposites but then when it comes to sex we like the same stuff." 

"Need I remind you I was a virgin who never even got friendly with herself before so I had no idea what I liked until I met you, so technically we aren't into the same stuff, I just go along with whatever you're into because you're the only thing I know."

"Okay well what don't you like that we've done and we won't do it again." He suggests. 

I think for a moment, deciding I really like the odd stuff he gets off on. 

"Nothing, yet." I tell him. 

"You just said--"

"--Go to sleep, I have to get up early for church tomorrow." I tell him.

"You're really gonna pray with the same tongue you were just drinking my cum down with earlier?"

"Christianity is a spectrum. Goodnight." I let out with a yawn. 

He turns back over to face me and I blink my eyes open a little when his knuckles brush against my cheek, a little smirk on his lips. 

"Go to sleep." I whine, nudging at him before he's pressing his lips to mine for a second. 

He pulls away and I bite my lip between my teeth before leaning in and kissing him again.

He chuckles when I trace his bottom lip with my tongue, my leg hooking over his hip as I move to straddle him, feeling his cum start to leak out of me, but I don't care, and he doesn't seem to either. 

"What happened to getting up early for church?" He teases, amused when my nails bite into the skin of his shoulders, his arms wrapping around my waist when he sits up, pulling my naked chest against his.

"I can drink a lot of coffee before I go." I suggest, kissing him again. 

"Whatever you say." He replies when he pulls away, not arguing, before kissing my cheek, then my jaw, then my neck.

"Yeah, it is whatever I say, and whatever I want." I add.

"And what exactly do you want?" He asks me suggestively, his hands resting at my hips, his lips brushing against mine. 

"Just you." I assure him in a whisper. 

"Oh, bullshit." He scoffs a little. "I'm sure the thought of me making it big and racking in money makes me all the more worth the trouble, right?" 

"You're an idiot if you think I'm with you for the possible-maybe money and fame." I pinch at his shoulder, scoldingly, and he winces. "I'm with you because I like you, jackass. I like being with you...I could give a damn about money--obviously." I motion around the shitty apartment bedroom and he blinks at me, slowly, smiling contently before bringing my lips down to his once more. 

"I like being with you…"

"Go fuck yourself, Nikki, you're fucked up!" I scream at him, throwing Slash's Jack bottle at him as everyone in the room--Tommy, Slash, Steven, and Sparkie--all duck as it collides with Nikki, spraying him with whiskey, but not hurting him as bad as I hoped...then he throws it back, shouting:

"You fucking psycho cunt!" 

The bottle misses me by an inch and breaks on the wall behind me, glass cutting at the back of my leg. 

Nikki--well, Sikki--had "accidentally" spilt his drink on me when entering the room, and didn't appreciate it when I told him he was being messy.

"You wanna jump down my goddamn throat for being 'messy' and then you start raising fucking hell when someone looks at you the wrong fucking way!" He accuses me.

"Guys, c'mon." Tommy tries to get us to calm down.

"You want some more of what I gave you earlier?!" I snap at Tommy, referring to his bloodied nosy I gave him a few days ago. 

"Vivian, you're being fucking ridiculous, all Nikki did was--"

"--Lie to me, cheat on me, choose drugs over me, make a mockery of my beliefs, humiliate me, shoot me, the list goes on, Tommy, if I haven't given you enough reasons as to why how I'm fucking acting right now is fucking justified!" 

"I'm about to fucking kick your ass, too!" Nikki threatens.

"Like you did to Vanity?! Might as well, seems like the only thing going for you in our relationship is the fact you haven't outright punched me!" I point my finger in his face and he takes a step to me, and Tommy tries to get between us to separate us. 

"I can fucking hit you, if you really want me to, Vivian, God knows I've tried my fucking hardest not to beat the ever loving life out of you, at least once, the past six fucking years living with your fucking witchy, vindictive, manipulative, victim narrative of an attitude!" 

"Then go ahead and see what the fuck happens!" I bark back. 

He pushes Tommy out of the way and raises his fist, and I'm ready for him to knock the piss out of me before Steven's suddenly grabbing at his wrist, getting me behind him. 

"Hey, hey, stop it!" Steven snaps, shoving Nikki back a few feet. "Both of you are being fucking stupid!" 

"Get the fuck outta my way so I can finally set this bitch fucking straight!" Nikki struggles against him.

"So you can go down as a fucking 'woman beater' if it gets out?!" He makes his point. "I know you're pissed, I know you're tired, but you're fucked up right now and you'd feel like shit if you woke up tomorrow and realized you'd hit her, Nikki, and you know it." 

Nikki looks at me, shooting daggers my way, before letting out a huff of breath, backing off of Steven. 

"Fine. Just get the rest of your band in here to collect you guys' bitch and get the fuck out." He sneers, more so at me…

My cheek stings when Nikki hits me as a result of me snatching Slash's lit cigarette from his mouth, lunging past Stevie and pressing the lit end to Nikki's jaw. 

Then, of course, I have to get the last hit in, grabbing a handful of Nikki's hair, my balled fist hurtling into his eye. 

The breath leaves my body when Tommy slams me down onto the floor to keep me from getting the shit beat out of me when Nikki comes for me, Steven and Tommy blocking him, screaming for Fred.

"What the fuck is going on?!" Fred's hollering when he comes in.

"Send her the fuck home! I want a fucking divorce and I'm fucking pressing charges!" Nikki seethes still fighting against Tommy and Steven. 

"Aww, how sad for you, Nikki, I feel so bad!" I sarcastically hiss back when I stand up, feeling Fred's arm wrapping around my waist to pull me out of the room. 

"Go fucking kill yourself you fucking bitch!" Nikki yells at me. 

"You'll be fine, Nikki...once you use this as an excuse to shoot up again, you'll forget all about it!" I argue. 

"Duff!" Fred yells down the hall as he tugs me out of the room. 

Duff's drinking from a solo cup on the other end of the hall, talking to Izzy, concern on his face when he looks over. 

I don't quit struggling against Fred until Duff gets to us.

"What the hell is going on?" He asks me, concern all over his face. "What happened?" He asks next as Fred hands me off to him. 

"Nothing, I'm fine." I tell him and he furrows his brows, his fingers going over the welt left on my cheek from Nikki slapping me.

"Who did that?" He asks me next and I shake my head. 

"Nobody, alright, let's just get the hell outta here." I nudge at him and he looks at Fred. 

"Who the fuck hit her?" He asks him. 

"Duff, c'mon, it's fine. Let's go." I urge, but he's not moving. "Duff--"

"--Who hit you, Vivian?" 

"I'll explain it later, alright?" I tug at his arm. 

"I'm not leaving until someone tells me what the fuck happened and who the fuck hit you." He states and I look at him, my eyes starting to water. 

The last thing I need is for him and Nikki to get into a fight.

"Baby, please?" I mouth, giving my best helpless puppy look, hoping to persuade him to drop it for now and just leave with me. 

He relents, letting out a sigh. 

"We get back to the hotel, you're telling me." He tells me and I nod in agreeance. 

I wasn't mad at Nikki for hitting me, I would've hit me, too. It was like I was losing control over every aspect of my life, but what little control I had over people around me to make them lose their shit for a moment--even if I got hit in the process--gave me a sick sense of security.

Duff, however, did care if my mouth got me hurt…

"You start shit, Viv." Duff scolds me as he paces, while I sit on the bed, brushing my wet hair out in nothing but his tshirt. We haven't really talked since before rehearsal yesterday, he stayed out all night with Steven and Slash. "I don't understand how you go from being the sweetest girl ever to being so mean to people."

"Because they deserve it." I say to him. 

"They aren't worth the energy it takes trying to stir the pot, Viv. They're not." He adds, frustrated. 

"Duff," I start, softly. 

"I'm not--I can't--I-I'm not happy with you, Viv, alright? I just need a few minutes to chill out because I don't want to argue with you, at all." 

"Baby," I say next, "please c'mere." I stand on my knees on the foot of the bed and he looks at me and let's out a heavy breath before trudging to me, my hands running up his chest. "I'm sorry, okay? What I did was stupid and childish and I shouldn't have done it and I'm sorry." 

"First it was the band rehearsal, now it's this...Viv, you can't keep…" he trails off, rubbing his eyes and I wrap my arms around him. 

"I know, and I'm sorry." I apologize again and he exhales. "What can I do to make it all better?" I ask, next, pulling my bottom lip between my teeth.

"Not scream people's heads off anytime they make you upset." He replies. 

"Okay, what else?" I ask again, pressing a kiss to his neck. 

"Viv, I'm really not in the mood…" he tells me and look at him, trying not to pout. 

He must be really pissed to blow off sex. 

"Duff, I said I was sorry." I tell him.

"And I said I'm not really in the mood." 

I give up, moving off the bed to brush my teeth and when I get back to the bed, he's laying down. 

"Who hit you earlier?" He asks, and I thought he would forget to ask, but he didn't. 

"Doc meant to hit Nikki, but he got me instead." I lie, turning my back to him, accepting the fact he's upset with me and probably will be until tomorrow. 

"Oh." He says lowly, and I can feel him looking at me for a moment before he turns the lamp off, turning his back to me, too. 

Sparkie's departing words come back to my mind:

"You have until the end of this leg of the tour to give me a turn, or I'm telling Nikki about you and Duff."

[tisfan]

Ring of Thorns

Title: Ring of Thorns Written by: @tisfan​ 3023 Square: S3 – Science and Magic Rating: teen and up Triggers/warnings: none Tags: space AU, fairy tale format, sassy Jarvis, bunnies, a truly excessive number of bunnies, pre-slash Created for: @tonystarkbingo​ Word count: 3919 Art from @gayspacesprinkles​ (unrelated to the bingo!)

Ship’s log: Stardate 5239.281.5

Woke from hypersleep on schedule -- thank you JARVIS. 

“You are welcome, sir.”

The Ring of Thorns is about two days on the sublight engines, which should give me plenty of time to make any course corrections. Course corrections. I say that like anyone has any idea where the best entrance is to the Ring. Several thousand cloaked glass arrows, left over from a war three centuries ago.

JARVIS’s records indicate that a single glass arrow has the explosive capacity to knock a good sized hole in the Malibu, which I have to say, is not an ideal solution. Even with crude calculations of where the bombs were originally seeded -- and let me tell you, that particular chart was not easy to procure -- we don’t know how much stellar drift has moved them. Dozens of ships have tried to fly into the Ring.

All have been, thus far, unsuccessful.

Pieces of the wreckage will add to the difficulty of successfully navigating the field.

I want it noted for the record, if I don’t succeed, I want you to tell Captain Amer -- no scratch that. I always know what I’m doing. This plan I’m gonna try and pull off tomorrow, it's got me scratching my head about the survivability of it all. What am I even tripping for? Everything's gonna workout exactly the way it's supposed to.

Stardate 5239.282.9

“Set for separation, J?”

“We are set, sir,” JARVIS said. He was the ship’s AI, navigation, piloting, engineering, physician. He served to take the place several key members of a ship’s crew. He was not, however, supposed to be the only other crewmate on a ship the size of the Malibu.

He was, because no one believed Mr. Stark that they could make it through the ring to whatever treasure planet was tucked away inside it.

JARVIS went because he was an AI and because Mr. Stark was his maker. But even if JARVIS had entire free will and he had some, because he was the one steering the ship, he probably wouldn’t have done anything differently. He could have refused to take Mr. Stark at all. Probably. He’d never really tried directly rebelling, and sometimes when he was feeling philosophical, he wondered if that was because he couldn’t rebel, or because Mr. Stark had not been wrong yet, and thus, rebelling was a waste of time. 

Mr. Stark would, after all, prove everyone wrong.

And JARVIS wanted to be there, to record all of it.

Truthfully, JARVIS himself wasn’t at risk; he had two backup units hidden away. But if something happened to this version, well, the story would never be told. And he couldn’t have that, could he?

“Remember, sir, close--”

“But not too close, I got it. We got this. Launch the dummy section.”

“Piloting remotely,” JARVIS said. He separated the dummy section of the ship, broad and ugly with the best forward shields that money could buy. He should know. He’d purchased them. And then Mr. Stark had improved them.

The dummy section looked like, in all honesty, like a flying brick. But that was all right. All it had to do was shield the smaller craft behind it. 

“Let’s plow the road, JARVIS,” Mr. Stark said.

“As you say, sir.”

Stardate 5239.282.11

“Well, that could have been worse,” Tony said. He was breathing hard, and his hands were shaking. Sweat dripped down the back of his flight suit. But he was alive.

 He landed the smaller, more maneuverable craft inside the docking ring.

“Allow me to inform you, sir, there are four glass arrows affixed to the hull--”

“You just have to ruin my moment,” Tony complained. “Can I get a countdown, or is that too much to ask?” He was already unlocking his piloting harness, grabbed a stim patch on his way past the console -- he’d need to be on his mettle if he was going to disarm bombs without detonating them instead and all the juice from his hectic ride through the Ring had dissipated.

“They are quiescent, at the moment, sir,” JARVIS told him. “But core deterioration suggests they are not supposed to be in an atmosphere with oxygen, and they will explode soon enough.”

“Wait, there’s life support in the hanger?” 

“It would appear so, sir.”

“Why?” The Ring of Thorns had been in place for several hundred years at least. There was no reason for life support to still be functional.

“I shan’t hazard a guess at this remove,” JARVIS said. 

“Can we vent the docking bay?” Tony had more than enough O2 in his suit, as he hadn’t been expecting any such systems to still be in place.

“No, sir,” JARVIS said. “I was able to override the security systems to get us inside by claiming emergency repairs. The system will not let us out until the proper codes have been entered. As well as sudden venting often disrupts seemingly stationary objects--”

“Yeah, yeah, no need to turn the room into a pinball machine. All right, I’m on it.”

Tony had removed three of the bombs -- truly elegant, lethal little things. They were no bigger than two fingers wide and about four times as long, concealed by a mirror-shield that bent light around it, showing up as flecks of black and the occasional flash of light in a starfield. No propellant, no heat reading, not even any traceable particles emissions. Old school explosives. Not quite all the way back to pipebombs with horseshoe nails mixed in, but still. Household chemicals.

Ions only knew what the people who made them were thinking when they mixed them up and set them loose in space to guard their station and their planet.

They were all dead, at least.

Theoretically. No one could get close enough to tell.

“Uh, sir,” JARVIS said. “You have company. Turn around very slowly.”

Tony didn’t quite raise his hands, but he was expecting to see someone armed and presumably dangerous.

What he saw instead was-- an animal? With white and tan fur covering its entire body, including a set of very long ears. Red eyes peered at him curiously and the creature took a few hopping steps closer.

“JARVIS,” Tony muttered, keeping his eyes on the creature, “what is it?”

“A Lagomorpha, particularly a subset of Leporidae. Known as oryctolagus cuniculus domesticus, or more commonly, a bunny rabbit.”

“Does it eat-- meat?” Tony was an awfully big meal, but as he watched the-- rabbit-- carefully, he noticed there were more.

A lot more.

“I daresay, sir, unless the species has evolved along another path,” JARVIS said, “they are primarily interested in grasses, fruits, and vegetables. A garden pest, as they were described in older zoology reports. And, to some degree, a pet.”

“People pet them?” Tony wondered, looking around. They were fluffy and sort of cute. Some of them sat up on their hind legs to look closer at Tony.

“Other people raised them for food and fur stock,” JARVIS continued.

Tony took a step forward and the lead rabbit thumped his foot several times against the deck plating. Other rabbits took up the signal and stamped as well, until the entire facility was ringing like being inside a drum.

Tony found himself on the floor, hands clapped over his ears. By the time the noise stopped, three or four of the bunnies were very close to Tony, noses wiggling curiously. One of them hopped all the way up to him, put a soft paw on his knee and poked its face directly at his chin.

“I’m not made of food,” Tony told it, and he went to shoo it away, but he touched it instead.

Oh. Oh, it was so soft. Oh, Ions, so soft. He let himself sit down, let them hop up to him, sniffing curiously.

“It seems they have never seen a human, either, sir,” JARVIS commented.

“Do, uh, we have anything we could feed them? What are they even eating around here?”

“A closer look at the scans, sir,” JARVIS said, “the hydroponics bays seem to have overrun most of the station. They’ve been living in a perfect bunny paradise. All the food they could want, and no predators.”

“Sounds lovely,” Tony said, and one of the bunnies hopped into his lap and proceeded to turn around a few times before flopping over and going to sleep. “Although, gotta say, a cargo bay of rabbits wasn’t what I was hoping to find.”

Riches, technological artifacts, answers. Especially answers. What had happened here, why had the people gone silent, or died? Why did they leave behind such elaborate traps?

“We could set up a fur trade, sir,” JARVIS suggested and Tony could have sworn that every single bunny in the room gave him the stink eye. All at once. It was chilling. 

“Yeeaaah, think I’m gonna go with no on that one, JARVIS,” Tony said. “Do you think there’s anyway to explain kaboom to them, because if I don’t get that last glass arrow off the hull, we’re all going to be in the fur trade.”

“You neglected to add lapine language skills to my databanks, sir,” JARVIS said.

“Smart ass AI,” Tony muttered, nudging the black bunny out of his lap. “Shoo. Go fetch. Something. Do you fetch? Yeah, go… go find a-- what to rabbits eat?”

“Strictly speaking, their diet is a mix of alfalfa and--”

“Whatever. Go… have a smoothie. Look, if you go into the galley on my ship, DUM-E will make you smoothies, go go.”

They didn’t go go or shoo shoo, but they did back up a little or hopped away as he stood up. He had to watch his feet as he moved back over to the ship, grabbing for the wrench. “Switch it up, JARVIS,” he said, and JARVIS triggered the color changing squares on the outside of the ship, one at a time, until Tony could physically locate the glass arrow, and only because he was looking really closely. The arrow changed colors, too, but at a slightly -- very slightly -- slower rate.

And then Tony was able to find it by touch, sliding his hand over the panel until he encountered a small projection. 

Once removed from the ship, the colors swirled again until what Tony held in his hands was flesh and floor and bunny colored. The biologics didn’t blend as easily, they weren’t mathematical or predictable, so once he had it away from the hull, it was a lot easier to look at. 

For something called a glass arrow, it was neither. More like a flat, thin package with a few grooves at each end. Not really accurate, but evocative, the imagery, he meant. Twisting the tail end, he slowly removed the detonation packet, wrapped in hyper thin plastics. Once that package was out, the arrow itself was rendered mostly harmless. Except that Tony would feel better getting all of it off the ship. 

He found a couple of rolling bins in the docking bay, emptied them of the tools they contained, and then loaded the explosives into them. “Can I space this shit, or is the airlock broken, too?”

“The south side airlock appears fully functional, sir,” JARVIS told him. Tony grabbed a couple of remote-automatics and affixed them to the sides of the bins. Station gravity would eventually grab anything floating in proximity to the station; it had taken quite a few murderers getting caught before they realized you could not, in fact, just junk a body out an airlock.

But you could fire one into the nearest star. Which is what the remote-automatics were for. Small, one shot of fuel, affixable to a trash or discarded object -- or even at some of the largest ring world systems, to move supplies through space -- to propel them away. Once in motion, they’d stay in motion until a larger gravity well swallowed them up.

“Bombs away,” Tony said, setting the bins into the airlock. He sealed the inner door, opened the outer door, and then flew the trash off into space. The nearest star was several weeks away by sub light propulsion. Unless it hit a few of its cousins while out there, in which case, he could expect a pretty pretty boom in a few hours.

“Always so observant, sir,” JARVIS said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony said, pushing away from the porthole. “You got anything for me yet?”

“Their mainframe systems are so old as to be little better than hand-cranked automobiles, sir,” JARVIS said. “I’m having difficulty navigating their systems without overwhelming them. That said, the system suggests you might find an interpreter on the eighth deck, C-section.”

“I am not delivering a baby on this station,” Tony swore and chuckled to himself. It wouldn’t take JARVIS that long to find the reference -- it had always been a bit of a challenge with them. Could Tony, in fact, find a historical or cultural reference so old that JARVIS didn’t have access to it.

So far the answer had always been no.

Tony grabbed several tools to help him around the ship; a crowbar for opening unruly doors, as well as more electronic overrides. MagmaTorch, if he had to go through the door. 

The vegetation was even thicker in the hallways. “Where are the plants getting food from?” Because really, dirt was a thing, even if Tony didn’t like standing on it. There was a thick coating of moss on the floor in places, and Tony found himself stepping around it. He did squat down long enough to take a sample, and send it off to JARVIS to analyze. 

“Sample shows a flourishing, if unusual, ecosystem, sir,” JARVIS told him. “The sample appears to be similar to compost. Organic waste, sir.”

“Rabbit shit?”

“It’s likely the first plants would have started in the hydroponics area; if they outgrew their containers, they would have likely encountered fertilizer and soil samples there. My map of the station shows that system-recycling was only a deck below.”

“Old human shit,” Tony rephrased.

“And bodies that weren’t spaced, food waste, biological waste.” Many places stored that up, condensed into cubes, packed into bags, and then sold to terraforming colonies. Probably the same sort of idea. It was being used for its intended purpose, then, if not necessarily its intended place. “The ship’s lighting system has stayed on, providing material for photosynthesis. Since the late twenty-fifth century all human space-going vehicles utilize solar lamps to prevent crew depression, mood swings, and the inability to digest certain foods.”

“Yeah, we’re made for gravity and sunlight,” Tony said. He paused to force a door to the companionway. The ladders stretched up and down several levels, slightly offset to prevent a bad fall from becoming a fatal flaw. Smart. “So they’re not in any immediate danger of being wiped out?”

“The power banks are currently still at half capacity. With such a slow rate of decay, even without intelligent interference, this colony could continue on without problems for another three or four hundred years.”

“What are they using to power this place?” 

JARVIS continued to analyze the station, providing more and more obscure data and facts. Frankly, Tony stopped entirely listening. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested, but there were also interesting things--

He stopped in a long hallway with doors spaced equally, and pushed one open. Crew quarters, right? Had to be…

The room was empty. Not just of crew, he really was not expecting a skeleton -- or maybe he was -- but also of artifacts. It was just empty. Bed cubby with no mattress, desk with no terminal or ports. Closet with no clothes.

“People did used to live here, didn’t they?”

“Records suggest that this station had a population of approximately twenty-thousand human beings at the time that contact with the greater galaxy ended.”

“What the hell happened to twenty-thousand people? I mean, even if the rabbits ate them--”

“Let me remind you, sir, that rabbits are primarily vegetarian,” JARVIS said.

“Thanks, you might need to keep reminding me of that--”

He wasn’t going to be able to close that door again, since a handful of rabbits had followed him in, and he wasn’t sure how to get them out again. They didn’t really seem like herd creatures to him. And while they’d been surviving perfectly well on their own, he didn’t really want them to starve to death because of him. Right?

It was a working theory, at least. No rabbit murdering.

He made it all the way to 8th-deck, Section C. Finally. Plants. A lot of them, too. And more rabbits. 

“What exactly am I looking for here?” Tony wondered. He pushed his way through thicker plants, almost jungle-like in their sheer stubbornness to give way.

“I might say you’ll know it when you see it, sir,” JARVIS said, “which would be quite helpful, since I’m entirely uncertain--”

“Oh.”

That.

Stardate 5239.283.02

“I don’t believe the situation is going to change, no matter how long you keep staring,” JARVIS commented.

“Sarcastic, I like that.”

“I know that, sir.”

“Still. This is not something I want to jump into right away. I mean, when the station AI--”

“It’s not an AI sir, the station’s computer systems are significantly less advanced in all ways--”

“Don’t be petty. It’s beneath you.”

“As I don’t, in fact, have a corporeal body, sir, you might add that everything is beneath me. Or nothing is beneath me. An interesting question for the next time you feel philosophical.”

“Which does not answer any of my current philosophical questions,” Tony said. “Like who is this guy, why is he asleep in that thing, and will he die immediately if we try to wake him up?”

“Probably not immediately,” JARVIS said. “He’s hardly a vampire and going to poof into dust at exposure to sunlight.”

“What?”

“I beg your pardon sir, I was looking up some of the various mythology typical to this station at the time. Did you know they believed the whole place was cursed?”

“Of course they did,” Tony said. “Also, why would I know that? How could I possibly know that-- cursed? What even does cursed mean?”

“A curse is the belief that powerful entities can take an interest in humans,” JARVIS said. “Faeries, witches, demigods and deities, for example. When these humans do something wrong, or offensive, or are in some cases, just being used as scapegoats for a powerful creature, that leads to a curse. A series of misfortunes that cannot be averted, except by a single act. Sometimes it’s ridiculously complicated, like when the moon loses her child if it happens in a week when two Mondays come together. And sometimes, all that takes to break a curse is true love’s first kiss.”

“Like that’s not complicated,” Tony complained. “So you’re saying I should kiss the guy awake to break the curse?”

“Much in the case of a week with two Mondays, sir,” JARVIS said, “you might want to take into consideration that your blood and cells are filled with--”

“Aesculapian nanintes,” Tony breathed. Which repaired injuries, protected him from disease and posion, and vastly extended his life span. Most infants born on Tony’s planet inherited some of them from their parents, but often required a booster injection every twenty years. And, in emergencies, you could share your nanintes with someone else, to heal their wounds.

Tony had gotten a booster shot last year, on his fortieth birthday, which meant his system was currently in top form.

“The fastest way to share nanites--”

“Is fluid transfer.”

“A kiss,” Tony corrected, directing a smug smile in no particular direction. JARVIS could see him.

“Indeed, sir, I’m so glad you thought of it.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Flounder,” JARVIS responded. “Badly.”

“Wow, you didn’t even hesitate with that one.”

Tony studied the casing a little while longer. The man was dressed entirely in white, except for a black cap where his left arm had been, he had long hair and just a hint of a beard. If Tony had to guess, he’d say the man had gone into some sort of healing tube while a replacement limb was vat-grown for him. Nanites could mend split skin and broken bones, but it wasn’t much good at regrowing parts entirely.

But Tony didn’t see any sort of vat system at all. Maybe they kept that somewhere else.

Theoretically, Tony’s nanites would keep the man alive, long enough to ask some questions, to find the bioregen chambers, or their historical equivalent. Get some answers, provide some aid. Something.

And, also, very quietly, to himself, where even JARVIS couldn’t hear him.

Tony might actually want to kiss the man.

He was stunningly, almost shockingly beautiful. His cheeks were just perfect, and the chin, with the hint of a cleft. Full, kissable lips, parted just a little. Long lashes. Tony didn’t know what color his eyes were, but he liked to think they were blue. Tony felt like he could see… everything.

“Sir?”

“Yeah?”

“Your brain is producing an increased amount of vasopressin, adrenaline, dopamine, and oxytocin.”

“Yeah?”

“And I believe you are experiencing mydriasis-- it’s a nerve reaction that causes your pupils to dilate,” JARVIS went on.

“Which means what?”

“Quite honestly, sir,” JARVIS said. “I think you are, as the poets would say, falling in love.”

“Yeah?” Tony found he didn’t quite care. It was almost like being drunk, a warm, fuzzy sort of feeling that just, made him generally happy. He wanted to share that with someone. A very specific someone.

He wasn’t sure how he knew which button to push, but the top of the tube slid away, and the man inside took a slow, stuttering breath.

“It’s all right,” Tony told him. “I’m here to rescue you.”

He leaned in, mouth open slightly, and kissed the man he hadn’t even really met. It was more than love at first meeting, it was--

A very nice kiss, warm, soothing, soft, with just a little heat in it.

The man pulled away, licked his lips as if tasting Tony on them and gazed up at him. “Uh… aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?”

“What?” Tony blinked, then blinked again. “How-- how do you know Star Wars? That is Star Wars you’re quoting, right, late 20th century cinema? I-- I’m a--”

The man struggled to sit, and Tony helped him until he could swing his legs over the side. “So, uh, question-- who are you, and why is there a rabbit on top of my stasis tube?”

“Um, my name is Tony Stark,” Tony said.

“Bucky Barnes,” the man said. “Uh, nice to meet you. Great kiss by the way, hell of a wake up call. Is my unit waiting for me--”

“Uh, no, no, probably not.”

Bucky stared around the room, from the bunny to the greenery to the bunny, and then back to Tony. “How long? How long was I asleep?”

“I can’t say exactly, but-- it’s been at least three hundred years since we last had contact with this station.”

“Oh.” Bucky took a deep breath, and then another one, and a third. “Oh. I guess… I guess she won.”

“Who? Who did this to you? What happened here?”

“Hydra did this to me. Mother of serpents and dragons. A witch. It’s a long story.”

“I-- don’t think there’s any such thing as witches,” Tony said, hesitantly.

“Oh, there are,” Bucky said. “Believe me. There are.”

A/n -  art from @gayspacesprinkles​ isn’t it LOVELY!? Now stop screaming, I already have a part 2 planned for this.

[slafkovskys]

but everything’s the same / a. turcotte

my masterlist!

title from suitcase by mary j. blige

-

you watched as the raindrop slid down the window. the plane had pulled up forever ago and now you were just waiting to board, your one way ticket to chicago resting on your thigh. the image of the admissions woman’s face when you told her you had no plans of returning to wisconsin was still burned into your mind. she had asked, “are you sure?”

yes, you had said, i’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.

with a few clicks and a digital signature, you’re enrollment at wisco was no more. you hadn’t even been able to fish out your cell phone and let your parents know of your decision. you had an idea of what they were going to say. you weren’t ready for that.

you can’t help but to think of what could’ve been, just like you both used to do.

-

his hand interlocked with yours, both of your eyes going to where they were conjoined. the chicago noise was muffled by the walls of the hotel alex had booked. you were both just sixteen at the time and had lied to your parents about where you were going to be.

“i think i’m gonna marry you,” he had said before shaking his head, “actually, i know i’m gonna marry you.”

“how could you be so sure?” you had asked, moving your head to look up at him. “you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, al. you could find someone else.”

he shook his head and planted a kiss upon your forehead, “i don’t want anyone else. i can’t even see myself without you and i don’t want to.”

that, you think, was the first lie he told you.

-

you remember the day he left for michigan. you didn’t cry until his flight started boarding and he held you as you did so, saying that he wouldn’t go if you didn’t want him to. you shook your head and pushed him back lightly, telling him how big this was for him and how if he didn’t get on that plane, you would drive him to michigan yourself.

that was also the first time he’d told you he loved you.

-

you had to beg and plead with your parents to let you drive the four hours to plymouth alone for alex’s first game. your hotel had been booked and you had contacted jack for help with your surprise.

the plan had gone smoothly. jack had snagged you a seat where alex could see you perfectly. when they skated out for warmups, your face hurt from how hard you were smiling. you didn’t even need to be pointed out because he instantly found you and grinned back. he scored that night and pointed at you when he did.

afterwards, you met up in the lobby and you had asked, “how did you know where i was? did jack tell you?”

“nope,” he buried his face in your hair, “i look for you in every crowd.”

now, you wonder how many other girls he had said that same phrase to.

-

there was a little girl sitting beside her dad across from you. she had on a little floral dress and a pair of sandals. not particularly airport attire, but it held her back none as she giggled and bounced around the terminal. her eyes caught yours and you sent her your best smile.

she slid off her seat and walked the little distance to you. she puts her hand on your knee, “i’m ivey. what’s your name.”

“hi ivey,” you hold out your hand, “i’m y/n.”

“are you sad, y/n? you look sad.” you try and shake your head but the tears that spill out of your eyes betray you. “you’re sad. why?”

“just,” you sniffle, “grown up things i guess.”

she huffs and goes over to her dad, pulling a stuffed bunny from a bag and bringing it over to you. “here you go. when i get sad, i just hug bunny and i get better. sometimes daddy hugs me too. you can hold bunny until you get better and if you don’t have someone to hug you, can i?”

your eyes flick up to her father who sends you a nod. you look back down to the little girl, “i’d really like that, ivey.”

-

you had applied to wisco the same time as alex did. alex didn’t have any problems because he had been scouted before hand, but you had to spend your nights worrying. you were the one left to lose sleep over what if you didn’t get in. what if everything you two had been talking about since you were kids was only just a dream.

you had kept it a secret from alex when your acceptance letter came in the mail. you waited until he was in chicago for christmas and handed him the envelope. you both sat on the floor of his livingroom, criss cross applesauce and you were biting your lip.

he tore open the envelope and unfolded the paper. you watched as his eyes scanned over it before they flicked up to you. he’d asked, “are you serious?”

you nodded with a grin and erupted into laughter as he tackled you to the floor. he laid on top of you as he peppered your face with kisses. “we’re gonna be together.”

“just like we talked about.”

you can’t help but wonder if he still loved you then.

-

ivey held onto your hand as your other gripped onto the white fur of the stuffed animal. she was four, loved unicorns and the color pink, and had a best friend named mary. she was on her way home to her mother from visiting her sick grandmother.

the plane would be boarding soon and she had asked what seat you were gonna be in. coincidentally, you were on the same row as her and her father. she nodded and grinned up at you, “good. i can still hold your hand.”

-

you heard the rumors.

you had many dms telling you of what you had refused to believe was true. he loves you. he would never do that.

you never questioned him until a girl from michigan sent you a dm with a picture attached. it was a picture of alex sitting on a stool in some basement with a girl between his spread legs. you confronted him, chill and mellow and just asking for the truth to which he responded with a shrug and a “bad angle” excuse.

you hung up the phone and threw it across the room. the next day when you got home from school, a vase of flowers was sitting on your kitchen counter with a box that had a bracelet inside. you never brought it up afterwards.

that night though, was the first of many where you cried over alex.

-

ivey had offered to share her skittles with you. her father, dan you had learned was his name, remarked how she never shared her skittles with anyone.

you felt honored.

she asked you to color with her and even loaned you a blue when you needed to color the sky in. she insisted tigers were purple and lions were green as she colored both in and you told her no different.

you wished you could go back to this stage of innocence. you’d be in a lot less pain.

-

things only got worse when you finally got to wisconsin. you and alex got an apartment together and he started his freshman season. you were alone frequently but it didn’t really bother you. you made friends to keep you company when your best friend was gone.

you’d get dms from girls in different states with screenshots and videos of alex asking them to hookup. one girl had even sent one where she asked about his girlfriend. he had said it wasn’t anything serious.

you had never been the type to go through his phone, but after that when he’d left it abandoned, you put in his passcode and turned on his location and that, that was your worst mistake.

-

the plane started boarding five minutes after it was supposed to. when the announcement was made, your new friend looked up at you with wide, blue eyes, “can we still color on the plane?”

“of course,” you promised and she held out her pinky. you wrapped your larger one around hers and she nodded, darting over with her coloring book to dan. you sighed before standing, collecting your own things. you grabbed you pursue and the handle of your carryon before wheeling over to the desk.

you hear a familiar giggle behind you and you turn and crane your head down, “we have the same colored suitcase!”

and, indeed, you had matching yellow suitcases. only hers had some characters from some kids show that you insisted was much cooler than your plain one.

she nodded, “kinda sorta.”

-

you should’ve ended it back when you saw the picture of the girl between his legs. you should’ve never applied to wisco. you should’ve never accepted his stupid apology gifts. you should’ve told him to fuck off a long time ago.

he said he was just going out with some teammates for a bite to eat after practice. “okay,” you had said, watching as he grabbed his keys, “could you bring me back-”

“a cake batter shake?” he interrupted and turned to face you with a grin. he strides over and leans down to kiss your forehead and then your lips. he hovers over you and smiles lightly, “i love you.”

“i love you too, alex. a whole lot.” you add on the extra bit and watch as he leaves out of the door. instantly, you texted owen asking when practice would be over.

we don’t have practice today? is what he responded.

that’s when you knew. you waited a few minutes and looked up the first flight out of wisco. before you bought your ticket, you looked at where he was.

just for shits and giggles.

when you saw he was at you knew to be a sorority house at four o’clock on a weekday, you nodded and clicked your tongue. you went back and bought your ticket and just stared at the ceiling.

you were there for a while before you stand up and go back to the bedroom the two of you had shared. your eyes linger on the bed where you’d made love only just the night before.

you opened the closet door and pulled out your suitcases. your grabbed your clothes and took time putting them away. the thought crossed your mind to just slash all of his things. rip them apart to mirror the way your heart felt in this exact moment, but you didn’t.

you wouldn’t stoop to his level.

-

the line moved as quick as you would have expected it to. you began to make small talk with dan as it moved, still holding onto the bunny. both your heads shoot towards where a deep voice shouted, “hey!”

dan rushes to put ivey behind him and you catch her look at you confused. a look of absolute dread crosses your face as you hear the familiar shout of your name, “y/n!”

and there he is. in the same clothes you’d left him in with same disheveled hair and a red mark blooming on his cheek. he spots you and runs toward you, but security stops him. they grab him by the arms as he bags, “baby, please don’t leave. i swear to god i’ll change. i love you so much.”

the security man holding his left arm looks at you, “do you know him?”

you looked at the boy whose eyes were pleading. the boy whom you’d loved for almost half your life and responded, “no sir. i have never seen him before in my life.”

-

you heard the door open three hours later. alex called your name as you shut your larger suitcase. he walks into the bedroom and freezes, “what’s going on?”

“i’m done.” is all you say, going over the nightstand and grabbing your laptop. you wrap up the cord as he stutters out his response.

“wha- what do you mean you’re done? with what?”

“with you. with us. with wisco. with all of this.” you shove your laptop in your bag and push past him into the living room.

he follows you like a puppy, “why?”

“are you serious?” you snap and turn to face him. “i gave you everything, alex. i was at every game i could be. i missed important shit so that i could support you. i worked my ass off just so i could come and visit you in michigan. i could’ve done what you’ve done to me a few times, but i didn’t. do you know why i didn’t, alex? because i loved you.”

that’s when the color drains from his face, “baby, just stay. let me explain.”

you push past him again, “there’s no reason for me to stay, alex. it took me too many years to see the truth, but i finally have. i refuse to be used by you.”

you’re in the bedroom when he grabs your elbow and you can’t even comprehend what happened before you’re hand goes across his face. he grabs his cheek and looks at you wide eyed. you shook your head and put your cases on the ground, “i wish that i had never met you.”

-

when you land in chicago and your time with ivey had come to an end, you handed her back the bunny rabbit. “are you happy now, y/n?”

“yeah, ivey,” you smile and rub the top of her head, “actually, i think i’m the happiest i’ve been in a while.”

[epicstuckyficrecs]

How To Tag Stucky Fics Part 2: Rating, Warnings, Fandoms, Relationships & Characters

Preliminary comments

First thing you can do to understand the tagging system better is read the Tag FAQ on ao3! And while you’re at it, I would suggest you also read the Wrangling Guidelines. Understanding the work of tag wranglers might help you to tag your fics better!

My aim with this is to encourage you to better use AO3’s tagging system, which means using canonical tags (especially for Fandom, Relationship and Character tags), VS unfilterable tags, which is everything else that’s not “canonical”. But any tag is better than no tags! Long, rambly tags are better than no tags! That’s what we have tag wranglers for! But my opinion is: if there’s a canonical tag for something, why not use it?

Tagging is an art, not a science. There are pretty much no absolute rules, which means that ao3′s tagging system’s biggest advantage is also its biggest disadvantage: you can do whatever you want with it! You can tag as much or as little as you want.

Every fandom has its quirks and odds about tagging. I’m obviously focused on Stucky, and incidentally on the MCU, so what I say here might not necessarily apply to all ships/fandoms.

As such, my opinion is as good as anyone else’s. I’m not pretending to be the utmost authority on how to tag: I’m just trying make good use of my experience to give writers some recommendations! These are my personal recommendations and in no way are you forced to follow them.

Tagging 101

Tagging has two main purposes, so you should keep them in mind while filling out the New Work form:

Content: tagging the content of your fics, so that readers who want to read said content can find your fic!

Trigger warnings: tagging content in your fics that people might want to avoid.

Basic rules of tagging (to help facilitate the job of our amazing tag wranglers):

Separate your Fandom, Relationship and Character tags by commas! There should be only one item per tag.

Always Use The Characters’ Last Name. Here’s why. Basically, when you tag with “Cute Peter”, wranglers have no idea if you’re talking about Peter Parker or Peter Quill or any of the hundreds of Peter characters in the Archive!

Personally, I would avoid using emojis in tags.

Some of these recommendations (and more) can be found in this AO3 News post under the How To Make Tags Work For You header.

Just read this post if you have no idea how tag wranglers actually wrangle tags. It’s really informative. The TLDR is: your tags are seen with no context, mixed in with all the other tags of other works in the wrangling interface, which are sorted by alphabetical order. Wranglers don’t know which tags in their workload belong to the same fic. Rambly Tumblr-style tags are fine, but just remember: “each tag stands on its own in the filters. Think about the idea you’re expressing in each tag, not just in your tags as a whole conversation. (...) Don’t assume that sarcasm, hyperbole, etc. will come through during sorting.”

Without further ado, let’s get into the actual tagging! I’m gonna be following the same order as if you were posting a new fic on AO3 :)

RATING & ARCHIVE WARNINGS

You can click on the little interrogation point in the form if you don’t know exactly how to tag for rating and warnings or check out the Ratings and Warnings section of AO3’s Terms of Service and FAQ. The only thing I would advise you here is to be as truthful as possible.

One important thing to know would be the difference between “No archive warnings apply” and “Choose not to use archive warnings”. From ao3commentoftheday:

“No Archive Warnings Apply means that the fic has nothing in it that people need to be warned about.

Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings means that the fic very well might include things that people would like to be warned about, but the author has decided not to warn because that warning might spoil the story (or for some other reason)”.

If you decide to use Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings, here’s a few options so your readers can still make an informed decision about reading your fic:

Additional Tags: You could use the Additional Tags field to list any details about what might be triggering in your work. For example, if there is a Character Death, but you don’t want to tag with MCD because it’s not a Major character, or it’s only temporary… There are tags for that! There was a great discussion on this post re: warnings vs spoilers on ao3commentoftheday, if you wanna go have a look!

Tag + Author’s note: Another thing you could do is use the “Additional Warnings In Author’s Note” tag and, as the tag says, give more details to your readers about triggers or warnings in your author’s note.

Author’s note (at the beginning) + End note (at the end): You could also write down a small summary of the triggering parts of your chapter in the end notes, and direct your readers to it in an Author’s Note at the beginning of the chapter.

FANDOMS

As I said above, please use the canonical Fandom tags!

MCU

I would really recommend you read this post on how to tag in the MCU! But basically, you should mainly be tagging your fic with Captain America (Movies) (or whatever movie is the focus of your story!). No need to use more general tags like Marvel (Movies) or Marvel Cinematic Universe ON TOP of your movie tag, it’ll show up there anyway! (If you’re writing RPF, use the Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF tag)

Always remember that if you’re tagging more than one fandom, you need to separate them with a comma! Don’t use a slash / or “and” (like “Captain America/Game of Thrones” or “Captain America and Game of Thrones”), or else it will create a single new tag that will be impossible to wrangle.

If your fic prominently features events or characters from other MCU movies (like The Avengers, Black Panther, etc.) or TV shows (like Agents of SHIELD or the Defenders), you could even add those fandom tags! But I wouldn’t if it’s not a major part of the plot though. For example: if Scott Lang is Bucky’s roommate, I would probably not tag with the “Ant-Man (Movies)” fandom tag. Ask yourself: would someone looking for Ant-Man fic want to find mine?

In fact, you can mostly apply this strategy to the whole tagging process. Ask yourself: would someone looking for xyz want to find my fic?

Also note that tagging multiple fandoms in the MCU will not make your work a Crossover according to AO3’s search engine, since they are under the same Metatag (aka Marvel Cinematic Universe). But if you tag another fandom in the bigger Marvel Metatag (for example, “Winter Soldier (Comics)”), then it will be considered a Crossover. (according to AO3: “Crossovers are defined here as works with at least two unrelated fandom tags, as determined by how tags are wrangled.”).

Alternate Universe

If your fic is an AU taking place in a non-MCU fandom (for example, Harry Potter), it’s up to you to decide how you want to tag.

Fandoms: You could add the Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling tag to the Fandoms field. Be aware that your fic will be considered a Crossover according to AO3’s search engine.

Additional Tags: there’s a few different ways to tag for AUs.

Alternate Universe - “...” : for example Alternate Universe - Hogwarts

Alternate Universe - “...” Setting: for example Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting

Alternate Universe - “...” Fusion (or just Alternate Universe - Fusion): for example Alternate Universe -The Little Mermaid Fusion, because there wasn’t a HP fusion tag in this case lol (according to Fanlore: “A fusion is a type of fanwork which merges two or more fandoms by incorporating characters from one fandom into the setting of another as if they had always been there.”) (emphasis mine)

In any case, you could also add the Crossover tag to the Additional Tags field (according to Fanlore: “A crossover is a fanfic in which two or more fandoms are combined in some way.”)

You could do all or neither of those things! As always, there are pretty much no absolute rules when it comes to tagging. But again, the more accurate you are, the better it is for your readers! :)

Now, I’ve used Harry Potter as an example, but there are a ton of Alternate Universe tags (under the Sub Tags section) for a great number of fandoms!

RELATIONSHIPS

From AO3’s FAQ: “The significant character interactions in the work, including romantic and/or sexual relationships and pairings (indicated in the Archive's canonical tags by a '/', e.g., James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers) and platonic relationships such as friendship, family, teammates, etc. (indicated in canonical tags by a '&', e.g., Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff). You can use whatever notation you like. Separate different relationships with commas.” (emphasis mine, and I changed the pairings for MCU ones)

So basically:

romantic or sexual = use the slash  /

platonic = use the ampersand &

I would recommend:

To only tag the one (1) main relationship in your fic (whether romantic or platonic), unless your story really focuses on more than one sexual/platonic relationship or contains a graphic scene depicting the second couple.

Any side pairings/friendships can go in the Additional Tags field (for example: Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov or Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes Friendship).

Ask yourself: would someone looking for xyz want to find my fic? Or as ao3commentoftheday put it: “Only tag the ship if someone who ships it would be satisfied with the amount of content (or ‘screen time’) that ship gets.”

Here’s a good post on what not to do when tagging Relationships. Namely:

Using portmanteau ship names like “Stucky”, or

Tagging multiple variations of the way you can refer to one ship, like: “Steve/Bucky”, “Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes”, “Steven Grant Rogers/James Buchanan Barnes”.

It’s not a huuuuge deal since they’ll just get synned to the James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers tag, but there’s no need to use all of those when you have a perfectly good canon tag!

Again, there are no rules on how you need to tag your works. I would only recommend that you use canon tags as much as possible and that you choose the tag(s) that accurately represent your story.

CHARACTERS

Use canonical tags! I was incredibly surprised when I searched for the character “Steve Roger” in the Tag Search and ended up with almost 600 tags. The Characters field is not the place for “Mention of Steve Rogers”, “Pre-Serum Steve Rogers”, “Alpha Steve Rogers”, etc. Those should go in the Additional Tags, or else any modifier you’ve put before “Steve Rogers” will be useless, since it’ll just get synned to the Steve Rogers character tag.

Also sounds obvious but… don’t tag Relationships in the Characters field. And vice-versa.

Only tag the main characters! Try to keep it to a minimum. Don’t tag every single character that appears in your fic! (especially if there are a lot of them  and most only make a short appearance)

If you’re not sure who to tag, ask yourself: if someone reads my fic, in a year’s time, who would they remember being in there?

In any case, if you want to mention a character without putting it in the Characters field, you can use the Additional Tags!

Stay tuned for Part 3 where I’ll be tackling the Additional Tags! :D

See Part 1: A Comprehensive List of Stucky Tags here.

See Part 3: Additional Tags here! 

You can also access a handy bullet-point checklist that summarizes these posts on Google Docs here! 

[jheselbraum]

billford

Send me a ship and I’ll give my brutally honest opinion on it

I fucking hate it.

And no I’m not gonna add a bunch of slashes every time I mention billford cause it’s already one word in the ask so just block me or block the post whatever I don’t care. Press J.

Okay I’ve got like. a long and varied history with the billford side of the fandom. You can probably see hints of it in TWIV, in the parts where I was kind of growing out of my billford phase but hadn’t really decided if I hated it or just didn’t ship it (cause I personally relate more to Bill and Ford’s toxic relationship being a toxic friendship, but beggars can’t be choosers so I took what I could get in those early days) but who knows how much actually made it in before I realized (very early on) actually no wait billford is trash.

Cause from about The Last Mabelcorn through part one/part two of Weirdmageddon they were basically the only portion of the fandom that wasn’t Filthy Ford Apologist Squad that actually acknowledged that Bill abused Ford. At all.

Like

Oh, you want a happy au where Bill and Ford wind up happy? Early billford shippers invented a whole other guy for that. Most fics with billford in it were like “Bill and Ford are fucking, but Bill is awful to Ford, they’re really only together for a fraction of the fic and the rest purely focuses on Ford recovering from the trauma of the abuse he endured” and absolutely did not shy away from the abuse, and very rarely fetishized it (basically the opposite of how billford is now). When it wasn’t played straight it was usually something like “Bill’s getting saucy and is acting suave but then he just starts spinning like a drill and yeets himself in the general direction of ford’s crotch” (even though I fucking hate billford now I still find that comic hilarious)

It wasn’t until Weirdmageddon that Ford being abused by Bill stopped getting played straight. About then was when the Hamilton jokes started up. Not bad in and of itself but more of a small snowball rolling down a steep mountainside. This is about the time One of Us AUs started cropping up (good or bad depending on who was writing them, at least in the beginning) and honestly that was the first red flag

Cause the Weirdmageddon three promos dropped and suddenly everyone was all like “that’s kinky” instead of “that’s terrifying” and that’s when the torture porn (actual, literal torture porn) started and that’s when the “bill and ford are fucking and bill, yes bill, not will-the-fanmade-dream-demon, but bill fucking cipher gets his crusty ass redeemed and ford either forgives him or we’re going to say he’s a dick for not forgiving him” fics started cropping up (especially after weirdmageddon ended) and they’re still. out there.

And this was around the time I dropped billford like a hot potato (cause fics like that make my abuse survivor ass dissociate to all hell and frankly, even the fics that did acknowledge the billford ship as toxic and played it straight weren’t exactly doing wonders for my mental health) and only recently has it been getting through my carefully cultivated tumblr brand dashboard, considering I’ve got most of the people who were active in that circle at the time blocked.

But it somehow got worse than that, because recently I’ve had to add to the list of blocked people. These include:

People who acknowledge that billford was shitty and abusive, but blame Jheselbraum for some fucking reason and hate her (eye. roll.)

People who acknowledge that billford was shitty and abusive but. Write. DOCTOR STANFORD FILBRICK PINES. AS THE ABUSER.

I don’t understand how anyone could come to either conclusion but they're supremely bad takes.

[littledarlinwrites]

My Redemption Chapter 3

JokerxReader Word count: 1778 Author’s Note: I think I kept ya’ll waiting long enough. Reminder this is a not a beta’d ficlet so bare with me on mistakes, I’m tired, sleep deprived, and haven’t wrote in a while so I’m shaking the dust off. Enjoy!

Previously on: Ch 1 Ch 2

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That is how far the world is from where I am. One. Bad. Day.”

When I awoke the next day, I was well rested physically but my mind was more tired than when I fell asleep. I still couldn’t grasp how J and Joker were the same person, and I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to find out. I came to Gotham to get away from my screwed-up life and start anew, not get twisted up with a psychotic clown who obviously has a past. It was way too early for all this before coffee I thought to myself and decided to get up. I lazily made my way to the kitchen to make my morning brew, the aroma filling every inch of space in my relatively empty apartment. I grab my coffee cup and fill it before walking towards the window and waiting for the scalding liquid to cool so I could drink it and wake up more. I could see the late afternoon traffic making its way through downtown Gotham and all the people making their way to their next destination. I stared out my window without particularly looking at anything. Eventually my coffee became lukewarm, I shook my mind out of the fog it seemed to be lost in and began to drink it. Thoughts of J were tangled within my mind, unfortunately thoughts of this Joker character were also.

Frustrated, I decided that maybe a shower would wake me up a bit and hopefully calm my thoughts. Either way it was needed in order to get ready for work tonight. I sang along to some of my favorite songs of the nineties as I showered, my thoughts never calmed though. I got ready for work pulling on some ripped jeans, a tank top, and an old faded band t-shirt. I laced up my converse, pulled on my leather jacket, and said a silent prayer for work to go by uneventfully fast as I walked out the door.

Barely an hour into my shift and I can already tell it’s going to be a long night. The bar is more busy than usual and filled with demanding customers. The bar hasn’t been this loud or filled in the three months I’ve worked here. It also hasn’t been filled with such rude, skeevy guys either. I’m used to the awkward but harmless flirting, but the guys here tonight made me feel like I was constantly being undressed by someone’s stare.

Closer to closing time I shouted for last call and after waiting on the last guy I started wiping down the bar.

“Long night?” I heard called out from the other end of the bar.

“You could say that.” I replied while taking a glimpse at the time, “if you want anything to drink speak now or forever hold your peace for the night.” I add before making my way down to him.

“I’ll take glass of scotch if you have it, Doll.”

I started pouring the drink absent mindedly until the nickname made me look up at who I was serving. I was taken aback when I didn’t see what I was expecting. In that moment, I thought I was losing it and couldn’t wait to be home.

“Here ya go.” I say as I pass the glass to the man, our fingers brush each other and my eyes instantly flick to his. His chocolate brown orbs gaze into mine and it’s like time stops for a moment before the connection breaks from the clatter of a spilled drink on the section I was about to clean and I have to go back to wiping down the bar. I turn back around once I finish and the stranger is gone, his money under his empty glass. I take another look at the clock and kill the music to give people the hint to start filing out the door.

I lock the door to the bar and begin to turn around when two cats chasing each other yowling and hissing. The cats, taking me off guard, make me jump. I held my hand against my chest as it slowly calms down to a normal rhythm. I begin the familiar trek home after I’m not so startled. As I approach my familiar alley, the one that keeps me more occupied than a weekly tv show, I hear a man, hos breath labored. I cautiously approached the alley, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. When my eyes fall upon a sight I wasn’t expecting.

I was shocked still as I absorbed the details of the scene in front of me. Two men occupied the dark alley, one was dead sprawled across the ground, the other was leaning against the brick wall, grasping his side. As my mind processed the information I noticed the man that was leaning against the building was familiar. I’ll take a glass of scotch if you have it, Doll. The image of him earlier compared to what my eyes were staring at was a stark difference.

“J?” The solitary word escaped my mouth without permission from my stunned brain. Those warm brown eyes looked up at me with only little surprise and as soon as they did I dropped to my knees beside him.

“What happened?” I asked him concerned. Once again, his head tilts to the side and he looks at me inquisitively for a second before a grunt falls from his lips and he doubles over in an obvious wave of pain.

“Let’s get you out of here.” I say aloud to myself as I get to my feet and warp my arm around him to help him to his. He goes to push away from me as if he didn’t need my help and as soon as he does he begins to fall back down. I catch him before much of any progress is lost and keep a firm grip on him. I look up to him and he stares down into my eyes, a hardness that was in them for a moment melting away and being replaced by a wave of pain. I take a step and gently pull him forward, thanking my lucky stars that my apartment is close by.

We make our way to my apartment building, through my apartment, and into my bathroom. J grips onto the door frame taking a moment of pause and I get a good look at his face since I found him in the alley. His face is white as a sheet, as though he was wearing his white make up, but I know he isn’t. He leans his back against the door frame and slowly slides down it. I move passed him and fully into my bathroom quickly grabbing two towels one that I drench in water and the other I left dry, I also grab the first aid kit I kept stashed under the sink.

I dropped down next to him once again, this time wiping his face with the wet wash cloth. His once heavy, labored breathing is now coming in short, almost quiet breaths.

“Maybe I should get you to a hospital…” I thought out loud, but quietly to myself. Lightning fast after my thought, his hand gripped m wrist with strength I didn’t think he was capable of in this condition. I had glanced down when his bloody hand gripped my wrist, and just as quickly my eyes flashed back to his.

“No hospital.” He rasped out the two words. I nodded my head in agreement to him and his hand gripped my wrist tighter as another wave of pain rocked through his body. I could tell he was trying not to crush my wrist with his grip, although he tried the pain in my wrist begged him to let go but I focused on the blood coming out of his side more freely without pressure on it anymore. The dry towel in my hand immediately reached to his side and put pressure on it. I pulled the wrist he still had a hold of towards the side and used that hand to hold the towel onto his side, I then coaxed his hand to let go and help hold the towel there.

I crouch in front of him and opened the first aid kit pulling out iodine, rubbing alcohol, and stitches kit from when I was interested in the medical field. I held the side of his face in hand for a second to get his attention and his eyes opened and drifted towards me.

“This is probably gonna hurt, a lot, but I’m gonna get you fixed up.” I warn and reassure him. He smirks before replying, “I don’t feel pain Angel, just chaos” trails off as his eyes close, and I take that as a sign to move quickly. I open his shirt and pour the iodine and rubbing alcohol on his wound. A wound that was a slash that was concerning but it didn’t seem as if anything fatal like an artery was harmed, but also a shallow puncture, as if someone had attempted to stab him but for whatever reason, wasn’t successful. I tear apart the stitches kit and set to work on closing the most concerning of the two wounds. About twenty to thirty minutes later I struggle on wrapping his mid-section with gauze, but manage to accomplish the slightly difficult task. I stand up and stretch my back and arms and walk to the sink and lean against it to soak in everything that just happened. I turn around and begin to wash my arms and hands of their red stains. I walk into my bedroom and look for a baggy shirt that might work for him. After finding one I set it on the night stand, then I face my next challenge of moving him to my bed. This endeavor was a lot tougher without his cooperation of consciousness last time, and after a bit of struggling, I manage to get him to my bed. I peeked under the gauze to bed sure I didn’t rip a stitch in the process, and breathed a sigh of relief when I see that they all remained intact. Exhausted, I stripped off my t-shirt and threw it across the room and did the same with my jeans. I pulled on a pair of shorts and wrapped a throw I kept on the couch and sat up against my head board as comfily as I could in my bed beside him. So exhausted in fact that it seemed like I didn’t even close my eyes before I fell asleep, with the final though running thought my head, how did he get all those scars?

[mymarvelimagines]

His Human Mate - Part 3

Finally part 3!! So sorry that it took so long. So there is a short scene that describes torture, so if the triggers you, be careful.

----------

You wake up alone and cold, locked in a cell. You’re dizzy, your head is throbbing, and everything has the hazy feeling of drugs.

“Did you get her, Soldier?”

“да, she is here”

You crawl forward, peering between the bars to the two people who are standing in the hall. “I have your next mission”

Bucky stiffens up immediately, “Ready to comply”

The HYDRA agent grins, “You are to guard Y/N Stark. Only I am allowed to touch her, understood?’

“Mission parameters understood”

“Good. Bring her to Lab 4, we have some questions for Ms. Stark”

--

You scream as another bolt of electricity tears through you. “I don’t know” you sob, “I don’t know anything!”

“You live with the most powerful people on earth, have observed them for months, you know their weaknesses, and I want you to tell them to me. What are the Avenger’s weaknesses?”

Bucky stands in the control room, constantly glancing at the door. You snarl baring your bloody teeth, “I don’t know anything! Even if I did, I would never tell you!”

Another shock rips through you, staling your breath, and making your muscles twitch uncontrollably. “I really hate to do this to you. I don’t want to hurt you, Y/N, but if you keep this up I will have to find more … creative … ways to get you to talk. How about a different question?” He crouches down so he’s eye level with you, “How do you kill the Asgardians?”

“I won’t tell you their weaknesses, why would I tell you how to kill them?”

HYDRA Baddie 1, as you’ve started to refer to him as, let out a chuckle, “I was hoping you’re say that! Soldier!!” Immediately Bucky stands up straighter, “Get me the tools.”

Your eyes widen as Bucky wheels out a table full of torture instruments. Straining against the metal cuffs, “I promise I don’t know anything!! I only met them a few days ago!”

“You are the only human in the tower, there is a reason you’re still alive, and I want to find out why. You’ll either tell me willingly, or I’ll find other ways to make you talk”

HYDRA Baddie leans down and grins, slashing his knife across your cheek. You’re exhausted and can already feel unconsciousness starting to creep up on you when you feel something brush against your mind. You lock eyes with Bucky, the only supernatural creature within range, but he only smirks an tilts his head toward the door.

Suddenly another mind brushes against yours, this one you recognize. Loki’s here, he’s in the compound, he’s come to rescue you.

“I’m here, dove. Just a little longer”

You look up at the HYDRA Baddie, “You’re gonna regret hurting me, you know”

He raises an eyebrow, “And why’s that? What are you gonna do?”

“She won’t have to do anything” Bucky’s growled before a gun fires. As soon as the HYDRA goon goes down, Bucky quickly gets the metal cuffs off you. “You’re alright, doll. Stevie contacted me, the Avengers are making their way here now.”

Your body pitches forward as soon as you’re unlocked from the chair, but Bucky quickly rights you, “How do you remember?”

Bucky chuckles, “Wanda did some of her long-distance magic, overriding HYDRA’s programing, it also makes me immune to the wipes. Stevie and I grew up together, so we can communicate over large-distances like most siblings can. That’s how I knew about the rescue”

He’s rambling, you can tell that he’s worried about you. Shit, you’re worried about yourself! You can feel your body going numb, vision hazy, and everything just kinda hurts.

The door to the lab bursts open and Bucky whips around, gun raised, but lowers it immediately when Tony and Loki are the ones who run in.

“Y/N!!”

Loki slides down next to you, pressing gentle kisses all over your face, while Tony has JARVIS running scans. You bring your hand up, clutching at Loki’s robes, and burying your head in his chest, “Loki …”

“I am here, dove, right here” he whispers, rocking you gently.

“Didn’t think you’d come”

Loki lets out a low growl, “I shall always come for you, always, never doubt that”

You nod, and are vaguely aware of being picked up, “Stay awake, darling. You shall be healed. Anthony has already relayed your injuries to SHIELD”

You give Tony a breathy smile as you pass him, “’m tired. Gonna sleep”

Several voices quickly start shouting for you not to fall asleep, but the pull is too great, you can’t stay awake, so your body is quickly dragged into unconsciousness.

--

The first thing you notice when you wake up are the soft sheets that surround you, next is the annoying beeping of the heart monitor, and last was the hands that were encasing both of yours.

“Y/N?” Tony whispers

You must have moved or made a sound, but when you try to open your eyes it feels like they are glued shut.

Loki’s voice is soft when his fingers stroke your face, “Take your time, dove, don’t strain yourself”

With a soft grunt, you manage to peel your eyes open, “Water” you whisper.

Immediately a straw is against your lips and you take a few blissful sips of water, “Take it slow, I don’t want you to throw up, pup”

You pull away and offer both Loki and Tony a shaky smile. “Thanks.” You glance around the room, taking in the equipment that is surrounding you, “How long was I out?”

Loki sighs softly and sits on the edge of the bed, “You were asleep for 8 days, dove. Your body went into shock, you almost died. I – I gave you a transfusion of my blood, the healing properties were able to save you, however it sent your body into shock. A human is not equipped to handle the blood of a supernatural in large quantities.”

“Thank you, for coming to get me” you whisper.

Tony takes your hand and Loki pulls you into a tight hug, ��Never doubt that we will come for you, my human. I will take on all of the armies in the Nine Realms for you.”

You let out a relieved sob, and cling to both of them. “I was so scared”

“I know you were, pup” Tony whispers, running his fingers through your hair. “Do you want to see the rest of the team? They’re on the communal floor”

You chuckle, “Yeah, I kinda wanna get out of this bed”

Tony’s eyes go comically wide, “J, did you record that?! It’s the only time Y/N will ever willingly leave her bed!!”

--

As soon at Loki wheels you up to the common room floor, you are rushed by the entire team. You quickly assure everyone that you are alright, and that there is no lasting damage. Bucky gives you a shy smile and a wave from behind everyone.

“It’s nice to see you again, Bucky. Glad to see that you’re finally home”

Bucky chuckles and reaches out to touch you, only to find himself pinned to the wall by Loki, “Don’t touch her” His growl reverberates throughout the room, causing everyone to take a step back.

“Loki! Put him down, he wasn’t going to hurt me!” You stumble out of the wheelchair that Tony had made you use, quickly wrapping your arms around his waist.

Loki whips around, tucking you underneath his chin, “I cannot have you here with all of these creatures, dove.”

“Take me to my rooms, we can watch movies, just the two of us” You whisper

Loki nods stiffly, “I cannot promise the safety of anyone who approaches Y/N” Loki spoke to the room, never taking his eyes off you, “I shall, hopefully, be more controlled tomorrow”

You glance over at the rest of the Avengers, “I’ll see you all tomorrow. By then he should be calm enough to let me be around other.”

Gently pushing you back into the wheelchair, Loki lets out one last growl before he heads to the elevator, “Come, my human. You need to rest”

You can’t help rolling your eyes at his protective behavior. The two of you had just started your courtship and he was already acting like this, you honestly couldn’t wait to see how much worse it will get. The Avengers are going to have an interesting year ahead of them.

----------

If you guys want to be tagged in any of my works just send me a request and i can add you!

@iamwarrenspeace

---------------

Part 4

[dontburnflowers]

An untitled poem and some comments.

Here comes the sad and the

joy the mortal coil and

lackadaisy, crazy, sprain

and crane your coy neck you see,

here the court says to me, chain

your jowl, make merry and wither,

like chewing cherries we gave each other

juice down our chins from when we

were young together, spritely lost,

back when play was hard and we

toiled over the world,

the biggest toy of them all.

Commentary:

I'll preface this by saying I rarely write poetry and I'm just not a poem kinda person.

All the poetry I write is idle writing when the mood strikes, and sometimes I take that opportunity to practice putting words together in different ways. I like the sounds a lot, so most of the time I'm just trying to stick wordsounds in some kind of interweaving pattern. So, it's really obvious in lines 2, 3, and 4, where [k]/[cr], [oi], [ain], [azy] sounds chain together. Yes, I know I'm using phoneme notation wrong, I'm sorry.

I extrapolated “lackadaisy” from lackadaisical, and I was thinking about bringing back daisy or some flower-like word later in the poem, but I didn't.

After the first 4 lines or so, I realized that I was using a lot of monosyllabic words and it was creating a staccato effect that I thought was somewhat neat. You know, in the same way they say a trochee sounds like funeral dirge (do they say that? I don't remember). I am really bad at intuiting English meter (English is my native language but I think of Russian, which has stress, as a more intuitive example), which is something I need to work on.

But anyway, I then tried to keep to 6 or 7 syllables for the beginning and ending lines to keep that plodding feel and have a midpoint peak of sorts. This resulted in enjambing the first line in a way that exposes “joy the mortal coil” as an explicit run-on without any type of connector. I have a hard time letting myself do this in general in poetry, so I forced myself to keep it as practice.

It's really tempting to rhyme sometimes, just on the basis that it will sound nice, but I try to avoid it (especially tail rhyme) because I think it makes my stuff sound cliché. In lines 3 and 4, “you see”/“to me” was incidental and I just kept it. I used “court” to bring back the [ort] sound from “mortal.” What also ended up happening is that “here the court says to me” might be heard as “hear the court says to me,” which I also thought was neat upon reflection.

I wasn't intending this but after using the [ch] sound with “chewing cherries” to link with “chain,” I realized I had brought into my head two kids eating fruit on a summer day, sitting on a stoop, juice dribbling down their chins, with a vague nostalgic aura of young innocent love. This made me quite annoyed. First of all, I think it's a little cliché, and second of all, it's a memory rooted in movies and advertisements, and not in anything I've ever experienced. But this is what happens when you just writingly wander through poetry, so I just went with it, albeit unwillingly.

So it took a while to figure out a decent way through that image. I still think “juice down our chins” is a weak and derivative image (and also phrase), but I kept it for narrative reasons, as well as the [j] and [ch] sounds.

I didn't realize this at first but the way line 7 ends creates a neat garden-path-sentence-like effect. So that was ok. It also makes line 7/line 8 a little suggestive, (like, am I saying that they gave each other their 'juice?' Uhhh..) but that's okay I guess. I'm just very skittish about those kinda things.

I suppose also you might think of popping cherries, which I realized just now.

I did find it very cool that neck/jowl/chin somewhat anatomically ties together, which happened serendipitously.

'when we // were young together' is also a phrase that I find weak, and it's something that works better in song lyrics (a lot of songs probably have that phrase verbatim). But I was sort of giving up at this point.

As for the last 3 lines, I ran out of motivation and I just gave up. I was trying to force 'toil' and 'toy' too hard (to refer to 'coil' and 'coy') so I just slapped them on and called it a day. I had the “chewing cherries” line be the long syllable line and an obvious focal point, and I was too bored to be creative about it.

I was gonna put 'before we learned // the world is not a toy' but I couldn't make it work.

I was thinking about using 'before we learned how to cry' and then repeating with rhyme 'before we learned how to lie/die' but honestly I couldn't justify how silly it was. It was just a little too cliché. I also thought about 'little boy' with 'toy' somewhere but I didn't want to push the youth image that much.

A final aside is that I just don't know how to play with punctuation with purpose. That is, peppering poems with slashes, pipes, partnerless brackets/parentheses and the like. I haven't figured out anything that adds to the poem without saying so obviously: 'look at me, I'm using punctuation differently, how postpostpostmodern!' Part of it is that I'm very unread poetry-wise, and I am probably an unintentional philistine. Even when I'm writing complete stream-of-consciousness prose-poetry I don't experiment enough with atypical punctuation.

Ultimately, breaking rules doesn't bother me, but I want to break them in a way that makes the resultant object more powerful.

[misfxts]

8.23.14 || Miles Drabble

Read part two [Here!]

>August 18, 2014. 2:46 AM.

Miles’ camera focuses on his Creator, who is just coming home. Judging by the way he was staggering into the house, his Creator was once again drunk after a night at the casino with his friends.

Miles moves to him, using a sound clip of a gently playing piano to catch Creator’s attention. In which his Creator responds by holding out his arms, then grasping onto Miles’ arm and uses him to steady himself as Miles takes him to his bedroom.

“H-hey Miles...how you doing bud..?” Creator slurs out. “...Good, I’m sure. Don’t answer thaaat...I do-- I don’t think I can see straight ‘nuff t’ read right now..J-juushht get me to bed okay?”

As his Creator commanded, Miles did not respond to the question, he just kept moving to the bedroom with his Creator holding onto his arm. Once they make it to the bedroom, Miles peels off his Creator’s jacket even if Creator was struggling against it in his drunken haze. But once he felt how soft the bed was, he calmed down almost instantly.

“G-goood niiihiiiiiiiight Miles~...” Creator mutters as he tries to get himself under the blanket. Miles doesn’t help him here, he simply waves and exits bedroom, closing the door behind him.

Miles makes his way back to the living area and starts to put the jacket in a nearby closet, stopping when he notices the light of a taxi waiting outside. He searches for his Creator’s wallet which was (thankfully) inside the jacket and goes outside to pay the taxi driver with the exact amount, which ended up being all the money Creator had in his wallet.

The driver was incredibly confused at the sight of Miles, but takes the money and drives off.

>August 20th, 2014. 5:37 PM.

Miles is folding his Creator’s clothes with factory precision while Creator is pacing a few feet away, arguing with who Miles assumed was the bank (He was too far away to hear clearly). This is a common sight now in the household, what with Creator’s frequent visits to the Casino. 

Creator slams his finger down on the end call button with such ferocity that the phone would have definitely cracked had Creator pressed any harder. The phone goes into his pocket and he approaches Miles.

“Miles. Computer Mode.” Creator’s voice is stern and angry. Miles doesn’t protest, he stops folding clothes and sits still. With a loud ‘Ker-chunk!’ Miles’s chest cavity is opened and the keyboard is retrieved from inside.

( What are we searching for tonight? }

“What did I say about talking during Computer Mode?” Creator is irritated, but shakes his head. “..I’m searching for a way to get us out of this hole we’re in. To answer your question.”

A hole of his own doing, Miles would add. But that is not going to help them, he just sits still as Creator types in the address of a job searching website.

>August 21st, 1:30 PM.

“One more slash Miles, come on, you can do it!”

As Creator commands, the sword Miles holds comes down on the dummy...cutting the fabric just a bit.

“Hmm..needs more work, but you’ll get it.”

( Are you sure.. .entering in this fight is going to help us get out of debt? }

“Yeah it will.” Creator nods. “Your size is gonna be a huge advantage. You could just flip over the robot and drive your sword into their gears.”

( My research into BattleBots showed that robots must be operated by a controller. I am not like this. }

“Way ahead of you!” Creator pulls out a controller. “I’m not gonna hook you up to this though, you can move however you please and I’ll just pretend to push all the buttons.”

( Wouldn’t that be cheating? }

“Only if we’re found out.”

>August 23rd, 7:16 PM.

Miles sits on a cart as his Creator pushes him into the building. As far as anyone else knows, Miles is turned off. But he’s not, he’s pretending.

“Quite a piece of machinery you got there, entering in the tournament I presume?” Says a greeter.

“Thank you! Yes, I am.” His Creator responds cheerfully.

“Sounds good. What’s its name?”

“It’s name is Miles.” Creator states.

“And that stands for...?”

“Uh..” Creator sounds taken aback. “...Mechanical Intelligent Life-form Engineered for... Sabotage.”

“That’s a mouthful.” Miles can hear the patron writing down the name, and the paper being handed to Creator. “Alright, you’re set. Follow this hallway and hang a right, first door on the left is backstage. Your work station is number 9.”

Creator thanks the greeter and pushes the cart down the hallway as he was instructed.

“Get ready Miles, there’s a lot riding on this. It’s a gamble, but it’s gonna work, I know it will...”

“I’m counting on you Miles.”