#not including any from the new series because frankly it would make narrowing down to ten impossible

[section-69]

There's been a bunch of these going around but none with the options I'd pick so...

[scripttorture]

One of the central characters in a fantasy story I'm writing has torture as part of her backstory. She was captured by an evil race, and one individual in particular put her through a "training" regime designed to turn her into a useful/trustworthy slave. Specifically the goals of the training were:

- destroy her sense of self / agency

- overwrite her ingrained response of healing herself when injured (she has magical healing powers)

- an affectionate or worshipful disposition towards her captors

- immediate obedience to any command

I feel like both physical and psychological torture / mental conditioning are probably appropriate, though I'm leaning away from including sexual abuse. I honestly don't know much about torture at all and the only things that come to mind as producing a result similar to what I'm looking for are the Game of Thrones torture sequence and the use of obdience collars in the Codex Alera book series. The latter is very interesting to me because it is a magical device that inflicts pain in reaction to disobedience but also inflicts pleasure to reward obedience.

I guess I'm just wondering if you have any advice for what kinds of methods would be good to include in a process designed to produce obedience, rather than torture for its own sake or to extract information, as well as if there are any common pitfalls I should try to avoid in writing about such a thing.

The training itself won't be in the book, but I need to be familiar with it for backstory purposes because later in the story this character encounters her torturer again, and is subjected to some further abuse before she finally overcomes her fear and kills him.

Alright well I’m going to be straight up with you: the scenario you’ve presented is a very common torture apologist trope. It’s incredibly unrealistic. And it’s unrealistic in ways that support torture by claiming it can be ‘useful’.

 Which probably means that you’re new to the blog and haven’t heard me give this talk before. That’s OK, we all learn sometime and it’s not my intention to shame you for the fact you’re not as obsessed with this stuff as I am or couldn’t afford to shell out for the books.

 Torture does not produce obedience. The best evidence we have right now suggests it encourages active resistance.

 If you got a lot of your inspiration from Game of Thrones then frankly I’m not surprised you came up with apologia. The torture in that series is incredibly badly handled. And a big part of the point of running this blog is that most people are getting their information on torture from shows like that. Which happens because the research is inaccessible and hasn’t been popularised the way fictional tropes (sometimes fictional tropes literally started by torturers) have been popularised.

 The important thing is what you choose to do now.

 I’m going to break down the problems here and make some suggestions for what you could do instead.

 Firstly: there is no torture or abuse that will guarantee obedience. Pain does not make people meek or compliant or willing to follow commands.

 Torture survivors are not broken.

 They are not ‘controlled’ by their torturers and the suggestion that they are is used in the real world to bar real survivors from treatment. It is also used to bar them from entering safe countries and to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed visas or passports.

 The best statistics we have for any sort of compliance under torture come from analysis of historical French data where torture was used to try and force confessions (something we know torture can sometimes do).

 The ‘success’ rate averaged at 10%. Under torture 90% of people will not comply long enough to sign their name.

 Secondly: torture does not and can not ‘make’ a victim feel ‘worshipful’ towards their torturer. The suggestion is kind of like asking if someone can tap dance immediately after removing the bones from their legs.

 Torturers have no control over a victim’s emotions. They have no control over their symptoms. They have no control over their beliefs.

 And there is no such thing as a torture that can change someone’s mind in a way torturers can control.

 Once again, this fictional trope is used by politicians and the media to justify marginalising real torture survivors.

 I have read hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts from torture survivors. I’ve read historic and modern accounts. I’ve read accounts from all sort of people from all over the globe. I have never seen a survivor say anything positive about their torturers. I have never seen anything close to toleration.

 A lot of survivors are blisteringly angry at their torturers. A lot of them feel overwhelming levels of spite and some report literally putting themselves at risk of death in order to spite their torturers. And yes, a lot of them are afraid too. None of these emotions are mutually exclusive.

 Affection is impossible. We are not wired that way.

 Thirdly: I understand that ‘evil races’ are a long standing fantasy trope but it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention the racism inherent in that idea. That some people are ‘born bad’.

 I’d strongly suggest you look up the Black, Indian and First Nations people that I know are on this site critiquing these kinds of fantasy tropes. Because they will be able to explain it better then I can.

 Fourthly: the term ‘psychological torture’ is a pretty common dog whistle for torture apologia.

 Most of the time tortures that people dub ‘psychological’ are things with real, physical effects that lead to lasting injury and death. They just don’t tend to leave obvious external scars. I use Rejali’s term ‘clean torture’ for these techniques. Researchers distinguish them from scarring tortures because they are harder to detect and prove in court.

 The majority of survivors today will have experienced clean torture. They will have no obvious physical scars. But they will still be disabled. They’re ‘just’ less likely to see any form of justice for it.

 Fifthly: torture is a terrible training method because it decreases a person’s ability to learn.

 Torture causes memory problems. It also often causes lasting physical injuries that make performing basic tasks more difficult. And it causes a lot of serious psychological problems which make performing basic tasks more difficult.

 A trained person who was never tortured will always out perform someone whose training involved torture.

 I probably sound quite angry here.

 I write fantasy and I also write about torture a lot. But I can’t imagine that it’s just flavour for a fantasy world or some artefact of the past. Torture is a real, present threat in the country that I grew up in. If I was to return now I could, literally, be tortured and executed.

 If you want to include torture in your world, in your story then you are committing to telling someone else’s story. You are representing an incredibly marginalised group of people and you are presenting that representation to a third group, one that has never had contact with real torture survivors.

 Are you comfortable with the idea of telling your peers that survivors are still controlled by ‘the enemy’? That they’re passive? That they don’t have the capacity to make their own decisions?

 Are you comfortable knowing that the popularity of this message keeps millions of genocide survivors in refugee camps, blocked from citizenship, aid and safety?

 I understand feeling attached to a story and a character. And I understand that this information is hard to find. Hell I’m probably going to end up with the only English copy of one of the pivotal textbooks because I’m shelling out to get it translated.

 You say you want to write a torture survivor. With respect I don’t think you know what a torture survivor looks like.

 I think the most helpful, and kindest, thing I can do here is describe what torture does to people. Because I can’t tell you whether that’s something you want to write. I could try and rebuild this scenario for you (and if you decide you’re interested in that after reading all of this and all the links then I suggest looking through the blog tags for ICURE, torture as training, Black Widow and Overwatch.) But I think you need to decide whether you actually want to write a torture survivor first.

 Here’s a post on the most common torture apologia tropes.

 Here’s the post on the types of memory problems torture commonly causes. I strongly recommend picking at least one.

 Remember that this would never go away. Improvement and recovery in torture survivors means learning to live with symptoms. The symptoms themselves are permanent.

 It’s a hundred different alarms set up on their phone to try and make up for the forgetfulness that makes them miss appointments. It’s the little bottle of perfume in their pocket to bring themselves back to reality when they get intrusive memories at work.

 Here’s a post on the other common symptoms.

 You want something in the range of 3-5 of those, though more are likely if your character is held for years. Each of them should be severe. Every single symptom should have a large, negative, impact on the character’s daily life.

 Do you know anyone with chronic pain? It warps their world. Work can become impossible. Basic household tasks like getting dressed, cooking, cleaning the dishes are done through gritted teeth or not at all. Hobbies and ‘fun’ activities dwindle as they struggle to find a way to do them that doesn’t hurt. Interaction with other people, even loved ones, can easily become barbed.

 Because the pain makes everything more difficult. It means everything takes more energy, more effort. Which means that things fall by the wayside, whether that’s by a pile of mouldering dishes in the sink or snapping at a child. It means tears and the social judgement that follows them. It means the world narrowing as it gets harder to go out.

 Do you see what I mean? Every part of life.

 That’s an example for one symptom. You need to work out at least four. Then figure out how they interact. Then figure out what the character can do to make her life better.

 With chronic pain that can mean painkillers but it’s always more then that. It’s re-learning how to do things; how to put on trousers without aggravating the bad knee, how to sew with one hand. It means learning to cut down on what they do and it means learning a new sort of flexibility; accepting that there are days when the pain is too much.

 It can mean having the same conversation about disability over and over again. With family, with friends, with colleagues. ‘I can’t do that.’ ‘I can do that sometimes but not always.’ ‘That will hurt me.’ ‘I can’t use that chair.’ ‘I can’t get my arms that high above my shoulders.’ ‘I need help with this.’

 And that sometimes means learning a kind of patience that is really barely held back rage. Or perhaps I’m projecting a little with this last one.

 If you’ve never met a torture survivor, if you’ve never looked at a survivor’s work, then all this is difficult. You’re trying to imagine something from first principals with nothing to fall back on.

 So let’s bring some survivors into the discussion here. Some reality.

 Who’s listened to Fela? How about Bobi Wine?

 Fela Kuti was the father of modern Afro beats music. He was tortured multiple times and during one attack, which destroyed his home, his mother was murdered by the military. When he got out of jail Fela marched her funeral procession past the biggest barracks in Nigeria’s biggest city. He wrote two songs about this attack and he doubled down on his opposition to the military government.

 Fela’s music started causing riots.

 You can read what I have to say about him here. You can listen to his music on youtube.

 Here’s an interview with Bobi Wine, which was conducted shortly after he was tortured in Uganda. He talked about how he was determined to go back and continue fighting. Which he did. He even ran against the president.

 I’ve also got a short piece on Searle who was a cartoonist captured by the Japanese during World War 2. His drawings of what happened in To the Kwai and Back are worth seeing. Especially if you want to write atrocities on this scale. They will show you the scale and how to focus on the small, human elements despite that overwhelming scale.

 Alleg’s The Question is pretty much a must, it’s one of the most thorough accounts from the Franco-Algerian war.

 Monroe’s A Darkling Plain is also a must, it’s a series of interviews with survivors of various different conflicts and atrocities. Some are torture survivors. Some are not. It is essential reading because it shows the variety in survivors as well as giving a sense of their lives beyond the symptoms.

 Finally Amnesty International has literally hundreds of interviews and studies available for free online.

 The most important decision for any story with regards to torture is whether it should be there at all.

 So much of this topic is intimidating and so much of it is difficult to write. Not just in the ‘oh this is horribly effecting’ sense but in the ‘I have twelve things to juggle in this simple scene’ sense.

 Ask yourself what torture adds to this character and this story. What does this backstory actually give this character?

 Because if the point is to have her vulnerable and then ultimately triumphing violently over her attackers I don’t think you want a torture scenario. You could get the same thing from a bad guy trying to drug her and having the kidnapping fail when she fights him off, clumsy but effective nonetheless.

 And she could still come out of something like that traumatised.

 Right now I really don’t see this adding anything but torture apologia to your story.

 Handling torture well in a story means accepting that it can’t be the same story without it. It means watching the characters and narrative warp under the weight of it. It means lasting effects, for all the characters and for the world itself.

 I believe you are capable of writing that if you want to, pet. But this ain’t it.

Edit: I’m having trouble seeing the beginning of the answer here. Can anyone let me know if there are formatting issues again please? The first word in the htmal is ‘Alright’ but what I’m seeing on tumblr starts 8 paragraphs in.

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[btsficsforthehumble]

adj.: 1. Modern, unfamiliar, or different

2. Not based on or conforming to what is generally done or believed

pairing: reader x ot7

genre: college au; angst, fluff, smut, poly, ot7

Summary: You begin your first year at a prestigious university, set out on achieving your academic goals when a series of men step into your life that change the way you view the definition of love.

Part Four

Warnings: explicit language

Word count: 2k

Your alarm forces you out of a deep sleep at eight on the dot. Groaning, you blindly press the snooze button and flip your face into your pillow, not quite ready to deal with a new day. You let yourself doze for a few minutes, longing for the dark pull of sleep to take you back.

Now, you had to be at your class in under an hour and you were stressed. Seeing how much time had passed in your drowsy state allowed a fire to be lit under your butt, encouraging you to quickly jump in the shower and get ready for the day. All the while, all you wanted to do was answer the call of your abandoned bed.

After rushing around your apartment, you finally stepped out in some light brown corduroys and an embroidered blouse tucked into the waist. A light jacket thrown over top, you felt put together enough to start your day. Even with the rush, you managed to grab a couple of your million muffins from your baking spree yesterday and a to-go mug of coffee. You learned your mistake yesterday, when you showed up to morning classes without caffeine to push you through.

Walking across campus, you watch other students scurry off to their own morning classes. It still being the first week of the semester, most people hadn’t lost the motivation to go to their early classes just yet. You really hope that you won’t fall victim to that… you can’t afford to skip in a class you struggle with.

Once you arrive at your classroom, you head to the same spot you sat last class, and plop your bag down as you get your muffin out to eat before class. Setting it out, you sip your coffee and scroll though your phone, checking your inbox that had accumulated honestly way too many emails overnight.

Your eyes glued to your phone, you don’t even notice when a large hand swipes the muffin right off your desk.

Still absorbed in an email about volunteering for a local animal shelter, you hear someone sit loudly in the seat behind you. Ignoring it, you continue to read though the details of the email --- it looked like the animal shelter for your city, Autumn Leaves Adoption Center, was accepting new volunteers and was looking for students from your university specifically. You had always had a huge soft spot for animals, so you were excited at a chance to spend time helping out.

You glance up from your phone when you finish, and immediately notice your muffin missing from it’s spot on your desk. Bewildered, you begin to search around the classroom with your eyes to locate the stolen baked good. Not finding it with anyone on your sides or in front of you, you swing around to check out the suspects hiding from view.

Ding ding ding!

You found it. Well, you found half of it. The attractive boy that had pestered you yesterday had the other half of your precious muffin stuffed in his cheeks like some sort of squirrel. Caught, he gives the best grin he can with his mouth full, including his eyes crinkling and his eyes shining with mischief.

“Excuse me, you can’t just steal people’s breakfasts right off their desks! Who raised you?!” you whisper yelled. You could feel the blood rush to your cheeks from being flustered, and hoped he couldn’t see.

“Wuh yahr warn ehten et,” he replied, cheeks still full.

“Ugh, at least swallow first you animal!”

“Well, you weren’t eating it,” he flashes a grin.

“Um, excuse me sir, who allowed you to go around stealing people’s food the second you deem them to be not interested in it,” you snapped.

“Oohhh, can you say that again?” As he spoke, he raised an eyebrow while his eyes traveled up your body.

“Say what?” Your flat tone gave away your high level of irritation at him.

“Call me sir again, sweetheart. I think you and I both liked it,” he leaned forward as he spoke. His gaze was challenging, almost to see if you were able to handle him.

The truth is, if this asshole hadn’t just stolen your goddamn muffin you’d be happy to do so --- outside of the classroom --- anytime. The guy, you remember being named Taehyung, had gorgeous dark curls that anyone would dream about pulling on. His dark eyes were enigmatic, and by every definition intense. Tanned skin, clear and smooth only made him seem more ethereal. HIs natural looks, coupled with an artistic and sophisticated fashion sense, made him look like a character of a k-drama.

But, this guy had some audacity if you’ve ever seen any. So, you weren’t going to give into his charm as easily as he wanted.

Slowly, you lean forward on his desk, allowing him to get a good view of your tits while you lift a hand to his mouth, to swipe away excess crumbs that had been forgotten during his cookie monster moment. You lightly trace his bottom lip with the pad of your thumb, pushing down just hard enough for the flesh to ripple.

His eyes become more hooded, obviously thinking he had won you over with his charms.

“Why would I call someone sir, if they need to clean up after like a child, hmm?” You dropped your voice as you spoke, not only trying to limit prying ears but also to give yourself a more sultry sound.

You lean back and retract your arm. But instead of letting it drop, you raise the hand you had reached out to him to your face, and pop your thumb into your mouth. While your lips are still encircling your thumb, you let your eyes meet his.

Honestly, you weren’t expecting him to look as affected as he does. His eyes are narrow, surely from your jibe. However, you see that he seems to be breathing a little heavier than before, and that his hands were gripping the edges of his desk with more force than would be considered normal. This makes the veins and tendons pop on his already large and beautiful hands and you can’t help but let your eyes linger on them for a little.

“Mmm, I did a good job with these muffins, I can tell even with just crumbs,” you say after popping your thumb out of your mouth.

Catching you off guard, a cheery voice asks from over your turned around shoulder, “Oooo, are you sharing muffins? I love muffins!”

You turn around in your seat quickly in response. “Oh, uh, yeah.” You bend over and grab the other muffin you brought with you, thinking you’d eat it as a snack later in the day. Oh well.

You hand the muffin over, and quickly realize this is the same guy that sat in front of you yesterday, the cute one with the even cuter smile.

“Yay! Thank you so much! You’re my new favorite person!” he declared. He was giving you a smile even bigger than the one that you had swooned over prior, and really looked like the embodiment of sunshine. “My name is Hoseok, but you can call me Hobi.”

“I’m y/n! And don’t worry about the muffin, I have about a million back at home. I went on a bit of a baking spree yesterday,” you giggled.

You hear a surprised scoff come from behind you. Apparently, Mr. Tall Dark and Handsome is unhappy with the heat you gave him, now knowing that not only did you have much more at home, but had another with you. And you gave it away. You can’t help but let out a small smile at his indignation.

“It’s nice to meet you y/n! I hope I’ll get to have more of your treats in the future, this is delicious!” Hoseok says, already taking a bite.

You give him a wide smile in return. “If you want, I can save you one of whatever I make. I love to bake new things all the time.”

Hoseok begins to reply, but is cut off by the professor starting class. His eyes widen a little, surprised at the intrusion, but quickly sends you an apologetic smile as he turns around to face the lecturer.

Prepared for social hour to be over, because frankly, this was way too much for you at 9 am, you pulled out your notes. As you straighten up, you feel a presence behind your ear. Being this close, you could smell a musky, dark, masculine scent wash over you.

“I hope you save some for me too, sweetheart. I’m a growing boy,” Taehyung huskily murmurs, quiet enough to be missed by anyone else.

Cheeks hot at the double meaning of his words, all you manage to get out was a flat, “No promises.” Hoping to appear unaffected by him, you go right back to paying attention to your professor. Hoseok, in front of you, was oblivious to your and Taehyung’s hushed conversation and was busy scribbling away in his notes. You take a deep breath, and follow suit.

Unfortunately, calculus is as hard as you remember. As the professor lectured, you could feel whatever understanding you had previously drift away. You write notes at a furious pace, in hopes that whatever you copy down you’ll understand at a later time.

You sigh after your professor dismisses class. You are feeling frustrated that even during the first week, you seem to be slipping behind in your understanding of the class material.

“Hey are you okay? Class was a lot today, huh.” Hoseok turned around in his chair to speak, seeming to have caught your pitiful sigh. You glace up to meet his eyes, your expression slightly sheepish.

“Yeah, I’m okay, just not very good at calculus,” you admit with a small smile.

He gives you a sunny smile in return. “Do you wanna study together? I actually like math. I know, I’m strange for that.”

Your eyes widen a little in surprise. He barely knows you but is offering to help you with the subject you struggle with the most. It was a no-brainer.

“Oh my gosh, yes! I’d love to have a study partner for this class. I’m so worried about falling behind.” You feel your face fall into a small pout at your confession.

“Can I join? I’m not too great at math either.” You jump a little, completely forgetting about the human pain in the ass behind you.

“Of course! The more the merrier!” Hoseok beams, looking past you to the boy behind. “I’m Hoseok, but everyone just calls me Hobi.”

“I’m Taehyung, nice to meet you.” He gives Hoseok a grin as he introduces himself, seemingly never not up to trouble.

“You too! Do you guys want to meet tomorrow? We can go to the coffee shop around the corner from here,” Hoseok suggests.

You nod, and Taehyung gives a noise of agreement behind you, before asking, “Do you guys want to trade numbers? That way we don’t have to wait to see each other to get help.”

Internally, you sigh, having a feeling he was going to use your number for more than just that. Regardless, you comply. The three of you swap your phones, inputting your contact information, and stand to exit the classroom as a new stream of students enter waiting for the next class to start.

“Bye guys! See you tomorrow!” Hoseok flashes his signature sunny smile as you depart.

“Bye Hobi!” You smile at him in response. Taehyung gives his own goodbye to the boy.

After Hoseok heads off a different direction, Taehyung leans closer to you to give you your own farewell. “Goodbye y/n, see you tomorrow sweetheart,” he basically purrs at you.

You give him a glare in response. “Bye, Taehyung.” After, you swiftly make your exit. That boy was a handful, to say the least. But, as much as you hate to admit it, he was hot. Like really hot. While Hoseok had that ‘boy next door’ quality, Taehyung oozed sex appeal. You were really going to have to train yourself to act normal around those two, if you were going to be spending extended time alone with them. Heading to your next class, you decide that is a problem for later.

[ailuronymy]

I remember encountering a few years ago, and it was set in New Zealand, where I live, and so when I noticed cats popping up with prefixes like Otter- I asked them if that was allowed, and they told me that they decided not to limit the prefixes to be country-specific because there wouldn't be many to choose from.

I always found this kind of unfair, because without even putting much thought into it I can already think of like 20 possible prefixes, and especially considering they didn't have any naming rules, with possible prefixes such as Bird- and Leaf-, etc, there would have been plenty. The only ones they would really be losing is the predators, and a few others obviously, but people really don't give enough credit to our country for it's variety of wildlife. There is a TON of options that work for here and nowhere else, to the point that there would be more new prefixes than lost ones. I actually think that there could be more prefixes to choose from than there would be in the typical UK territories.

I cannot possibly imagine running out of prefixes, even with a large rp, and I don't actually feel it would be very restricting at all. So I don't know, it always felt like a cheap excuse to me. I was wondering your opinion, do you think it was reasonable to allow prefixes like Otter- for a wider variety of names? Because personally I feel that it was unnecessary, and at the time it really rubbed me the wrong way for some reason. I guess I felt it was in some way disrespectful??

Hello there! Thank you for writing in. I think ultimately the problem here is that you went to a role-play group that wasn’t using any kind of naming rules, and expected there to be rules. Everyone engages with this series in different ways, so I think there’s value in being discerning and clear with your expectations and what you want to get out of the experience of creating with other people. Including being clear with yourself, so you know what you’re looking for and can find it. It seems to me you would thrive in a more traditional style naming community role-play in a New Zealand territory, based on what you’re saying. 

I would disagree with you on the point of New Zealand having more prefixes than, for example, an English setting, because the fact is any setting can have a huge number of prefixes if you put in the time and effort to research the area and consider what prefixes are available. This blog, for example, I only offer English prefixes, because I’m not interested in doing the infinite amount of research required to make prefix lists for every possible location. However, it’s absolutely possible to make lists for other locations and find a wealth of potential prefixes. In other words, yes, New Zealand has a lot of potential prefixes. Pretty much everywhere does. 

Finally, to answer the question you’ve asked me: it’s not how I would do things (obviously, given this blog’s narrow focus re: location) but I frankly don’t see it as my business what other people do with the role-play forums and that, either. 

For me, it doesn’t make sense to have otter-, for instance, in a country where there are no otters, because the world I like to write when it comes to Warriors might take some creative license here and there--but not that much. So personally I wouldn’t join that role-play forum, because it doesn’t mesh with me. But canon does take immense creative license, melding UK and North American influences, so it doesn’t surprise me that many fans also play fast and loose with those details because that’s what they prefer.

It all comes down to personal taste. I think for you it hit in this particular way because you live in Aotearoa and so for you, this setting is home and it is familiar and you know and appreciate the plants and animals there in a way many other fans just don’t. I can understand that frustration very, very well, as an Australian. But unfortunately, the solution is to find fans who do want to create the same way you do, and avoid the rest. I hope this helps a little. 

[nerdyfangirl67]

Once Upon A Time -  Criminal Minds Reader Insert

Pairing: Aaron x reader (previous),

Warnings: angst all the way, slightly cold Aaron, language

Word count: 1715

Reader used to date Aaron, but Aaron pushes the reader away. So the reader decides to marry someone else, and invites Aaron to the wedding, where Aaron realizes she is the one who got away

A/N: Here is the first part of my three part mini series. Reader does get with a character that many, if not all, of you know but I don’t want to ruin the surprise. This is an Aaron x reader fic though, despite the reader’s other relationship.

Your POV:

You stood staring at his apartment door, debating if you should even be here at all. Aaron hadn’t talked to you in days, unless absolutely necessary at work. He had stopped using your first name, opting instead for your last. He wouldn’t even sit next to you on the jet. Rather, he had taken to sitting next to, and across from, the other team members, making sure an empty seat was never available near him.

After two weeks of this, you had had enough. Hence the reason you were standing in front of his door now. After another moment of hesitation, you decide to go for it and give the apartment door a hard knock.

You hear shuffling behind the door, followed shortly by a loud sigh.

“Look Aaron, I know you are in there. I can hear you. All I want to do is talk.” You say, the thought of him ignoring you making your heart ache.

The door in front of you slowly opens and reveals a tired looking Aaron. He has bags under his eyes, his hair is wild, pointing every which way, and he has the top three buttons of his wrinkled dress shirt undone.

You slip in the door, an intense throbbing pain consuming you as you now stand in front of him and see him like this.

“Aaron.” His name falls from your lips, the tone of your voice betraying how you feel. His eyes, the ones that have brought you so much comfort, are cold.

“What’s wrong?” You murmur softly, moving to take a step closer to him. He matches your step forward with a backwards one of his own.

“We can’t do this anymore.” He says stiffly. “We can’t. It’s done.” He is looking anywhere but at you.

His sharp words instantly bring tears to your eyes. Of all the things you thought he would say, this wasn’t one of them.

“W-why? What do y-you mean?” You stammer out through the tears.

“I just…” His voice cracks, showing the first sign of emotion since you entered his apartment. The next words out of his mouth stun you into silence. “I have a reputation to uphold.”

The tears were flowing freely down your face at this point. You don’t know what to say so you turn and rush out of his apartment. You don’t slow down until you reach your car and once there you drive to the only person you could stand to be around right now.

You scramble up the stairs to his apartment, tripping up the last few at the top. Once you reach his door, you knock furiously, too broken to care that it is around one in the morning.

A husky “I’m coming” sounds from inside the apartment. Not a moment later the door opens and a sleepy Spencer is staring down at you.

He scans your face before pulling you into a hug. “Y/N?” Once Spencer pulled you into his arms, you were crying again.

When you are able to speak coherently, you lift your face and look into Spencer’s comforting eyes. “Spence, he dumped me. And he didn’t tell me why. Just said he had a fucking reputation to uphold.” You spit out venomously. Spencer was the only one you had told once you started seeing Aaron and he hadn’t told a soul, which you were very grateful for in this moment.

Stepping back from Spencer’s embrace, you quietly ask, “Can I stay?” Spencer nods his head and grabs one of your hands, gently leading you to the couch. He turns on one of your favorite TV shows before bringing you close to his side. You lean your head on his shoulder and try your best to focus on the show, in hopes of ridding your mind of thoughts of Aaron. You don’t recall much after that, probably due to the fact that you found Spencer’s one bottle of wine and drank almost the whole thing by yourself, Spencer having only been able to nab a glass.

You awake the next morning on the couch with a pounding head and a queasy stomach. At first you weren’t sure what woke you up, aside from the obvious hangover, but then you heard it. A phone, which appeared to be yours, was buzzing on the coffee table.

Groaning, you stretch forward and grab it. “Yo.” You say quietly, not wanting to increase the pounding in your head. JJ’s stern voice immediately fills your head, not helping at all with the headache you had. “Y/N, I’ve tried calling you three times. We have a case in New Orleans and Hotch wants everyone at the debriefing in 30 minutes.”

“Shit, sorry JJ. I’m going and I’ll be there soon.” You end the call and quickly get up off the couch. You stumble to the bathroom, searching for the Tylenol, which you pop two off in hopes of getting rid of your headache. Next, you move to Spencer’s bedroom, knocking on the door. You hear a muffled “What?”, before you open the door.

You smile as you take in Spencer. He is sprawled across his bed, his comforter half hanging off both him and the bed, and you could tell his hair was absolutely wild.

“Spence, we have to be at a debriefing in 25 minutes.” He shot up and was out of bed in ten seconds, rushing past you towards the bathroom, grabbing a change of clothes on his way out.

You turn towards Spencer’s closet, intent on locating your backup outfit that you had stashed there. Having established a standing Saturday night TV show binge, alternating between either yours or Spencer’s apartment, combined with the fact that the two of you had crazy schedules, you had taken to keeping a pair of work clothes at each other’s place. And over the last two years you had yet to actually use your backup outfit, until today.

After a few minutes of searching you finally found your clothes. Eyeing the outfit, you let out a squeak of surprise. “What the hell was I thinking with this?” You huff out in frustration.

In your hands was a fitted, navy blue pencil skirt, a sleeveless black blouse, and a pair of black heels. Hell, you couldn’t even recall the last time you had worn heels. These were obviously clothes you had just wanted to get out of your closet because you had no intention of actually wearing them.

You didn’t have time to get pissed about your younger self’s idiotic choices, so you stripped down to your underwear and shimmy on the skirt, followed shortly by the blouse. A gray cardigan of Spencer’s catches your eye.

“Hey Spence?” You shout. He yells back an acknowledgement to which you respond with a question. “Can I borrow a cardigan?”

He strolls into the room, towel drying his hair, already dressed and ready to go. You feel a small twinge of jealousy at the fact he showered and beat you at getting ready. He nods and you swipe the cardigan off the hanger.

It was a few sizes too big for you, despite Spencer’s thin frame and just covered your butt, causing you to let out a sigh of relief. You grab your phone, purse and jacket from Spencer’s living room and follow him out the door.

The ride to the FBI headquarters was uneventful and despite your best efforts, the two of you still arrived fifteen minutes late. Spencer was panicking because of how tardy the two of you were but you could care less. Frankly, it excites you knowing that by being late you would be irritating Aaron. Despite the feelings you had for him, let’s be honest, you were madly in love with him and had been for a long time, you were deeply hurt by his actions.

The two of you walk into the debriefing room, causing a few pairs of eyes to glance your way, including Aaron’s. He glances at his watch but doesn’t say anything, even when Spencer starts apologizing profusely.

You sit in the free chair next to Morgan, which just so happens to be across from Aaron. You hardly hear a word Penelope is saying because you are so focused on Aaron. You watch him through the entire debriefing, looking for any hint of the pain you’re currently feeling.

The team is dismissed from the round table with “Wheels up in thirty.” Hotch breezes out of the room, followed shortly after by Rossi.

You wait a beat before heading towards your desk to grab your go-bag. Spencer joins you and the two of you head to the jet early.

You don’t feel much like talking and Spencer doesn’t push you. When you arrive at the jet, Spencer sits at the opposite end of the couch, pulling your feet into his lap.

“How are you doing Y/N?” He asks softly, eyes searching yours. You shrug. “It just really hurts.”

He gives one of your feet a squeeze before pulling a book from his bag. The two of you sit in silence for a while before the rest of the team filters in.

As the pilots start preparing for takeoff, Morgan turns around in his chair to look at you.

“Dang mama, you’re looking fine today.” He whistles slowly. You blush at Morgan’s words before responding, “Well someone had to give you a run for your money hot stuff.”

Out of the corner of your eye you see Aaron clench his jaw and narrow his eyes. “Let’s focus on the case please.” He cuts off any further conversation.

The flight to New Orleans went quickly and Aaron sends you and JJ to the precinct upon landing. The drive there is short and as the two of you enter the precinct you are greeted by a handsome, New Orleans native.

“I’m Detective Will LaMontagne and you two beautiful ladies must be from the FBI.” He flashes the two of you a bright smile, which you find yourself reciprocating.

“I’m SSA Y/F/N Y/L/N.” You reach a hand as JJ introduces herself.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you ladies.” His comment has you thinking that it certainly was a pleasure and you silently thank your younger self for what you are wearing.

[pikapeppa]

Felassan/f!Lavellan: Imshael

Chapter 14 of The Love That Grows From Violence (Felassan x Tamaris Lavellan) is posted!

In which a lot of lore is discussed, including the story from Tevinter Nights that’s narrated by a character named Hollix. A note before we start: Hollix is a master of disguises whose gender identity is non-binary or fluid, but in this fic, I have Dorian calling Hollix ‘she/her’ because that’s what Dorian calls Hollix in the Tevinter Nights story — he gets the impression that Hollix is a ‘she/her’ based on Hollix’s disguises, an impression that Hollix doesn’t correct because they easily and cheerfully slip into either gender identity/role as part of their position as a Lord of Fortune.

~6000 words; read here on AO3 instead.

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

“Listen closely now,” Dorian said jauntily. “My story begins with a series of unsolved and rather gruesome murders that had been going on in Minrathous for some time. Rumours had started to circulate that the perpetrator was a creature that came to be called the Cekorax.”

“Cekorax?” Varric asked. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a butchering of the old Tevene word for ‘headsman’,” Dorian said. “The creature earned this charming name because its victims were all found without their heads.”

Tamaris grimaced, and Felassan laughed. “This story is exciting already.”

“Not quite so exciting for those who lost their heads, but I digress,” Dorian said delicately. “No one was doing anything about it, unfortunately, especially since the beast hadn’t attacked any of the altus class yet. So I put out a bounty for the perpetrator’s head, and the person who came to my aid was a wily little thing whom I’ll affectionately call Hollix.”

Tamaris raised an eyebrow. “That you’ll call Hollix? What was their actual name?”

“I haven’t a clue,” he said cheerfully. “I called her Hollix on a whim. She decided to keep the name while she was in Minrathous, and who am I to argue with the adoption of a silly nickname?”

“Fair enough,” Varric said.

“Of course you’d agree,” Dorian said drolly. “In any case, Hollix did some unsavoury investigating for me — for a fair price, of course — and discovered that the creature doing all the killing was…” He sighed. “Frankly, it was a creature of unearthly and uncanny horror. And you know I don’t say this lightly, considering all that we’ve seen together.”

“No kidding,” Tamaris said flatly.

Felassan sat forward and rested his elbows on the table. “What did it look like? This uncanny creature of horror?”

“I can only tell you so much firsthand, as I was high above the action when the creature presented itself,” Dorian said. “But Hollix described it more fully. It was…” He hesitated for a moment before going on. “It was an enormous fleshy mass as large as a house that was able to peel parts of itself away to produce… tentacles. Unbelievably long tentacles bearing human eyes that it had stolen from its victims’ heads.”

Tamaris exchanged a horrified look with Varric. “So it just took the victims’ eyes?” she asked Dorian. 

“Unfortunately, no,” Dorian said. He sounded very serious now. “In the deepest part of this fleshy mass, it was harbouring the heads of all of its victims. Over two dozen heads, Hollix said — all perfectly preserved as though they were still alive. And the monster was… animating the heads. Speaking through their mouths.”

A cold ripple of revulsion ran down the back of Tamaris’s neck. “Oh fuck,” she breathed.

“Shit,” Varric muttered.

Felassan narrowed his eyes. “It was speaking through the heads? Using their mouths to express its own thoughts?”

“Apparently,” Dorian said. “Hollix said it was trying to lure her into joining it. To ‘keep her safe’, it said.”

Felassan leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the table. “So it seemed to have motivations of its own. That’s fascinating.”

Tamaris tilted her head. “Do you know something about this?” 

He grinned. “Are you asking if I’m responsible? That hurts. I’m clever, but I’m hardly diabolical.”

She tsked. “Of course I don’t think you’re responsible. But is it an ancient monster or something like that?”

His smile faded slightly. “I… honestly can’t say.” To Dorian he said, “How did you defeat this creature in the end?”

“An ingenious plan that I regret to admit was not mine,” Dorian said. “The creature had entwined itself in one of the city’s finest public gardens, which happens to be just below my apartment. Hollix cleared the gardens and exploded the fountain with gaatlok so the creature was drenched, and Maevaris and I electrocuted it from the upper balcony of my apartment.”

Tamaris raised her eyebrows. “So wait, you weren’t even in the garden during all this? I thought you said you were involved in the disgustingness.”

“I was involved,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I was in it. Can you imagine?”

Tamaris snorted in amusement. “You’re such a spoiled noble.”

“I do miss your loving insults,” he said. “In actual fact, though, Mae and I had to keep distant so the monster wouldn’t suspect anyone else but Hollix was involved. I do feel sorry for Hollix though, poor thing. The creature popped like an enormous filthy balloon when we zapped it, and she got rather, er, moist in the process. When all was said and done, only the creature’s skin was left behind.”

Varric grimaced. “Like a sausage casing?”

“Ugh,” Dorian said. “That’s what Hollix said. Believe me, you wouldn’t be thinking about food if you’d seen what I had.”

Tamaris looked at Felassan. “So? Does it sound familiar to you?”

He twisted his lips. “Yes and no, actually. It almost sounds like one of Ghilan’nain’s delights, but not completely.”

Tamaris blinked in surprise. What did Ghilan’nain have to do with a horrific murderous monster in Minrathous?

“Ghilan’nain?” Dorian said. “Isn’t that one of the Dalish gods? Er, so to speak.”

“Yes indeed,” Felassan said. He raised his eyebrows at Tamaris. “Would you care to start us off?”

She groaned. “Do I have to?”

He chuckled. “No, you don’t. But it would be informative for everyone.”

“Uh-huh,” she said skeptically. Then she addressed Varric and Dorian’s crystal. “The Dalish say that Ghilan’nain was the mother of halla, and the goddess of navigation and wayfaring. She was actually a mortal who was raised to the status of a goddess thanks to Andruil, who’s the goddess of hunting.” Then she frowned at Felassan. “But in the Temple of Mythal, we found an old inscription that Solas translated. It said that Ghilan’nain created all kinds of creatures, but the creatures ran rampant through the elves’ lands until the Evanuris offered her godhood in exchange for destroying them.” 

Felassan grinned. “Fen’Harel translated that for you?”

“Yes, he did.”

Felassan chuckled. “I can just imagine him screaming on the inside while he read that to you.”

She offered him a slightly bitter smirk, and he folded his arms. “Well, that inscription had the right of it. Like all the Evanuris, Ghilan’nain was a powerful mage, and her favourite hobby was creating new forms of life.” He held up a finger. “Wait, I should be specific: she created new forms of life from ones that already existed, blending and forming them into new creatures that were increasingly spectacular and powerful.”

Tamaris harrumphed. “Until the Evanuris got sick of her shit, it seems.”

Felassan smiled at her. “Blunt as always, avise, but yes. This was before my time, but my understanding is that Andruil became enamoured with Ghilan’nain, who created increasingly insane creatures for Andruil to hunt. Andruil praised her efforts, which spurred Ghilan’nain’s experiments on.” He smirked. “They encouraged each other’s insanity, just as any good couple should.”

Dorian chuckled, and Varric ruefully shook his head. “Very romantic, Jester.”

“I am, aren’t I?” he said. “In any case, Andruil and Ghilan’nain’s… activities eventually drew concern from the other Evanuris, who offered to raise Ghilan’nain to the status of a goddess if she destroyed her more disturbing creatures. By that time, she had already gained a measure of infamy among the people, so it took little propaganda for them to believe she was a goddess like the others.”

“Let me guess,” Dorian said. “Her experimenting didn’t stop just because she became a goddess.”

Felassan widened his eyes in mocking surprise. “How did you know?”

Tamaris folded her arms. “But you don’t really think that this Cekorax could actually be one of Ghilan’nain’s creatures. That would mean it was thousands of years old.”

Varric shrugged. “It’s not impossible, Cuddles. Think about some of the old shit we’ve encountered. Corypheus, the Titan…”

“A certain person in this room,” Felassan said blandly.

Tamaris snorted a laugh, and he winked at her. Then Dorian spoke through the crystal. “Whether this creature is new or old, what was it doing roaming around beneath Minrathous?”

“That is an excellent question,” Felassan said thoughtfully.

“Can you answer it?” Tamaris asked.

He shrugged. “I can try.” To Tamaris and Varric he said, “Recall that I told you about Mythal’s Sentinels, and how the other Evanuris sought warriors who were equally dedicated and fierce?”

“Yeah,” Varric said.

Felassan nodded. “Ghilan’nain’s efforts involved attempts to make hybrid… species that would be good fighters and soldiers. And her experiments didn’t just use non-sentient animals anymore.”

A cold stone of horror dropped into Tamaris’s gut. “She started experimenting on slaves?”

“Yes,” Felassan said. His manner was completely serious now, without a hint of levity. “From what we gathered at the time, she wanted her… creations to have some level of sentience, but not so much that they would try to rebel. Which is why I wonder if this Cekorax wasn’t just a simple monster, but a monster possessed by a spirit, since it sounds like it had more… motivation than Ghilan’nain’s surviving creatures had.”

Varric sighed and rubbed his chin. “A possessed monster? As if a regular monster wasn’t bad enough.”

Felassan didn’t reply, and Tamaris looked at him; he had an oddly absent-looking half-smile on his face.

“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

He met her eye, then let out a little laugh and shook his head. “Oh, nothing. Just an idle thought, really.”

She narrowed her eyes, but Dorian spoke before she could press Felassan further. “This still doesn't explain why one of Ghilan’nain’s creatures might be roaming around beneath Minrathous now.”

Felassan sobered once more. “Ghilan’nain had multiple hidden… laboratories, for lack of a better word, where she was creating her so-called soldiers. I don’t know where they were located as her activities weren’t my particular area of focus, but if one of Ghilan’nain’s laboratories was recently… activated, or disturbed, then it’s possible that this Cekorax broke free.”

Dorian sighed. “The murders started shortly after some surviving Venatori opened an underground cavern of some kind.” 

Felassan grimaced. “That could explain it. You should probably look into where that cavern was, in case you start getting more lovely visitors from the deepest pits of Ghilan’nain’s twisted imagination.”

Dorian tsked. “Fasta vass. Of course. We’ll look into that.”

“Felassan,” Tamaris said. 

“Yes, avise?” he said pleasantly.

She frowned slightly. “You mentioned that you thought the Cekorax was possessed by a powerful spirit.”

“I did, yes.”

“Do you know the spirit that might have been possessing it?”

A slow smile lifted the corners of his lips. “Why do you say that?”

“Why are you dodging?” she said quietly. 

His smile faded. “Force of habit,” he said ruefully. “I apologize. I did wonder if the spirit might be one that I was acquainted with in the past.” He smirked and rubbed his chin. “Possessing a many-headed and many-eyed monster that can shape itself at will would be in keeping with this particular spirit.”

“What spirit?” Tamaris asked.

“It called itself the Formless One,” he said. “As you can probably guess, it didn’t have any particular shape that it preferred, nor a name to go by.”

“A name?” Dorian said in surprise. “Spirits have names?”

“If they want one, certainly,” Felassan said. “Though many of them are boring and keep the name of the virtues they embody.” His tone was bland once more, and Tamaris shot him a chiding smirk; he was clearly taking a jab at Solas.

Dorian’s voice was keen with curiosity through the sending crystal. “What are some of the spirit names you’ve known?” 

Felassan casually laced his fingers behind his head. “There was an amusing group of spirits who were banished from Elvhenan long before I was born. Or were supposed to have been, at least,” he added with a smirk. “The Formless One was one of them, though it obviously didn’t have a name. Gaxkang was one, and Imshael was another—” 

Tamaris straightened in surprise, and Varric interrupted. “Imshael?” he said.

Felassan’s eyes widened, and he smiled. “Don’t tell me you met him.”

Varric and Tamaris stared incredulously at him, and Dorian answered. “We didn’t just meet him. We killed him.”

Felassan’s face slackened with surprise. Then he laughed. “You’re kidding. Well, now you have to tell me how that happened.”

They told Felassan how they’d met Ser Michel de Chevin during their travels to Emprise du Lion, and how Michel had asked for their help defeating Imshael at Suledin Keep. When they described how Imshael had been directing and guiding the growth of red lyrium in the Red Templars and peasants in the quarry, Felassan laughed and tugged his ear.

“Well, I suppose I did tell him to have fun,” he said dryly. “Not the sort of fun I would have chosen, but…”

Tamaris recoiled slightly at his flippant reaction. “Were you friends with Imshael?” she asked.

“More like long-time acquaintances who made deals sometimes,” he said. “He was supposed to have been banished from our lands along with the others I mentioned, but he, er, stuck around.”

His tone was curled with mischief. She eyed him shrewdly. “Did Solas know you made deals with a spirit who was supposed to be banished?”

“He knew, but... unofficially,” Felassan said.

“Why unofficially?”

“Because Mythal didn’t know,” Felassan said slyly. “She was one of the Evanuris who banished him, you see.”

He was grinning now. Tamaris frowned more deeply. “How is this funny?”

“It’s not, actually,” he said. “Not at all. Can I ask if Fen’Harel was present when you met Imshael?”

Varric nodded. “Yeah, Chuckles was there.”

“And he didn’t say anything?” Felassan said. “Any… recognition or anything?”

“Not a fucking word,” Tamaris said bitterly.

Felassan let out a snort of laughter. “I bet he was fuming on the inside. If I wasn’t already out of the picture, he probably would have skinned me.” He snorted again and rubbed his mouth, then suddenly burst into laughter.

Tamaris’s heart clenched; the quality of his laughter was wild and uncontrolled. She took his hand and squeezed it. “Hey,” she said quietly. “Just breathe.”

Another blast of laughter left his lungs. Tamaris stroked his arm with her metal fingers. “Look at me, brat,” she said softly. 

He wheezed as he met her eye, and Tamaris nodded encouragingly. A few breaths later, he was calm again.

She squeezed his hand before releasing it. “Why did you say Solas would skin you?” she asked.

“Because it’s my fault Imshael was free to run a red lyrium farm in Emprise du Lion,” Felassan said. “And whatever shortcomings the Dread Wolf has, he does not like red lyrium.”

“No one in their right mind does,” Varric said flatly.

Tamaris frowned. “What do you mean, it was your fault Imshael was free?”

He looked at her, and her belly jolted; for a split second, an odd flash of wistfulness had crossed his face before his usual pleasant half-smile returned. “Imshael had been summoned and bound by a Dalish clan,” he said. “My… lack of involvement, shall we say, led to him being set free.”

Her gut twisted with apprehension. A Dalish clan?

Dorian’s words echoed her thoughts. “You were with a Dalish clan?” he asked.

“For a very brief time, when I was travelling with Briala and the others,” Felassan said. His tone was light and pleasant, but he was still gazing steadily at Tamaris, and there was something about the neutrality of his expression that she didn’t like. 

Then Dorian spoke in a peevish tone. “I beg your pardon, but what in Andraste’s sacred underthings are you talking about? I’m feeling terribly left out.”

Felassan finally looked away from her to face the crystal. “I travelled for a time with Celene, Briala, and the illustrious Michel prior to the Orlesian civil war breaking out in earnest,” he said. “At one point during our travels, we were hosted by a Dalish clan.”

“Hosted?” Dorian said. “The Dalish hosted Celene and Michel?”

Varric spoke up. “I didn’t think Dalish hospitality extended to humans. No offense, Cuddles.”

She didn’t reply; she was too focused on Felassan, who was now wearing a little smile that somehow made his face look empty.

Felassan shrugged. “Well, they tied Michel up and beat him, and they kept Celene under guard. Does that count as hospitality?” 

Tamaris’s gut twisted. Something awful had just occurred to her. “Felassan, what happened to the Dalish clan after Imshael was freed?” she said quietly. 

His eyes returned to her face. “Imshael killed them all.”

A jolt of shock stabbed her in the gut. She stared at him for a second before finding her tongue. “Imshael killed them?” she said weakly. “The… the whole clan?”

“All but one, yes,” Felassan said. He was still wearing that empty little smile, and he sounded so casual, and it… it didn’t add up. 

“Wait,” she said. “He…” She trailed off; her heart was thrumming now, and it was making it hard for her to breathe. She forced herself to inhale. “Imshael went after the clan because you let him go free?”

“Yes,” Felassan said.

She dragged in another breath. “Did you know that Imshael would attack the clan?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said. 

He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked so serious now — no, not just serious. He looked…

Her heart twisted. He looked wolfish, somehow. Dangerous. This wasn’t the Felassan she knew. 

She swallowed hard and lifted her chin. “So you… you purposely let a demon go free, knowing it would kill an entire Dalish clan.”

“Yes, Tamaris,” he said. “I did.”

She stared at him in shock. His face was so forbidding and his voice was uncharacteristically hard, and … and he’d purposely given a demon free reign to kill a Dalish clan. 

She hadn’t known. She hadn’t known about this. He hadn’t told her about this, for obvious reasons — he’d gotten a Dalish clan killed, for fuck’s sake, so of course he hadn’t told her. But if he hadn’t told her this, what else was he hiding from her? What other ugly secrets was he keeping? 

Nauseous with horror, she gazed into his violet eyes — his beautiful violet eyes that were usually full of warmth and humour, and that she’d been growing to trust more and more with every passing day. 

Beautiful violet eyes that were probably hiding all kinds of deeds that Tamaris knew nothing about. 

She rose from her chair, and his hard expression cracked. “Tamaris,” he said.

She shook her head and took a step back from the table. Felassan stood up and reached for her hand. “Tamaris, don’t—”

She whipped her hand away. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled. She turned on her heel and ran up the stairs.

She went straight to her room and shoved open the window, then climbed up to the roof and started pacing. Her heart was pounding in her chest and behind her eyes, and her fingers shook as she dragged them through her hair.

Felassan had gotten a Dalish clan killed. He had purposely let a demon run rampant and kill an entire clan, and he hadn’t told her. They’d been living here for weeks and he hadn’t… she had no idea.

She was so stupid. She was so fucking stupid to have thought she could trust him. He was thousands of years old and she’d only known him for three weeks, and — she knew basically nothing about him. How could she have thought she could trust him at all? 

It’s Solas all over again, she thought. Once again, she’d been lulled into a false sense of safety with a compelling older man, and once again, he’d betrayed her trust. 

Her ribs felt like they were swelling with misery. She sat down abruptly and leaned back against the chimney, and for some uncounted time she just sat there ruminating on her own idiocy. 

Eventually, she heard the distinctive soft shuffle of bare feet joining her on the roof. She clenched her jaw and looked away, but Felassan sat beside her anyway.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

His voice was back to its usual warmth, but this only made her feel worse. She shot him a venomous look. “Don’t act like you know everything about me. You’ve only known me for a couple of weeks.”

He elegantly lifted an eyebrow. “Can I speak without you biting my head off?”

“Why should I let you?” she snapped. “So you can talk circles around me?”

His eyes narrowed. “I have never done that to you and you know it.”

A pang of remorse penetrated her anger, and it was enough to make her relent. She shrugged and looked away from him. “Fine. Talk.”

“As I said, I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking that I’ve withheld this terrible tale from you, and that if I was hiding this, there must be an entire thaig’s worth of villainous secrets that I’m keeping from you. I am extremely old, after all. There must be hundreds of skeletons in my proverbial closet that you don’t know about, so how can you possibly trust me?”

His tone was annoyingly playful, but what really rankled her that he was right. “Look at you, using your spy skills to figure me out,” she said snidely. 

“I am only using the information that you told me yourself,” he said. “I know you’re on alert for reasons to cast me aside. I am not going to give you any.”

A sudden throb of pain in her chest took her by surprise. She swallowed hard and lifted her burning eyes to the sky as Felassan continued to speak. “I was not purposely hiding this from you. If the topic had come up before, I would have told you.” He lowered his voice. “And I think you know that.”

Fuck, her lips were trembling. She looked away from him and didn’t speak, and Felassan was silent as well. 

When Tamaris was able to control her face once more, she shot him a hard look. “Tell me why you let that clan get killed.”

His shoulders loosened slightly. “The practical reason is that Imshael had something I needed: a keystone to unlock the eluvians. Setting him free gave us access to the keystone, which ultimately ended up in Briala’s possession.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” she said coldly.

“I do know what you mean,” he said calmly. “The real truth is this: I could have gotten that keystone in other ways. I knew Imshael, and I knew how his mind worked. But I wanted that clan to suffer.”

“Why?” she demanded. “What the fuck did they ever do to you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “They did nothing to me, and there was nothing they could have done to harm me.” He paused and clenched his jaw, and her gut twisted; his expression was hardening again in a way that she didn’t like. 

“It was the way they treated Briala,” he said. “Briala had been supplying information to that clan for years through me. She’d pinned her hopes and dreams on them, and do you know what they said to her when they finally met her?”

“What?” Tamaris said faintly.

“They called her a flat-ear and said that she was not their people,” Felassan said.

For a moment, Tamaris stopped breathing. That was what Abelas had said to her at the Temple of Mythal, and she still remembered the way his disdain seemed to stab her straight in the heart.

Felassan went on. “Their Keeper, Thelhen…” He curled his lip in disgust. “It wasn’t that he was blind to the plight of the alienages. He knew what they suffered, and he didn’t care. He was no better than the human nobles that beat and killed city elves for looking at them the wrong way. He knew the problems that city elves faced, and he chose to do nothing, claiming that they were not his people.”

His voice was growing angrier by the second, and Tamaris held up a hand in surrender. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay, I… I hear what you’re saying.”

He took a deep breath and nodded, then leaned his head back against the chimney, and for a moment they were both silent. 

For once, Tamaris broke the silence. “Was that the only clan you ever had dealings with?” 

“No,” he said. “But I had dealings with Clan Virnehn for as many years as I have known Briala. No matter how many times I told them that a city elf was the one to thank for their knowledge of Orlais and how to avoid the shemlen troubles that plagued the country, they still refused to accept her as their own.”

“I hear you,” she said gently. “Honestly, I do. And that’s… it’s fucking awful, and I’m sorry Briala had such a shitty experience with the first Dalish clan she finally had a chance to meet. But do you really think that’s enough reason to let the entire clan get killed?”

He exhaled heavily. “Tamaris…”

She pushed on ruthlessly. “What about the kids in that clan? There had to be kids. Did they deserve to die because their Keeper was a piece of shit?”

“You don’t understand,” he burst out.

“What don’t I understand?” she asked. 

“The…” He dragged his hand over his hair and glared at her. “The frustration of living through the same short-sighted stupidity from thousands of years ago. The fact that our people are still so divisive and blind. You can’t understand how frustrating it is to wake up thousands of years later to realize that the worst attitudes of my time were one of the things that survived.”

“You can’t judge all of the Dalish based on that one clan’s attitudes,” she said firmly. “That’s you and Solas’s biggest problem. You’re judging all of us based on just a few.”

He let out a rather tired-sounding laugh. “This kind of sparkling optimism is a strange look on you.” 

She couldn’t tell if he was complimenting her or insulting her, but it didn’t matter right now. She shifted a little closer to him. “My clan isn’t like that, Felassan.”

“You’ve said that before,” he said. “You told me you take in city elves who run away from the alienages.”

“Yes, we do,” she said.

“And the elves who can’t run away?” he said. “Those who are stuck in the alienages with no means of escape? You told me you knew of the massacre of Halamshiral’s alienage. What did you do about it?”

His tone was calm but piercing somehow, like he was trying to dig beneath her skin with his pointed words, and Tamaris forced herself to reply just as calmly. “Me personally?” she said. “Nothing. By the time I heard about it, it had happened six months before and I was travelling to the Temple of Sacred Ashes to spy on the Conclave.”

“And once you became the Inquisitor?” he said. “Once you had power? What did you do then to help your brothers and sisters in the alienages?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I allowed the Empress of Orlais to be murdered in order to make a city elf the real power behind the throne,” she said quietly. “Or have you forgotten that already?”

His eyebrows rose. After a brief pause, he smiled and bowed his head to her. “Fair enough, avise.”

She relaxed slightly. “I can’t speak to that clan you ran into,” she said. “And… fine, all right, I’ve known some people from other clans who… who feel like we don’t owe anything to the city elves.” She scowled at him. “But Clan Lavellan is not like that, okay? I’m not bullshitting you. We don’t look down on city elves that way. My clan purposely went into Wycome to protect the city elves, for fuck’s sake.”

He looked at her in surprise. “They did?”

“Yes,” she said. “This was a couple years ago. The Duke of Wycome was involved with some Venatori, and they were trying to frame the elves for red lyrium getting into the water supply. The humans tried to burn the alienage down, and my clan interfered to help the city elves fight back. After the Duke was killed, my clan stayed in Wycome to support the city elves, and my Keeper and a city elf got sworn in on the city council along with some human merchants to run Wycome. A third of the clan is still there.”

He nodded slowly. “And the rest?”

“They didn’t want to stay in the city,” she said. “Most of us prefer the woods. But a number of city elves wanted to leave the city with them, and guess what? My clan adopted them.”

He gazed at her appraisingly and didn’t speak, and she gave him a pointed look. “What, nothing to say? That’s new for you.”

“It is, yes,” he said. “It’s an interesting change. It’s not often I’m struck speechless.”

“You do talk a hell of a lot,” she said.

“Don’t pretend you don’t like it,” he retorted.

She scoffed, then realized she wasn’t feeling angry anymore. And then she felt weird about the fact that she wasn’t angry.

He tilted his head. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t… really know,” she said slowly. She was feeling oddly at a loss, and she couldn’t say why.

He gave her a slow smile. “You’re not used to winning arguments about the virtues of the Dalish, are you?”

She lifted her chin. “So you admit that I’ve won.”

He chuckled and flicked her knee. “Yes, avise, you’ve won. You can gloat if you like.”

She didn’t laugh. Instead, she studied him thoughtfully. “You really care, don’t you? About the elves of this time. The city elves especially.”

“Why wouldn’t I care about them?” he said.

She didn’t reply right away, but instead continued to study him. The more she thought about it, the more she understood where his attitude about present-day elves came from. Felassan might wear vallaslin and know things about the elvhen gods, but his origins as Andruil’s slave gave him far more in common with city elves than the Dalish. 

A little pang squeezed her heart. That was why he cared about the city elves and their suffering. He’d essentially been one of them, back in the times of ancient Elvhenan.

He lifted one eyebrow quizzically, so Tamaris replied. “Solas didn’t care about the city elves,” she said. “Not like you do.”

Felassan sighed. “I suspect the issue is more that he couldn’t care. He couldn’t afford to. With all that guilt hanging over his head? He couldn’t afford to carry any more by caring about anyone else that he couldn’t save. It would crush him.” He suddenly grinned at her. “I imagine he must have been furious with himself when he realized he was in love with you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You think that makes it okay that he… how he treated me?”

“No,” Felassan said. “Not by any means. A stronger man would have distanced himself from you.”

She huffed, then shrugged. “He tried to. Sort of.”

Felassan shot her a half-smile. “Meaning what exactly?”

“He warned me more than once that getting involved with him was a bad idea,” she admitted. “I guess I… I should have listened.” She scowled. “But he was saying one thing and acting a different way… fucking Solas.”

Felassan smiled to himself, and Tamaris shot him an exasperated look. “What’s so funny now?”

His smile widened. “If I tell you, you’ll say I’m full of shit.”

“Well, now you have to tell me,” she said.

He huffed a little laugh and shook his head, then looked her in the eye. “Fine. I say a stronger man would have distanced himself from you. But it would require the strength of Titans to resist your brassy charms.”

She stared at him. Then she started laughing. “You are completely full of shit.”

He placed one hand on his chest and bowed his head politely. “Acknowledged and accepted.”

She smiled at him, then chuckled and shook her head before taking a joint out of her breast pocket. She lit the joint and took a drag, then offered it to Felassan.

He accepted it with a nod and lifted it to his lips, and as she often did, Tamaris appreciatively watched his lips as he drew from the joint and released the smoke into the air. 

He took another drag and blew a perfect series of smoke rings before offering back the joint, and she carefully took it from his fingers. “You know,” she said, “for someone that he tried to kill, you sure spend a lot of time trying to make me forgive him.”

“That’s not my intention,” Felassan said. “I told you before: I’m not defending him, only explaining him. Know your enemy, blah blah and so on.” He shrugged casually. “Besides, there is only so far that sheer anger can take you. An adversary as unexpected and subtle as Fen’Harel can be requires an approach that’s equally unexpected and subtle.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What approach is that?”

He gave her a fond look that made her heart flip. “This is one thing I won’t tell you,” he said. “Think about it, avise. You’ll figure it out on your own.”

She harrumphed, but with no real ire. “Fine. Keep your secrets.” She took a drag from the joint.

He gently took the joint from her fingers. “I will say this: of everyone who is working against him, you stand in a unique position. You are someone who knows Fen’Harel, loved him, and still wants to defy him. You may be the single most dangerous person to him in all of Thedas.”

She shot him a sharp look. “Is that really what you think?”

“Of course,” he said. “I always tell the truth. To you, at least,” he added with a smirk.

“Then you’re just as dangerous,” she said firmly. “You know him and loved him, and you’re defying him too. You’re just as dangerous as me.”

He raised his eyebrows, then brought the joint to his lips. “How about that? What a team we make. The woman who dances with fire and the slow arrow.”

Her heart did a little squeeze. He’d called himself a slow arrow, not a broken one. 

She smiled at him, and he smiled back at her. Then she reached up and plucked the joint from his lips. “I still think you’re a fucking asshole for letting a demon loose to kill that clan.”

“I know you do,” he said. “And I’m not asking your forgiveness. But I will ask you to recognize that I did not lie about this to you.”

She eyed him appraisingly for a moment, then nodded. “I know. And… I do appreciate that.”

They smoked together quietly for a moment, and the silence between them stretched like warm taffy. From the corner of her eye, she watched as the joint met his lips and moved away to let the smoke bleed from his perfectly sculpted mouth.

She had no reason to trust Felassan. There were thousands of years’ worth of heinous things he could have done and hadn’t told her about. But he had been honest with her about his reasons for doing this one heinous thing. He hadn’t tried to sugarcoat anything, and he hadn’t tried to prevaricate. He’d even followed her to the roof in order to tell her the truth, knowing full well that she wouldn’t like it. 

He offered her the joint once more, and she took it. But instead of bringing it to her lips, she leaned into his side and rested her head on his shoulder. 

He shifted slightly so her head was tucked more snugly against his neck. When he turned his head to speak to her, his words wafted over her forehead in a soft murmur. “You walked away from me.” 

She sighed and closed her eyes. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “It gave me an excuse to watch you walking away.”

She snorted a laugh. “You’re such a fucking rogue.”

He chuckled and took the joint from her fingers, and for a time they simply sat pressed together on the roof with her head tucked against his neck. The longer she sat there savouring the steady warmth of Felassan’s neck against her temple, the more she realized how strange it was to feel this relaxed and at ease after a fight. How strange it was to feel so… resolved.

“Any particular thoughts on your mind?” he said.

His voice was low and warm, and it was just as comforting as the warmth of his neck. She shrugged and nibbled the inside of her cheek as she considered her reply. She was having plenty of thoughts, thoughts about Felassan’s mischievous smirk and his righteous anger and how patient he was with her, even though she’d walked away. 

She was having thoughts, all right. But nothing that she was ready to say out loud just yet. 

“Not really,” she said. “I’m just… content.”

“Ah, contentment: my favourite,” he said. “It really is an underrated feeling, you know.”

“You said that before,” she said drolly. But in the privacy of her heart, she knew what she was really feeling.

Athdhea’lath, she thought: the precursor to love. A feeling which Felassan had openly admitted to having, and which he was so carefully fostering in the closely guarded garden of Tamaris’s heart.

A little jolt of nerves plucked at her gut, but she took it in stride. She drew from the joint once more, then exhaled and closed her eyes. She breathed in the scents of herbal smoke and Felassan’s skin, and she enjoyed the feeling of being… content.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Yzma

I feel like there’s no sense in introducing this one. You know her. I’ve seen all the gif sets, the quotes, the images, the memes… it’s safe to say most every person on the internet is intimately acquainted with The Emperor’s New Groove’s geriatric villainess, Yzma. So, let’s just cut to the chase and talk about why Yzma is a fantastic villain, shall we?

Motivation/Goals: Yzma’s goal is pretty simple and yet also infinitely understandable. She wants to take over the kingdom from Kuzco because, after years of being treated like garbage by the snotty little emperor she likely helped raise, he’s just firing her because she’s old and ugly. Like, it is TRUE, but it’s still incredibly tacky and rude. It’s not hard to empathize with her at least a little bit as she goes to poison the snotty, miserable emperor, though it really does become harder to side with her as the movie goes on and she continues to berate her poor manservant Kronk.

Performance: The legendary Eartha Kitt of Adam West’s Batman and My Life as a Teenage Robot fame gave Yzma exactly the voice she needed to instantly ingrain herself in your memory forever. Kitt was absolutely not afraid to ham it up, and combined with the character design and animation, it makes Yzma a delightfully over-the-top figure that is easy to love to hate. Even better, she has insanely good chemistry with Patrick Warburton as Kronk, and the two play off each other extremely well, leading to Yzma being part of a good 95% of the movie’s funniest scenes. It helps that, while she is definitely very funny, she is more often the straight man reacting to the insanity her compatriot brings to the table, a dark mirror to Kuzco and Pacha’s relationship… well, comparatively dark. These two are a couple of goobers after all. What I think really helps is that, despite being the straight man in a general sense, Yzma is still probably one of the most insane villains in Disney’s filmography, as in literally unhinged, so she is as able to generate laughs as anyone else.

Final Fate: Yzma’s attempts to kill Kuzco backfire spectacularly, and instead of succeeding in any way, shape, or form, she ends up turning herself into a cute little kitty. It’s a marked improvement, honestly. How she changed back to normal for the TV series, who can say? By all accounts it doesn’t make sense. Just don’t think too hard about it, it’s a comedy after all.

Best Scene: Considering how the entire climax of the film is an absolute cavalcade of comedy, we could go with that. Or we could go with her attempts to poison Kuzco at dinner. Or we could go with her interactions with Pacha’s family. The “problem” with Yzma that every scene with her is so great that it’s hard to single out any single one moment as outstanding, because all of them are pretty much on the same level. She’s remarkably consistent with how great she is.

Best Quote: It’s really hard for me to pick just one line (which is something I tend to say a lot, but I mostly talk about good villains on here, so cut me some slack), but I think the combination of the delivery and just how great Kitt’s voice was really helps make her brainstorming ways to kill Kuzco a legendary moment:

“Ah, how should I do it? Oh, I know. I'll turn him into a flea. A harmless little flea. And then I'll put that flea in a box, and then I'll put that box inside of another box, and then I'll mail that box to myself! And when it arrives, AH HA HA HA! I'LL SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER!!! It's brilliant, brilliant, BRILLIANT, I tell you! Genius, I say!”

The laugh is really what sells it, honestly.

Final Thoughts & Score: Yzma is probably the single greatest Disney villain who doesn’t totally follow the Renaissance villain format post-Renaissance, with only Turbo really being a contender for the crown. What I mean is this: the Renaissance set a serious precedent for animated movie villains going forward. They had to be hammy, have huge personalities, and get their own song. Ratigan was something of a prototype, and then Ursula went and set the standard. Sure, there were exceptions in the Renaissance – Hades is great but got no song, and Ratcliffe is… Ratcliffe, and he has a song – but for the most part the best Disney villains had a clear style. Ursula, Gaston, Frollo, Scar, all of them are some of Disney’s best and all of them stick to these rules.

Yzma came early in the post-Renaissance era so it would make sense for her to fit the bill entirely while they were still experimenting with new styles, but because of the tumultuous production of The Emperor’s New Groove, she ended up keeping the ham while having her villain song cut. And yes, this is a damn shame, since Eartha Kitt was a fantastic singer and the song’s not half bad, but I think the movie as a whole and Yzma herself work better without music. She’s just so funny with how she reacts to and interacts with things throughout the movie, I just don’t think she really NEEDS music to really push her over the top in terms of quality. Like, let me put it this way: I think, without “Be Prepared,” Scar would probably not be quite as impressive. I think with a villain song, Jafar would have been even cooler. Yzma? She’s pretty much perfect the way she is.

I debated a long time on what score to give her, but I frankly think she does deserve a 10/10. I almost gave her a 9 on the basis that she didn’t have a song, but her overall performance combined with my realization she didn’t need her song to be great made me decide to reward her with the highest marks. However, there is one criticism I have that I think stands: she would not nearly be s funny if not for the presence of her faithful lackey. So let’s talk about him, shall we?

Psycho Analysis: Kronk

I put this one to a vote, and it turns out that a lot of people consider Kronk a villain. I guess if we’re being technical he is an antagonist, but a villain? Kronk is pretty much the least evil villain out there. Still, it’s pretty impossible to deny that he’s not exactly a good guy when he’s complicit in an assassination attempt. Kronk’s a bit of a morally gray figure for much of the film.

He’s also, without a doubt, the funniest character in the film.

Motivation/Goals: See Yzma above. He’s just her lackey, so he doesn’t have much in terms of goals of his own. He does, however, have a conscience, as well as numerous skills including some serious culinary skills, including knowledge of fry cook lingo.

Performance: This is one of the roles that really put Patrick Warburton on the map, alongside Joe Swanson in Family Guy. And if I’m being honest, this is the definitive Patrick Warburton role in animation. Kronk is just an absolute delight to watch, since he’s basically the lovable idiot character perfected. He’s a ditz, but he does have a lot of skill in some interesting niche areas, he’s not truly good or evil and has a moral code, he’s very quotable and funny in a pretty natural way… Kronk has got it all! And it’s all thanks to Warburton injecting that Patrick Warbuton-ness we’ve all come to love from his performances. 

Final Fate: Of course Kronk gets redeemed in the end. The dude is the biggest softie on the planet. Maybe Yzma should have thought twice before insulting his spinach puffs.

Best Scene: Kronk has a similar problem to Yzma, where every single scene he’s in is incredibly perfect, but unlike Yzma, there is one scene that really narrows things down and gives you the perfect summation of Kronk as a character: the scene where he is attempting to dispose of Kuzco’s body, does his own theme music, argues with his shoulder angel and shoulder devil, and then ends up saving Kuzco, thus allowing the rest of the plot to happen.

Best Quote: Unlike Yzma, there is no way I could possibly narrow down Kronk’s best quote. Whichever one is your favorite, you’re right. That’s the best one. Everything out of his mouth is gold.

Final Thoughts & Score: Kronk is a very interesting lesson when it comes to Psycho Analysis because, while he is certainly antagonistic, and certainly is a great character, he’s not a great villain, which is what these reviews are for. Like, he is easily the best part of the movie, he is hilarious, his chemistry with Yzma is undeniable, and this is Warburton’s definitive vocal performance in animation… but it doesn’t make Kronk a good villain so much as it makes him a good character. Like there’s no way I can give him below an 8/10, because again, still an antagonistic role, but he can’t score much higher because his personality is just so legitimately NICE that calling him a villain seems really weird (which is why I put it to a vote in the first place).

I really can’t stress enough how much I love Kronk; he’s like in my top 10 favorite Disney characters. But when it comes to villains, I really don’t think he’d make the cut, because even when he is doing something bad it comes off more as misguided loyalty to Yzma than an actual desire to do bad. It’s really telling that it’s the most petty of things that makes him drop Yzma like a hot potato: Kronk was never really a villain, he was a good guy who made poor life choices and had a toxic friend influence. He didn’t really have a character arc where he became a better person like Kuzco did, although Kronk’s ultimate turn to the side of good does somewhat mirror Kuzco’s; he simply realized that the friend in his life he devoted his time to was an awful person and decided to leave her behind, and when all is said and done, that just leaves a big, buff nice guy who likes to cook. And that makes Kronk a truly great, funny, and lovable character.

It just doesn’t make him a great villain.

[iturbide]

@cianidix​ replied to your post:

The more you talk about this, the more I want to read it! Edgeworth-centric and also more Edgeworth-Maya interactions, ahhhhh. I’m also sooo interested in reading about how the relationship falls apart and how they (hopefully, maybe, I don’t believe Feenie is actually dead here… right??? Q_Q) eventually make better or move on and just- ahhhh I wish this fic was here already (if you get back to it)

(Trucy still exists, right? Even tho Wright wasn’t disbarred, right???)

Of course Trucy still exists I could never write her out of existence she’s too precious of a child to not be around in some way shape or form (and there’s nothing to say that Nick won’t end up with her at some point in the future, anyway -- he could always use another kid or two, and I think we all know it).  Interestingly enough, though, one of my other big works was an AA4-compliant piece, also Edgeworth-centric, that involved a lot of Edgeworth-Trucy interactions because Trucy’s a part of Phoenix’s life now, and if he wants to have any part in it himself Edgeworth has to get along with the adopted daughter.  It actually had a decent chunk of words in it, too (around 12k -- it’s the second excerpt from the link in the last post).

But in all honesty people getting excited about my stories gets me excited about those stories and since I still don’t know when I’m going to get around to writing the whole thing out, what’s the harm in dropping the summary? 

Gonna give this another shot and Tumblr’s not gonna eat it this time mark my words

A couple notes before we get into things:

OCs are fair game in Ace Attorney as far as I’m concerned, and we’re certainly going to have a host of them.  From the prosecutor on the case to all of those involved, I’ll be making a whole cast and crew to back this story up, and if I can manage it there will be absolutely terrible puns, because that just seems to be how AA games operate.

Lana Skye is hands down one of my absolute favorite characters in the series, and it’s a crime that they only put her into one bonus case and put her in prison at the end of it.  For all of my continuities, I completely write out SL-9 as a case: Joe Darke never escaped his cell, Lana got into the prosecutor’s office and became chief by virtue of her own talents, and both the prosecutor’s office and the police department have cowboys running around.

I have a fairly non-standard view of Phoenix as a person, just based on everything I remember seeing in fandom back when I was more active.  For instance: I love the fact that he was an art student, but I’ve always specifically thought he was aiming to be an actor and had a thing for Shakespeare; frankly, the ad libbing that has to go into acting when something goes wrong explains so much for me where Nick’s bluffing is concerned (when a man interrogates a parrot, you know he has a weird history).  Unrelated but still relevant to that point, I think he’s actually a decent pianist and took lessons through most of his childhood and adolescence -- but he’s a classical pianist by training and not great at playing by ear, so people just think he sucks because he botches any modern tunes.  So if you see something that seems Weird compared to fandom’s general take, just know that it probably has backstory.

So with all that in mind, let’s dive in.

In true Ace Attorney fashion, the whole thing starts with a cold open.  As he finishes up the last of the paperwork associated with the case he wrapped up that afternoon, Phoenix gets a call from a familiar number, and though he dreads the conversation to come he answers anyway, refusing an offer to meet and saying that he can’t do this anymore before someone enters the inner office.  He insists that they’re closed as he turns toward the door, and a voice replies that this won’t take long -- and then there’s gunshots.  And then nothing. 

The next morning, Maya is understandably shocked and horrified to arrive at the office and find that it’s once again a crime scene: bullet holes in the windows, blood on the floor, police everywhere...but no sign of Nick.  Gumshoe is on the scene, though, and after a lot of badgering, he reveals that there’s been no sign of Phoenix, but the police are operating under the assumption that he’s dead -- and they’ve already arrested a suspect.  Maya can’t imagine who would want to hurt Phoenix, and hearing that it’s Miles Edgeworth they’ve imprisoned just makes the whole thing feel that much more surreal.  Sure, Nick and Edgeworth have had their disagreements --- including one the day before, in the recesses of their trial, and Phoenix had seemed really upset after that -- but she didn’t think it was something worth killing over. 

But she’s still hurt, and reeling from the morning’s news.  So her first order of business is to march down to the Detention Center to confront him.  Edgeworth is...not surprised to see her, given the circumstances -- but when she demands to know why he did it, he insists that he’s innocent: he would never harm Wright, no matter the circumstances.  As much as Maya wants to believe that, though, the fact that he doesn’t seem upset by Nick’s supposed death so much as the accusation that he had a hand in it rubs her wrong, and despite herself she can’t help but wonder if he did have some role in it; regardless, she still goes everywhere she can think of in hopes that there was a mistake, that Nick is okay after all, collecting evidence with every stop...but as it gets later, when there’s still no sign of him, she and Pearl return to the Detention Center.  

With no defense counsel, Edgeworth is almost guaranteed to go to prison...but at Pearl’s urging, Maya steps up and offers to defend him, since she recently passed the bar and got her badge.  She spends the rest of the evening doing her best to cobble together a case based on what little information she has, and reports to the courthouse the next morning for her very first trial as a defense attorney. 

Her first case, and Nick isn’t even there to see it.  She didn’t think it could hurt any worse. 

Before they’re called into the courtroom, the defense gets a surprise visitor: chief prosecutor Lana Skye, come to deliver case notes and evidence files.  Maya barely gets time enough to leaf through them before they’re called into the courtroom to start the trial, where she finds herself facing the rising star from the prosecutor’s office: Gayle Huntington, a young woman who counts Chief Prosecutor Skye as her inspiration and who is excited to add another guilty verdict to her record, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that one of her fellow prosecutors stands accused. 

The prosecution declares it a crime of passion, and presents their theory of the case: following a heated confrontation outside the courtroom, Miles Edgeworth called Phoenix Wright to arrange a meeting.  While he may have intended only to put an end to the argument, tempers flared, and in a fit of rage the defendant shot the victim three times before dragging the body down to the street and driving it off to be disposed of at another location.  Their evidence includes the blood found at the scene, which matches Phoenix based on forensic testing; three bullet holes in the office window, though no slugs or casings were found at or around the office despite an extensive search with metal detectors; Edgeworth’s phone, which shows that the last call before he contacted 911 was made to Wright’s number; and a handgun found at the scene which shows evidence of recent firing, though no magazine was found in it. 

Over the first day of testimony, Maya manages to shred the prosecution’s case based on that chain of events:

The gun, as it happens, belonged to Phoenix himself.  One of the documents the chief prosecutor provided to the defense was a photocopy of a sign-in sheet for a local gun range, which not only has Nick’s signature on it, but included a copy of his firearm registration and permit, which was for the exact make, model, and serial number as the purported murder weapon.  Lana Skye herself is called to the stand, as her name also appears on the sign-in, and she testifies that after court the previous day she happened across Wright at the range and they talked a bit; he said that he needed to blow off a bit of steam before going back to his paperwork, and she clearly recalls that he did not clean his weapon before leaving, instead saying that he would do so after he went home since his cleaning kit was there.  On closer examination, it's discovered that while the weapon has mostly been wiped clean, the trigger was not, and a partial print matching Phoenix is recovered.

On calling Edgeworth himself to the stand, he admits that he did contact Phoenix late in the evening in the hopes of resolving the argument from that afternoon; however, he was across townpicking up his car from the repair shop when he made that call, and when he heard what sounded like a shot before the call cut out he immediately drove to the office where he found the blood trail leading to the curb.  Cell tower records do, in fact, confirm that he was far from the defense attorney’s office when the call was made, and based on the time of his calls to both Phoenix and 911, there was far too narrow of a window to dispose of the body. 

The next revelation comes with the filing of a new piece of evidence, courtesy of a frantic Gumshoe bursting into court and taking the stand.  The police, in their search of likely dumping grounds for a body, dredged something out of the river that seems to confirm that they have a murder on their hands: a blue suit coat with three apparent bullet holes in the back...and Phoenix’s badge still affixed to the lapel.  What little blood evidence they were able to collect matches Phoenix, as well. 

For all that this is a stunning (and devastating) revelation, it brings with it yet more to undermine the prosecution’s case: namely the bullet evidence.  When placed on a mannequin, even coupled with the knowledge that Phoenix left his suit jacket unbuttoned while working in the office, the placement of the bullet holes in the back would require that there be associated entry points in the front -- which do not exist.  Maya draws the logical conclusion, then, that the shots must have been fired from outside the office -- through the window, and the reason no slugs or casings were found was because the shots weren’t fired from inside the office, and the bullets were still in the victim. 

Despite the upset in court, the prosecution refuses to budge, and the Judge refuses to declare a Not Guilty verdict.  Court adjourns for the day instead, and Maya heads out to continue her investigation.  Making her way to the Gatewater Hotel, she manages to get information on who was staying in the room across from the office: four members of a jazz band in town for a show, who insist that they’re the only ones who have been in the room and that they were setting up for a performance on the night of the crime.  Though she doesn’t know them herself, she hears vague rumors that they have a fifth member who’s been in some ‘legal trouble.’  When Maya relates the name to Edgeworth, he remarks that it seems somehow familiar, though he can’t quite place why.  She also gets the prosecutor’s repair records and goes to check out the rental company he used while his car was in the shop, which nets her a copy of the damage and condition checklist the agent filled out when Edgeworth brought the car back.

While Maya has the case to occupy her mind, Miles has no such means of escaping his own thoughts in his prison cell.  Between the confirmation that the jacket does, in fact, belong to Phoenix (something he had tried to deny at first, hoping that the coat was a look-alike and the badge stolen, only to have that possibility dashed by the presence of Wright’s initials on the underside of the tag) and the relative isolation in the detention center, he’s had ample time to think over how things had been with Phoenix -- including how he, himself, had been with the defense attorney...and he’s forced to face some very hard truths about his behavior toward someone he cares about far more than he wanted to believe.  

With the start of the second day in court, the prosecution has changed its theory of the crime, but not its perpetrator: rather than committing the crime alone, Edgeworth had an accomplice, and his call to Wright was a ploy to get him into firing range while the shooter waited in the hotel for his chance.   Leaving his rental car in front of the defense attorney’s office, he picked up his usual vehicle and upon arriving at the crime scene helped his accomplice load the body into the getaway car for disposal while he made a call to police.  Their evidence comes from photos of the rental vehicle in question, which show damage not reported on the return checklist, as well as blood evidence taken from the trunk which matches Phoenix. 

Once again, Maya tears through the prosecution’s case piece by piece:

The damage in the evidence photos compared to the rental return form make for the first order of business.  On calling the man who signed off on Edgeworth’s car to the stand -- an amiable but nervous young Latine by the name of Novi Nada -- they swear up and down that the damage in the photos absolutely was not present when they checked the car in on the night of the crime.  (In true Ace Attorney form, this gets somewhat ridiculous, as this witness lapses into Spanish when especially nervous; when pressed, they insist “no vi nada” -- I didn’t see anything -- to which the Judge responds “yes we know your name now what did you see?”)

Sensor data from the rental lot finally confirms the agent’s version of events, where the car is registered as driving onto the lot shortly before the time marked on the inspection form; more importantly, it also recorded the car being driven off the lot and then back on much later.  Unfortunately, there is no additional inspection form, nor a record of who rented the car after Edgeworth, and therefore no record of who might have been involved. 

Edgeworth is recalled to the stand to revisit his testimony, and he adds another key detail: while it was a sound that he took to be gunfire that sent him to the defense attorney’s office, Wright had said something strange during the call, mentioning that the office was closed -- as though he was speaking to someone else that had just arrived moments before the shots sounded and the call cut out. 

Neither the defense’s office complex nor the Gatewater Hotel have video surveillance of the street; however, the Gatewater does take video of the lobby, which shows one of the four band members leaving around an hour before the crime occurred, two more leaving minutes before the shooting, and the last rushing through the lobby with a trombone case under his arm; notably, he’s the only one of the four to actually take his instrument when he left, as the others were all empty-handed.  Most importantly, though, the video proves that no one else left the hotel between the time of the shooting and the time that the police started arriving, which calls into question the notion of an accomplice helping Miles dispose of the body.

This, however, provides the prosecution with a shiny new theory: that Miles hired the band to act as hitmen while he kept his hands clean.  As it turns out, the reason the band name seemed familiar to him was because he was set to prosecute the fifth member of their group after his case against Phoenix wrapped up; the prosecutor posits that Miles promised to go easy on their incarcerated bandmate if they took out the defense attorney. 

This is a damning accusation, and Maya has no ready response.  The Judge adjourns the court for the day, and the defense scrambles to come up with a way to prove that Edgeworth had no part in what happened and place the blame on the truly guilty.  She returns to the rental company and, while interviewing Novi further, finds out that the fifth bandmate has a sibling that works at the same agency.  She also returns to the Gatewater to speak with the band, and notices that the trombone case in the room doesn’t look like the one from the lobby video.  When asked, they say that the old case got lost...which seems odd to her, since the trombone itself is still there and doesn’t appear damaged. 

While Maya looks deeper into the band, she reaches out to Miles for insight into the case he was supposed to prosecute.  The fifth band member had been taken into custody on suspicion of murder, and while he suspected that the man did not commit the crime alone, he hadn’t yet been able to prove that when all this happened.  For the first time, though, Maya starts to see real anger in the prosecutor -- not because these people dragged his good name through the mud with this set-up, but apparently because Phoenix’s blood is on their hands, and he can’t abide the thought of them getting away.  He readily gives her access to his office for the other case file (which Chief Prosecutor Skye secures for her) so that she can use it in establishing her own case.

Despite her best efforts, though, Maya simply can’t pull together enough solid evidence to prove that Miles didn’t have a hand in the crime -- and without proof of his innocence, the court intends to find him guilty.  But before the judge can hand down his verdict, the courtroom doors open, and a strident Objection! rises from the back of the room...and who should come limping up to the witness stand but Phoenix Wright himself. 

The courtroom goes absolutely wild about this. 

Understandably, the judge calls for a recess, and before the prosecution can drag him off to prep him for testimony Maya and Edgeworth at least get a minute with him.  As it turns out, Maya had forgotten her phone that morning, and Pearl grabbed it for her; just as they were called into court, though, it rang, and Pearl stayed behind to answer -- only to be shocked to hear Mister Nick’s voice on the other end, at which point she rushed off to beg Mister Scruffy Detective to take her to get the defense attorney from the hospital where he’d been for the past few days as a ‘John Doe’ (since he had no ID on him when he was brought in).  Maya is overwhelmed to see him alive, if worse for the wear, and Edgeworth…

...he can’t even find words for the feeling. 

The celebration is shortlived, though, as Phoenix is dragged off to the witness lobby in short order to prep him for testimony.  For all that the prosecution seems to believe he’ll help them, though, Nick gives them absolutely nothing, and instead confirms that he received a call from Edgeworth that evening, and while they were on the phone two strangers came into the office just before he was shot.  They dragged him down to the street and threw him in the trunk of a car, then drove to the river and threw him in; most importantly, though, he remembers one of them asking what to do with the case, and another saying they would dump it at the club where it would blend right in; police are immediately dispatched there and find a bloody trombone case (since they’d thrown it into the trunk before loading Nick in) with a rifle inside.  

The motive?  Everyone knows the Demon Prosecutor’s reputation, and they knew that they’d all go down if he tried the case on their buddy.  The enmity between prosecutors and defense attorneys is well known, though, and in particular they knew that Wright had broken Edgeworth’s old record and it had never recovered; they figured it would be easy to frame him for the murder with the right set-up.  They had a small window of opportunity while Wright and Edgeworth worked through their trial, and they used it to put all their pieces in place, expecting that Edgeworth would go down and they’d all get off when a less competent prosecutor inevitably got their friend’s case.  Clearly, though, that backfired on them: they’re all taken away, and Edgeworth is declared Not Guilty.  Cue fanfare and confetti!

...and that’s where the fallout begins. 

While Miles is taken to get things squared away with his release from detention, Phoenix is taken back to the hospital because honestly he should not have left in the first place.  The man was admitted with a collapsed lung.  It’s frankly a wonder he even managed to stand, let alone raise that objection.  His recovery takes a while, and Maya and Pearl are frequent visitors...but so is Miles, much to his surprise.  Only it’s not a good surprise for him, given what he’d been planning to say on the night he got shot.  Things feel awkward, and all the more for how Miles is acting...different.  Not like his usual self.  Phoenix doesn’t know what it is or if he likes it, but he’s too tired to complain since it’s not bothering him, and visiting hours are relatively short since the prosecutor is still working cases. 

Given what happened to him, though, the doctor recommends that Phoenix should stay with someone once he’s discharged: his condition, while improved, could deteriorate rapidly if something happens, so it’s imperative to have someone else around in case of an emergency.  Maya and Pearl are still going back and forth between the city and Kurain semi-frequently, though, and he wouldn’t want to impose on them, especially since Pearls has been thinking about attending school in the city rather than just getting her medium training...but though he doesn’t even consider Edgeworth as a possibility, the prosecutor immediately volunteers when he hears: he has more than enough vacation time accrued and the chief prosecutor hounds him regularly about needing to take some, so he can be on hand for whatever Wright might need. 

This does not, in fact, reassure Phoenix. 

It’s okay enough at first, if only because Nick is just too tired and hurts too much to think about it or care about much beyond finding a comfortable position to sleep in and figuring out how to breathe without it making his chest feel like it’s full of broken glass.  But as he starts improving, the tension slowly ratchets up, because Phoenix still doesn’t understand why Miles volunteered for this and the only possible explanations he can think of aren’t really good (most involve having him in the prosecutor’s debt, which is not what he wants).  Miles, meanwhile, isn’t aware of this tension at first...but gradually he becomes more and more aware of the silence around Phoenix.  It was understandable at first, because he was fresh out of the hospital and still recovering, but the longer it goes on the more noticeable it becomes, and he knows it means something but he doesn’t know what to do about it. 

Eventually, though, it all does come out, because Miles finally broaches the subject of his own accord by asking Phoenix what he’d been planning to say that night: he’d said he can’t do “this” anymore, but he never said what “this” is.  And even though he’s aware that nothing is likely to cme of it, Phoenix explains exactly what his problem is and has been for so long: the one-sided relationship where he’s the one doing all the work and making all the concessions and getting none of his own needs met in return.  It’s exhausting, and he can’t do it anymore.  And rather than fighting or arguing the point, Miles -- who has never had a relationship like this before -- asks what needs Phoenix has, and how can he meet them.  He concedes the point, he admits that he’s been in the wrong and needs to change, and asks for help figuring out where to start -- because he came so close this time to losing Phoenix permanently, and that realization scares him more than he can say. 

Phoenix is pretty well dumbstruck.  But he recognizes, too, that this isn’t easy for Miles.  He’s reaching out, he’s trying...and even though Nick had intended to cut his losses that night in his office before everything went so wrong, he decides to give this one last shot. 

And when Miles listens to what he says, and actively responds and adjusts...he can’t help hoping that this turnabout will end up well.

[sol1056]

hey! i noticed that you’ve written a lot about how voltron fails as a mecha series, and it got me curious about what a GOOD mecha series looks like. do you have any recs for someone whose only experience with the genre, quite literally, is voltron?

note: that is NOT where I wanted the cut. who knows what the devs are doing over there at tumblr hq.

-----

Welp, there’s more than one kind of mecha. There’s super robots -- where (in general) the robots are ultra-powered and relatively indestructible. Then there’s real robots, which will break down and/or run out of ammunition at the most dramatically critical moments. And then there’s a category that at best might be nearly-sentient robots, which have minds and motivations of their own -- but I wouldn’t say that’s a true category (in terms of the genre) so much as a distinction I've noted.

I’ve never been big into the super robot series (with a few exceptions), and I mostly find the combining robot genre to be frustrating. Former mechanic and engineer who currently works with AI, so a lot of the hand-wavey aspects are frustrating for me, especially in super robots where things mysteriously repair themselves and there’s never a struggle to upgrade/repair. (And don’t even get me started on the idea of controlling a bipedal reactive machine with only two foot pedals and a damn joystick.)

Which is all to say, I suppose I should recommend that you watch the classics, except I’m not really sure what they are because I’ve forgotten most of them. And frankly a lot of them are really shoddy animation by today’s standards, and life is too short to waste time on that. I’ll need to refer you along to other mecha fans to add their recommendations, instead.

Well, I can at least recommend Gundam and Macross, but that’s kind of like saying I recommend Doc Martens and Aididas -- that barely narrows it down, since there’s so many options within each brand. Everyone’s got their favorites in each, as do I, but any mecha series that’s stayed with me is one that found a way to either twist the core trope, or explored implications that other series glossed over.

Note: I’ve never seen any version of Eva, and never felt the urge to, either. Sorry. Ask someone else for input on that. Plus there’s also ones I’ll leave off here ‘cause they’re veering over into AI/robots/tech and less what would usually be called mecha, but they’re still worthwhile: Battle Fairy Yukikaze, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, Broken Blade, Last Exile, and Voices of a Distant Star all come to mind.

Gundam

For me, I adore the technical geeky touches in Gundam F91, but the story is total spaghetti, so you might want to skip that until you’re more familiar with the gundam tropes. (It was meant to be a series, iirc, got shut down, and they took the pieces and made a movie from it, so it’s... kind of compressed, to put it mildly). 

Gundam Wing and Gundam 00 are considerably less geeky on the technical (though they do satisfy the mechanic itch, with a bit more real robot, at least on the technicalities). I like the international core cast, and the way each series explores geopolitical dynamics. (That said, skip the second season of Gundam 00. It just goes totally off the rails into some really wild and wacky directions.)

A long-running concept like Gundam is recognizable across the series thanks to core concepts, and in Gundam’s case it’s the conflicts between imperialism and colonialism, war versus justified rebellion, and pacifism versus a first-strike as self-defense. What I liked with Wing and 00, in particular, was its central pilots felt more tied to (and aware of) the political ramifications of their actions.

I did watch about half of Iron-Blooded Orphans, which struck out in a new direction by having Mars as the colony instead of the lagrange points, but didn’t bother finishing. From what I hear, watch it with a box of tissues, as it’s a return to the classic kill-em-all perspective of the original Gundam series.

Macross

I’m sure someone else will tell you to watch the original Macross (the american version being Robotech, albeit highly edited). I know lots of people adore the first Macross series, but it’s just too late-80s for me. (The hair, my god, the hair.)

Personally, I prefer Macross Frontier -- the amination is much improved, though the fact is I also adore the voices of Yuuichi Nakamura and Aya Endō. Macross has some politics, but it’s mostly internal -- that is, the opponents aren’t human, so whatever debate there is about who’s right or wrong is mostly one-sided, since we only ever see humans doing the talking.

I tried to watch Macross Delta but it just didn’t do it for me -- and therein lies some of the issues (for me) with both Gundam and Macross. Because both have some core elements that they tackle in every series, it can start to feel a bit repetitive.

For Macross it’s always music, Valkyries (the mecha type for Macross), and a love triangle -- which sometimes isn’t even resolved. (I’ve read all kinds of debates about whether Alto ends up with Sheryl or with Ranka, but the series leaves it open.)

A good writer can explore these themes over and over, but between the two, I personally think Gundam has done a bit better of pivoting to take a new angle with each series. But at the same time, Gundam is pretty consistent about not building on a previous series -- with a few notable exceptions, most of its series are alternate-universe stories to each other. In Macross, they’re all continuations of the previous -- so if you’re not into its setup about aliens and weird diseases and whatnot, you’re only going to get more of the same in the next series.

Everything else

So here’s the series I like, but I’m not sure all of these would be counted as ‘true’ mecha by other fans (a debate I mostly ignore, so I’ll leave it to others to argue about that).

Escaflowne -- one of the rare breed of fantasy-styled mecha (Broken Blade being another one that comes to mind). The animation is strongly 80s, but the voice acting is superb, the story (originally meant to be longer, then budget cuts forced a much longer story to squeeze into half the episodes it really deserved).

[It’s also a series I’d call a harbinger, similar to tripping over little-known movies from twenty years ago and realizing every single actor including walk-on parts went on to be massive names. Escaflowne’s got that, but that also extends to its animation team, its director, its composer, on and on. All of them went onto work on some of the greatest hits of anime. That makes Escaflowne immensely (if quietly and somewhat subtly) influential, both for the genre and animation overall.]

Eureka Seven -- another not-on-Earth story. At first the mecha movement -- almost like surfing in the sky -- was odd, but they took some interesting physics concepts and made them not just worldbuilding, but integral parts of the story. Okay, I’m not keen on how the female lead gets successively down-graded as the hero ramps up, but there are some emotional implications of Massive Destructive Machines where Eureka Seven lingers that a lot of other series gloss over.

Fafner in the Azure -- another aliens-against-humans, but first off, I’m gonna say it: you either love Hisashi Hirai‘s character designs or you want to torch them with total prejudice. If you can get past that, Fafner is brutal to its characters well beyond most other series, excepting the earliest Gundams. Although (of course) the pilots are all kids, there are in-story reasons, and there are still adults running the show. And there are consequences, small and large.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion -- because what would life be if we didn’t have at least one mecha series with character designs from CLAMP. (Which, admittedly, I loathe, but somehow it worked here.) Can’t speak for the second season, but the first season played up something a lot of mecha bypass for just plain banging on each other, which is strategy. It caught me at the time, at least.

Full Metal Panic -- watch this after watching Gundam Wing and/or Gundam 00, to get the tropes they’re playing on with Sousuke Sagara (the ostensible protagonist who just cannot seem to relate to real human beings). I saw one description of him as “about as well-adjusted as a feral child” and that kinda fits. It’s more real robots, and of course parts require some hardcore suspension of disbelief (the commanding officer who looks 14, sounds like she’s 12, and has boobs that never occur in nature on a frame that teeny). But all told, a lot of fun and plenty of explosions.

RahXephon -- this is another oddball one, because the mecha aren’t mecha, they’re golems (as in, creatures made from clay). For all that, there’s a lot of significant mecha influence and tropes at work. It’s held up pretty well, animation-wise, considering its age (from 2002). and while it’s the same ‘strange aliens attack earth’ plotline, it spins all that off in a completely different direction.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (aka Gurren Lagann) -- don’t watch this one until you’ve seen plenty of others, though, because it’s a fondly affectionate send-up of nearly every possible trope from combining to super to real robots. Cranked up to eleven.

Knights of Sidonia -- of all the ones on this list, KoS is possibly my most favorite. It was an early all-CGI series, and a lot of people were turned off by that, but once you get used to it, the story can carry you along. Like Macross Frontier, it takes place in deep space, where a colony of humans fight for survival with an incomprehensible (and nearly unstoppable) alien foe. But KoS is true science fiction, with a lot of solid science driving its dramatic points. Also--unlike most of the others series--although the characters are technically human, they’ve also evolved as a result of their time in space. For one, they have three genders, for another, they don’t eat; they photosynthesize.

[lightsandlostbells]

so, overall, what did you think of season 3 of stranger things?

It took me a while to answer this question because I had to sort out how I felt about this season! I guess if I had to narrow it down to an overall opinion: enjoyable, but very messy. Had some of the series’ best moments but also, while I was watching, I had far more grumbles and gripes than the previous two seasons.

I’ve never really been hung up on whether this show is derivative or plays too into nostalgia or w/e. Plenty of media does that. And despite all the time I’ve spent dissecting micro-expressions and weighty silences in European teen dramas that are filmed for the cost of a candy bar … I am way into genre films and TV shows. I love monsters and superheroes and spectacle! I watched Stranger Things the weekend it premiered because I love ‘80s movies about kids on bikes having adventures, I eat that shit up. So I don’t expect this show to be a hardcore deconstruction and re-imagining of those tropes (though that sounds like a pretty great show), I’m fine with it being what it is: a solid, spooky sci-fi/horror throwback series. What matters most is whether the story and characters work. Personally, I would say whatever criticisms you can make of S1 and S2, they had heart, and unfortunately I think some of that heart was missing from S3. Much of that, IMO, comes from sidelining some of the familial relationships that were at the center of the narrative in S1 and S2, like the Byers family and Hopper & Eleven, and to some degree the important friendships like the party, although there were other friendships introduced in this season so that wasn’t as glaring. It’s not a surprise that one of the best-received parts about this season, Steve and Robin’s friendship, is also responsible for one of the most heartfelt scenes Stranger Things has ever done. 

There was also a way larger emphasis on comedy in S3. Comedy is probably my favorite genre, and I did laugh at a lot of humorous moments in this season. But I also felt like there was more comedy for comedy’s sake, like long sequences created intentionally to make the audience laugh. Whereas in S1 and S2, I can’t remember any scenes like that? The comedy was more understated and came from character personalities and relationship moments rather than joke set pieces. That’s perhaps another reason why S3 felt like it had less heart.

My hope for season 4 - and I am assuming there is a season 4, because apparently this show did mega ratings for S3 - is that they don’t add more major new characters (except love interests for the gay characters, go ahead with those, lol) and instead focus on the existing cast,  which is already a very strong ensemble, yet many of the characters have gotten pushed to the sides. I would love if they added to the episode count: a lot of Netflix series drag out their seasons, like they have enough story for 10 episodes but have to stretch it out to 13, but Stranger Things has the opposite problem. I feel like if they had 10 (or 11, ha) episodes they could have more time for breather moments and more space for character arcs. This season was really fast-paced in my opinion, and although that’s a positive in many respects, I missed a lot of the down time.

Also, I think every season has taken place over like a week maximum, not including the epilogues, and like … you can make the story last longer than a week! Not everything has to go to hell in like a day or two.

Some more specific opinions underneath, obviously lots of spoilers.

First of all, I gotta say, I feel like a weirdo, because so many of the reviews for this season are like A RETURN TO FORM AFTER A DISAPPOINTING SECOND SEASON and UP THERE WITH SEASON 1 NOT THAT CRAPPY SEASON 2 THAT NO ONE LIKED and uhhhh … I liked season 2 just fine? It’s probably my favorite. There are things I don’t like about it, but the stuff I love is stuff I really, really love. Hopper and Eleven’s relationship, for instance. Steve and Dustin teaming up and Steve Harrington becoming a guardian to four children. Those are not just great elements to the series, but directions that I think only a second season could have taken - Hopper and Eleven’s bond wouldn’t have had half the weight if they weren’t established as traumatized, broken people in S1. Steve Harrington becoming a babysitter would not be nearly so delightful if we had not known him as the popular douchebag stereotype from S1 - if he were just a cool dude hanging out with kids from the get-go, the impact wouldn’t be as great. After S1 used Will Byers as a MacGuffin in S1, S2 gave Will a much larger role and that little actor acted his ass off. His performance generated a lot of genuine suspense and chills. There was Sean Astin being lovable! Paul Reiser’s character being a surprisingly good guy! Yeah, there are big flaws in the season, and you can argue it’s too much of a repeat of S1, but to me it was a version of S1 that made the characters more specific and interesting. I’m just … genuinely baffled by how it’s supposed to be demonstrably worse than the others. Because of the Kali episode? I didn’t think that one was terrible, either. I think it broke up the momentum of the chaos at Hawkins Lab, and Kali’s friends were obnoxious, it’s certainly not the greatest writing of the series, but as a whole the episode is like. Fine. It’s fine. It’s mediocre, not atrocious. It’s not the worst thing ever. It doesn’t ruin anything about the story or direction or the series. Most importantly it’s easy to ignore or skip on a rewatch if you don’t like it. The backlash was way overblown.

My biggest disappointment with season 3 was Hopper. Whaaaaaaat. Whaaaat did they dooooo. 

Hopper in previous seasons is a flawed, messed-up human being, but I always knew where he was coming from. When he yelled at Eleven in S2, I still got why he did it. In this season he felt cartoonish. The overprotective paternalistic dad trope is annoying BUT I might have been less bothered had they connected it more to Eleven’s lack of experience with the world, less RAWRRRR KEEP BOYS AWAY FROM MY GIRL. Or if Hopper had not demonstrated like, actual rage toward Mike and we just saw him fuming about it to himself or venting to Joyce, if he was trying to keep that shit under control. (I did laugh at him singing “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” in the car, I gotta admit.)

But his attitude toward Joyce was what really bummed me out. I’m not into this show for shipping reasons, but I low-key enjoyed the possibility of Joyce and Hopper hooking up based on previous seasons. This season felt like they were writing a completely different dynamic for them, one that was much more aggressively obnoxious. I think their intentions were clear - they were going for a Sam-and-Diane relationship, something that was referenced early on in the Bob flashback - but the problem is that their relationship was not like that at all in S1 and S2. When I think of Joyce and Hopper from those seasons, I think about him supporting her after Bob died, or listening to her concerns about her son, or working together to find Will. They didn’t have this combative dynamic! Frankly watching giant-ass Hopper yell at tiny Joyce was viscerally unpleasant. (Side note but in the first trailer there was a shot of Hopper running at the Fun Fair with someone else who I assumed was Eleven, but no, turned out to be Joyce, Winona Ryder is just that tiny next to David Harbour.)

Also, considering this season ended with his death (and we all know he’s not really dead but OK) it’s such a waste that there were few Hopper&Eleven moments! Only the finale brought some quality content on that front. But otherwise their relationship was out of sight, out of mind for almost the whole season, which wasn’t a great choice, both to maximize the emotional impact of the ending, and to expand upon their situation post-S2. I mean, it’s been months since then, how has their relationship changed now? Hopper’s letter talked about the stuff he enjoyed doing with his daughter - why didn’t we see any of that on screen this season? It could’ve helped with the Mike angle, too, like show Hopper and Eleven watching TV together and laughing and having a good time, and then the phone rings and it’s Mike and suddenly Hopper’s watching TV alone as Eleven’s now focused on her boyfriend, we see his disappointment, etc. 

Scoops Troop - Now they were a delight. They had such a ludicrous story but for the most part it worked due to the characters playing off each other and because the writing/acting/directing embraced the silliness. 

Steve Harrington is easily one of the best characters on this show. I fucking love that guy. He’s consistently entertaining, he’s had possibly the best character growth out of anyone in the series, he’s evolved from a stock ‘80s asshole stereotype into someone who’s funny and sympathetic and likable. He’s this amazing blend of the ridiculous with the heroic. Steve and Dustin were great together, as they were last season, and I’m cackling that Steve acquired YET ANOTHER CHILD under his supervision without even trying. But the MVP of the season was the Steve & Robin friendship. Holy shit do I love that relationship. Holy SHIT.

Robin herself is a terrific new character, smart and funny and once you know she’s half-Uma, you can’t unsee it. I was loving her already and then the bathroom scene happened and I YELLED. I was so utterly overjoyed. If they had made Steve and Robin hook up, honestly … I would’ve been fine with it, like this show doesn’t need more heterosexual romance but at least they had a fun dynamic, but man, the friendship angle was so so superior. It’s a type of relationship that media is lacking, and the specific circumstances of this friendship made it genuinely moving to me. I keep wanting to write like a meta post devoted to just this relationship because I just have so many emotions about it! But they play well off each other as a comedic duo and as an odd couple friendship, and they’re really what each other needs, IMO. Steve needed this close friendship more than he needed a girlfriend; in this season he’s clearly adrift and we’ve seen the kind of shitty friends he had in like season one, is Dustin the best pal he had at this point? And I love Steve & Dustin but Steve needed a good friend his own age. Robin is a lesbian in small-town Indiana in the ‘80s, and she was clearly full of fear that Steve would hate her if he knew, and for him to accept her so easily, not even making a big deal about it? That’s kind of life-saving, really. I can’t wait to see more of them, if Netflix wants to make the half-hour Clerks-esque spinoff about them working in a video store and shooting the shit, I would be 100% down for that.

I have some mixed feelings about Erica because I think she could have benefited from getting the same humanization as the other kids (and I’m going to leave the discussion of racial tropes gently by the side at the moment but … yeah). The other child characters are played more like actual people with vulnerabilities, which has been part of the show’s appeal since the first season, and Erica was more like the sitcom kid who always has a snarky quip ready; however, she did make me laugh and I like that they tapped into her being a nerd, I wish they’d explore that in future seasons with the character. “I’m ten, you bald bastard” was one of my favorite lines of the season, I lost my goddamn mind. 

Billy - Lmao, so Billy in S2 was the woooorst. This dude had ZERO redeeming qualities. His abusive dad creates a smidgen of sympathy, I guess, but Billy goes so far beyond normal teenage assholery that it didn’t make a dent in my opinion of him. You can redeem someone like Steve Harrington, first of all because Steve actually feels regret and works to correct his mistakes, but Steve also didn’t go to a point of no return in the first place. Billy did, for me. Physically and verbally abusing his younger sister? Attacking a black middle-schooler for the crime of being in the same room as his white sister? What a piece of shit.

With that in mind - I have no problem focusing on him as a villain this season, I really don’t. It justifies his inclusion in S2 other than as a human antagonist who’s ultimately not really connected to the main plot, as it retrospectively establishes him as an even greater threat in this season. I also think the actor did a good job with the material he was given. However, ultimately this dude’s arc was underwhelming. The thing is … I can tell they were trying to show Billy struggling with the Mind Flayer, but Billy is so lacking in any positive qualities that it’s kind of like, where does that struggle even come from? Yeah, even the worst people aren’t going to be wild about having a monster from another dimension hijack your body and use it to collect people for spare parts, but this is the same dude who was about to run over Mike, Lucas, and Dustin on their bikes last season for absolutely no reason. He beat Steve to point of unconsciousness and could’ve put him in the hospital. He assaulted Lucas. So I really need some evidence of Billy’s moral compass because it is not inherent and there’s in fact plenty of evidence that it doesn’t exist. I’m not very enthusiastic about redeeming a racist, abusive creep, but I also think if you’re going to go for him helping Eleven at the end … you have to show some current potential for goodness, not just “used to be a nice kid.”

A really glaring omission: the lack of any family/home scenes with him, Max, and their parents this season. We left off last season with Max telling him to leave her and her friends alone. How is their relationship since then? Is there still a lot of friction? Is there a tense peace? Has their relationship improved in any way? We really needed to see that follow-up. I get that Max crying over Billy this season makes sense in that he’s still her family and we can still have love for those who hurt us … but I also feel that we needed something between them to justify her pain, like even just the potential of their relationship being a fraction better, or the suggestion that Billy used to be OK to Max before he went full asshole. And I think we really needed to see Billy’s dad being currently abusive in this season - tbh, missed opportunity that the dad didn’t get flayed like, out of revenge (which would have been both satisfying and horrifying), missed opportunities for suspense when we think Billy might serve up Max and her mom to the Mind Flayer, etc.

Another missed opportunity: drawing parallels between Billy and Will. Both are possessed by the Mind Flayer. Both had shitty dads calling them homophobic slurs. Both could be read as gay (I’m not hungry to claim Billy as LGBT representation or invested in this interpretation but his scenes with Steve in S2 admittedly have that sweaty homoerotic dick-measuring vibe, if you want to take it there). Their names are both William, FFS. The difference is that Will is a sweet and gentle kid surrounded by loving family and friends who fought to save him, and Billy is a violent, cruel dude who probably doesn’t have any real friends, just shallow connections. You could show how the Mind Flayer could more easily possess and manipulate someone like Billy, but that wasn’t really explored.

Also, is anyone going to dwell on the fact that like … Max is living with an abusive man as her stepfather? He’s shown hurting Billy’s mom. Does that not concern anyone that he is very likely to attack either Max or her mom? 

Oh, and thank God they didn’t take the Billy/Karen thing all the way. In retrospect, even weirder considering Billy’s mommy issues. 

Joyce - I get that it’s a big leap downward in emotional investment to go from “must save my son” to “fucking magnets, how do they work” but I liked that she had her own investigation that wasn’t full of emotional turmoil. Winona forever. 

Mike - Everyone is ragging on him but I think he was less terrible than people are making him out to be. He was bratty in a teenage way, but he wasn’t the worst kid ever. I didn’t take his now notorious line to Will (“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls”) as something intentionally cruel or homophobic, just something that came out wrong and that he instantly regretted, and he and Lucas did seem genuinely apologetic over the D&D game and went over to Will’s in the rain out of concern. And the reason he lied to Eleven was because SCARY ASS HOPPER threatened him??? Also, his concern over Eleven overexerting herself was not misplaced, lmao! It really took that long for anyone to go, “Hey, should we be worried about the amount of blood coming out of her nose? Should we be concerned about the effects on her brain?” Sure, Eleven has the final say in whether or not she uses her powers, but tbh… she didn’t have a normal upbringing and her view of her powers is probably skewed. Like, would Eleven have enough basic medical knowledge to be worried about brain damage or nosebleeds, or would that just be the norm to her? Is she making these decisions with a full grasp of the potential consequences? Anyway, I don’t have a more negative opinion of Mike after this season. 

Eleven - I loved Eleven a lot in this season. I don’t know if it did a ton for her character arc, but it’s nice to see her slowly develop into more of a normal girl. And the season was rough for her in terms of getting her ass kicked, she goes through so much mental and physical pain! In the end she loses her dad and her powers!

Of course one of the bright spots was her and Max becoming friends! Not gonna lie, there was something a little … simplistic about some of that depiction of friendship for me - just that so much of it was SHOPPING and GIGGLING and BOY TALK, girls being GIRLS, when Max has been portrayed as a tomboy and Eleven is a telekinetic kid raised in a lab, that maybe their interactions shouldn’t have fit the mold quite so much - but it doesn’t truly bother me because they were so sweet and fun. I loved them tracking down Billy together and I appreciate that their friendship carried throughout the season, that Max was the person shown carrying an injured Eleven along with Mike, Eleven comforted Max after Billy died, etc. That was a definite sore spot of S2, the girl-on-girl jealousy and Eleven flat-out rejecting Max’s friendly introduction, and I do think they took that feedback into account for the better here. I also like that Eleven was clearly taking cues from Max, the more “worldly” of the two about boys and clothes and teenage attitudes in general - it gave their friendship a more specific shape.

I cannot WAIT to see her living with the Byers family next season. Like if they don’t spend significant time on that dynamic, it will be the biggest disappointment. There could be 8 episodes of just boring mundane Byers domestic scenes and I would love it, please inject it into my eyeballs, Duffer bros. I want to see her bonding with all of them, trying to fit in at school, attempting the most normal life she’s ever had. Also lmao, she and Will can finally have a goddamn conversation??? I hope they’ve been withholding that relationship because they were planning to go all out with those new sibling vibes in S4. They are the two characters who have been most traumatized by the Upside Down, we deserve to see them connect.

On that note, I have a lot of thoughts about Will in this season! Mainly - underused as FUCK. After all that trauma of being possessed by the Mind Flayer last season, they barely utilize this connection in the second half of S3. Even his Spidey sense hardly came in handy??? Now that was really weird, IMO, because the least they could do was have that feeling alert the others or be useful, but lmao it was practically pointless. 

It’s weird because I’m not sure if they just don’t know what to do with Will if he’s not being a victim (which is stupid because there’s plenty you could do with him), but at the same time, he has one of the most poignant subplots of the season. From the reactions I’ve seen, Will feeling rejected and left out as his friends move on really resonated with a lot of viewers. But then this thread is abandoned after episode 3, for the most part. Will cries and destroys the place that represents his childhood, a place that was created specifically in response to trauma (mentioned in S2 that he and Jonathan built it after their dad left), this is very rich emotional territory … and then the show’s just like ehhhhhh moving on. He’s just hanging out in the background and touching his neck for the rest of the season. 

And now I gotta talk about that other thing with Will.

I am so confused by what the Duffer brothers are trying to accomplish with Will’s sexuality, because on the one hand it seems like they have a really clear idea about it and on the other hand they’re just like¯\_(ツ)_/¯  The thing is … it seems very obvious they have always thought of Will as gay. This is blatant from the original pitch from the show as well as one of the S2 scripts (the only one that’s available publicly, so who knows what else they’ve written). I accept that people have different interpretations, but The Line this season is far from the only textual support for Will being gay, and I think it makes for a much, much stronger narrative if you read Will as gay in addition to not wanting to grow up as fast as his friends and being stunted from trauma - that is an entire meta post in itself, though. 

What gets me about the ~ambiguity is that the Duffer brothers planted the gay hints in the first place! They are absolutely not there by accident! Like I’m not speaking for the teenage actors but lmao, the adults involved in the writing and directing of this series absolutely fucking knew how that “not my fault you don’t like girls” scene would be interpreted, especially considering fans were debating Will’s sexuality from the beginning, based off the many homophobic comments leveled at him in S1. There have been TV shows where fans latched onto gay “subtext” that was likely unintentional, but this isn’t one of them. 

IDK, man, it’d just be nice to have some confidence in where this is going. I loved Robin and the bathroom scene made me think that yeah, they might do a decent job with Will’s sexuality, something I might have doubted before. Under no circumstances do I expect a Skam S3-style coming out arc for Will, but I’m also uncertain if I should expect anything from the show on this front at all or if they’ll play it coy to the bitter end. Though I guess I’d still take the ambiguity over giving him a female love interest after everything. Lol, that would be a giant oh-fuck-no.

Real talk, though, let’s discuss what an utter waste it would be to not write a scene where Joyce tenderly accepts her son when he comes out to her. You really aren’t going to bring that instantly iconic moment to life, assholes? You’re not going to provide that for Winona Ryder’s and Noah Schnapp’s Emmy reels? MAKE IT HAPPEN, BASTARDS.

Nancy and Jonathan have a reputation for the most boring plots but they’re fine, w/e. I’m not deeply invested in their romance but I don’t want to fast forward their scenes or anything. Nancy is an underrated character; she’s extremely proactive and always has been, and I enjoy watching her shoot things. I think the best thing they could do for both characters, though, is to separate them next season, not just physically but storyline-wise. Jonathan would be best in a subplot involving his family, because he’s at his most likable as a son and brother, and Nancy should either go off with Mike (a sibling relationship that is VASTLY undeveloped), or she should team up with Robin. I mean it, Nancy and Robin would be a power pairing, let me show you my manifesto. Both are smart young women who are good at solving mysteries. Would Robin think Nancy is a priss after Nancy unloads several rounds into the latest demogorgon chasing them? Would Nancy find Robin a refreshing alternative to the crushing suburban conformity that she claims to want to avoid? Oh, the possibilities. Meanwhile, Steve tags along in the background, all like OH SHIT, my lesbian BFF and my ex-girlfriend are in cahoots! 

Lucas and Max were playing relationship counselors to Mike and Eleven through much of the season. Max still had a fair amount to do, but Lucas needs a meatier subplot next time. I feel like they’re not sure what to do with him? I would like to see him and Erica interact more since their dynamic so far is one-note. 

There is one hell of a conversation to be had about the Evil Russians of this season, but I’m really not the person to do it. 

Also about the depiction of capitalism this season. That’s more thinkpiece-y than I am equipped to do right now. 

The product placement is something that should bother me more but I’m just like … shrug. Except that New Coke bit because that was an actual mood-breaker. 

Could have done without Russian Terminator guy. That was a blatant ‘80s homage so I get why he was there, he just wasn’t all that interesting. And was that guy supposed to be superpowered or something? Was he getting jacked on Upside Down steroids???  What was his deal???

Alexei/Murray was the true OTP of the season, let’s be real.

The trend of lovable, doomed minor characters continued with Alexei. Props to that actor for making you root for the guy. He even made me kind of love Murray? I was very WTF over that guy encouraging two teenagers to fuck in S2, and I’m still not into his habit of telling people to bang even when they’re adults, but I guess he just needed a sympathetic Russian buddy to win me over. 

There were a ton of moments where I felt like the characters made stupid choices as opposed to earlier seasons. Will getting dragged into the Upside Down in the first 10 minutes of the series is an impressive example of a horror movie character doing everything right and making good decisions - a 12-year-old, no less. And he was still overpowered by the demogorgon so it’s not like making good decisions will always save you! Whereas this season I was like LORD some of these characters are drinking dumbass juice. 

There was also so much silly stuff happening, like things that are even more far-fetched than previous seasons, but I just kind of went with it. Yeah, of course there’s a secret Russian base under a shopping mall. Sure.

This season is objectively disgusting in terms of gore and yet I was fine with it? And I’m someone who was repulsed by Barb’s corpse in S1. The Mind Flayer being made of people was some nasty shit but effective horror. I felt bad for the poor little rats :( Oh, and the flayed humans, too. Some of them. Was sad to see Mrs. Driscoll bite it but FUCK those cartoon misogynists from the newspaper. 

Visually beautiful! Starcourt Mall is an amazing set and I’m rather sad that the mall was destroyed, although that was basically a foregone conclusion. Some great cinematography, too. On a purely aesthetic level I had a great time just blasting this season into my retinas.

I have had the motherfucking NeverEnding Story theme song in my head for almost two weeks and I’m suffering.

[bakudekuficlibrary]

(Answer this ask whenever you can.) Are there any good ongoing BkDk fics out there? So far I have been binging on completed ones. Because of the fic "Beyond Sea and Storm" by Celestialgunfireopera, I want to binge read on the ongoing ones. Thank you! 💕💕💕

Heyyy~ I have some good ongoing fics I’d be glad to suggest to you! Yes, most of them are explicit what did you expect. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do!

~Eve ❣

I added some recommendations at the bottom! And for those who are interested in reading the fic mentioned in the ask, click here! 

-Ellie

15 Works.

Eve:

The Devil Ships ZeKu by xairylle( E | 174,694+ | 29/? )

Midoriya Izuku knew what fanfiction was. He just didn’t think there was something like THIS out there. About him and Kacchan no less.

Hummingbird Heartbeat by Tokiji( E | 91,620+ | 19/? )

“The knife went through his fucking chest, Kirishima.” Katsuki spat his name into his face, mouth twisting into a vicious snarl, teeth and all. “You know that’s where his heart is, right? And his fucking lungs? All the vital shit?”

Kirishima blanched. “I-I know, I just meant—”

“What, you mean to tell me that your stupid fuckin’ ass is so ignorant to forget that he lost a shit ton of blood, hah?! Yeah, it was a flippin’ knife wound, oh hoo-ray, but look at the nerd now! He’s fucking dying because of it!”

Some Read It For The Articles by low_commotion( T | 61,151+ | 11/? )

It all starts because Kirishima lets slip to Kaminari, who whispers it loudly to Sero and is overheard by Ashido, who tells Jirou, who announces it the rest of the girls in the class, that Bakugou has some secret beefy dude mags hidden deep under his bed.

OR Bakugou and Midoriya rebuild their relationship on the backs of shared nerdship and a frankly alarming amount of misintentioned homoerotica.

Bleeding Emerald by AlchemyandHeroAnalysis ( E | 25,188+ | 5/10 )

Katsuki isn’t an idiot. He knows that Izuku and him aren’t exclusive. He’s the one who had made that perfectly fucking clear when Izuku had dropped down to his knees and blew him for the first time all those months ago.

Summary: Katsuki struggles with his growing attachment towards Izuku and his jealousy towards others who get to spend the same sort of “time” with him.

Room 1217 by ImpossibilityGirl( T | 56,533+ | 9/? )

When Izuku found his room again, he could hear music behind the door- loud, with lots of screaming and guitars. His heart sunk a little, but he tried not to pass judgement too quickly. The guy inside was alone right now, after all. He’d probably use headphones once he met his new roommate, right? Izuku took a deep breath and twisted the doorknob, pushing it open as casually as he could to hide his nerves. He thought about the greeting he’d rehearsed in the mirror earlier today.

“Hey! I didn’t see you here earlier! It’s nice to meet you, I’m–” Izuku froze in the doorway, the other man in the room mirroring him. He was holding up a sweater, clearly in the middle of putting it on a hanger when Izuku had barged in. Izuku had been preparing for a lot of possibilities behind the door, but this was not on his list.

Blond, spiky hair, and eyes like fire with a temperament to match. Katsuki Bakugou, undoubtedly.

Hunting The Past by Justaperson1718( M | 141,394+ | 22/? )

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I’ve only ever heard good things about Katsuki’s work and I’m willing to trust him completely for this job,” Izuku explained. Katsuki glared at his appraising gaze. It was one thing to be sized up by an enemy or potential ally, but something else entirely to be sized up by some scrawny kid who could barely hold onto his own gun. “Besides, he looks wholly confident and capable to me.”

Katsuki placed his hands on his knees and bent forward, narrowing his eyes at the other man. Izuku kept on staring at him without a care in the world and if Katsuki’s mother wasn’t in the room staring him down and mentally daring him to say something rude to his new client he’d probably have already yelled at the other by now.

Izuku took the chance to walk over to Katsuki, stopping just in front of him and holding his hand out. He grinned from ear to ear and held his other hand behind his back, waiting for Katsuki to grab his hand in a more peaceful manner this time.

“I think I’m really going to enjoy working with you, Katsuki. I hope we can get along really well.”

To Stand by your Side by aeronines( E | 87,867+ | 14/? )

One student, one hero, and a whole lotta pining

Or, the High School Bakugou/Pro Hero Deku slow burn I need in my life

[Age Gap]

Off Limits by BecauseIAmMildlyAshamed( E | 12,033+ | 4/8 )

When his second rut hit, Katsuki was tempted to start reconsidering Izuku being off limits. It wouldn’t be too weird, right? It’s not like they were hanging out together on their off days. While screaming into a pillow in a fit of frustration instead of rubbing himself raw, it seemed like a great idea.

Once his rut started tapering off, he threw away the idea again.

-

Then the third rut hit, and Katsuki was officially over this bullshit.

Lights. Camera. Hero! by brichibi( E | 23,248+ | 6/? )

If there’s one thing Izuku Midoriya’s good at, it’s dreaming big, and dreaming hard. That’s why he’s in Hollywood, of all places, his hometown an entire ocean away along with his graduating high school class and single mother. But he’s gonna be an actor, an international sensation, a superstar like no other.

He just.

Has to convince the rest of the world.

Which is, admittedly, a difficult task.

[AU where “My Hero Academia” is an upcoming television series, everyone’s an actor/actress, and romance happens behind the scenes]

Izuku’s Home for Wayward Pets by glamour_weeb( E | 44,400+ | 10/? )

Izuku works at the Bureau of Companion Protection as a rehabilitator for abused and abandoned Companions, animal-human hybrids. He’s seen his fair share of cruelty cases and even fostered a few Companions, but he’s never had a Companion of his own, until now. After rescuing Katsuki from a life in an illegal, underground Companion fighting ring, Izuku must take in the wolfdog that no one else can handle.

Eventually, Katsuki comes to love his new home, as well as his new Master.

[Graphic Depictions of Violence | PTSD | Past Abuse]

{ Curator Ellie’s Note: Y’all might recognize this one as the winner of October’s Fic of the month! I highly recommend it as well c: }

Horny, Stupid, and In Love by kacchansass( E | 23,032+ | 5/6 )

Kacchan wants to prove that he’s better than Deku at everything—including sex. Deku, like the fool he is, agrees to create a competition that involves performing certain sex acts on their classmates who then tells them who did better. What seems like a quick fix for his Kacchan addiction quickly becomes a one-way ticket to sexual frustration hell.

Friction by warschach( M | 20,057+ | 3/5 )

Izuku’s getting married today.

To an alpha he hasn’t met and doesn’t know beyond his name and the kind of strain he was born with; lion if anyone was curious. And it wouldn’t be that bad of a situation but Izuku’s an alpha too with a tiger strain, and you know the spiel about alpha-alpha unions more fighting than loving in those bedsheets.

So there’s a high probability this whole sham marriage might go up in flames if they’re not careful; and when was the last you heard about alphas being careful, huh?

(or Izuku makes the right dumb decision to marry the right alpha under the wrong conditions)

Ellie:

Chalk and Stale Coffee by Synnie ( M | 45573 | 15/15 )

Raising a little girl wasn’t easy, but pro hero Katsuki Bakugo felt he owed it to her after an accident in the field left her parents dead and him shouldering the blame.

But now she was starting school and her teacher was a lot cuter than Katsuki had been expecting.

{ Curator Ellie’s Note: There’s a lot of pining, Katsuki’s a good dad to Eri, and Izuku would be a great dad to Eri, too. }

my ex-man brought his new boyfriend by setitoff ( M | 39,717+ | 7/? )

izuku’s desperate to get a date after being persuaded (forced, more like) to go for a family reunion back in his hometown, in which he will most definitely see his ex, todoroki shouto, with a date of his own.

in a last attempt to find someone, izuku asks for help and ends up getting bakugou katsuki.

{ Curator Ellie’s Note: I love the fake dating trope! And what makes this fic really interesting is how Katsuki’s still at a stage where he’s not as temperamental as he was in the beginning of the series, but he still is temperamental. They fight and then they have to work through things like they should. }

Rehabilitation by InkspillsNotebook ( E | 46,807+ | 9/? )

It had only been one day off, not even the entire day if he was being honest, so how had things gone so wrong? This wasn’t supposed to happen. They would get through this, he had to get better. It would take time, but Izuku wouldn’t fail him, not again.

A near death encounter changes the every day life of Izuku and Katsuki as injuries need to be mended and time may not be on their side.

[Graphic Depictions of Violence | Suicidal Thoughts]

{ Curator Ellie’s Note: This fic hasn’t been updated in a couple months, but I think it’s still ongoing. I high recommend it for anyone who loves angst with hope. }

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

Stella and the Wolf - Chapter 4

You can find it here on AO3, or the Tumblr Chapter Index here. 

This Alpha werewolf business is getting way too serious. When Stiles arrives at school the next morning, it’s to discover that the reason Dad hasn’t been home all night—his text messages did not share any of the gruesome details—was because some guy at the video store was literally ripped apart last night. Why are video stores still a thing, first of all? And secondly, why were Jackson and Lydia there trying to rent a copy of The Notebook? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to order the DVD off Amazon, since the word on the street, or on the lacrosse field, is that Lydia makes Jackson watch it at least once a week?

Stiles would like to share this observation with Scott, but Scott has apparently decided to ditch school for the day with Allison. Which is another thing that’s getting way too serious, frankly. Stiles loves Scott like a bro, seriously, but he’s going to end up dead if he keeps trying to hang out in the lion’s den and put his dick inside the lion’s daughter. And no, Stiles has no idea who the lion is in this metaphor—Chris or Victoria are equally terrifying, honestly—and yes, he’s aware of what a disturbing metaphor it is.

Point is, Scott’s adoration of Allison is just another added complication in this whole werewolf mess, but apparently he can’t be talked out of it.

Stiles has tried.

Stiles chews the end of his pen avidly in homeroom, trying to pay attention when his teacher reminds them all that it’s parent teacher night tonight, also known as Stiles’s least favourite event in the academic calendar. It’s not that he’s a bad student or anything—his grades are great—but he feels sorry for his dad, who has to sit through a procession of teachers telling him what he’s already known for years: that Stiles couldn’t focus if his life depended on it. He’s also an inveterate smartass.

Like they think his dad doesn’t know that somehow?

Please. Dad’s been dealing with Stiles for sixteen years. He knows better than anyone.

Anyway, how is Stiles supposed to care about stuff like parent teacher night when there is an Alpha werewolf on the loose?

He chews his pen so hard that he tastes ink, and then spits the bits of plastic out and wipes his mouth frantically with his sleeve to make sure there’s none on his face.

Danny gives him a weird look, but Stiles is used to those. It is literally the least of his problems.

The real problem, of course, is the Alpha werewolf.

Except when Stiles tries to focus on the Alpha, it’s another werewolf he finds himself thinking about. Derek Hale. Derek, who almost died last night—he almost dies a lot of the time, and Stiles is becoming seriously concerned about that—and was a total raging douche about it, but also—and Stiles feels this part is crucial—took the time to replace Stella’s sushi and bring then orange Gatorade.

Like, his angry, growly waters run deep or something.

Stiles thinks that his opinion of Derek is changing because of that tiny gesture last night. Or maybe it’s because he saw Derek’s abs. He doesn’t think he’s that shallow, but he’s sixteen. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when his brain is thinking or it’s off chasing butterflies and his dick has taken over the job.

Also, Stiles isn’t gay, but he is maybe bi? A straight guy probably wouldn’t imagine licking Derek Hale’s abs, right? Although they’d be missing out, Stiles is sure, because they are truly incredible abs. But no, Stiles definitely isn’t totally straight, because he also kind of wants to do things to Derek’s dick. Like lick it. And suck it. And—

“Stiles?” Danny asks, and Stiles looks up to see the classroom is empty. “Are you coming to chemistry?”

He flails to his feet. “What? Yes. I was just resting my eyes.”

“Your eyes were open,” Danny points out.

“It was a metaphor,” Stiles attempts.

“That’s not how metaphors work.”

Stiles shrugs, slings his backpack over his shoulder, and follows Danny out the door.

***

Stiles and Danny have Chemistry. Literally. And, Stiles wonders, figuratively?

Like, is that a thing that exists in the realm of possibility?

Does Stiles have game?

Clearly not when it comes to Lydia, although to be fair that’s because she is a goddess. But what about with guys? Does Stiles have game when it comes to guys?

Okay, no. Stiles has no game. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

But he’s pretty sure he doesn’t need game if he’s pretty.

Not that any of this is even about Danny, of course. Danny’s too nice. Stiles is thinking of a leather jacket, tight jeans, and a face airbrushed into perfection by genetics and God.

Does Derek think he’s pretty?

“Hey, Danny?” he asks, leaning over. “Hey, Danny, can I ask you a question?”

Danny gives him a long-suffering look, but he doesn’t say no.

Stiles leans over even further. “Am I attractive to gay guys?”

And then he leans too far and falls off his chair before he gets an answer.

***

Parent teacher night is what it is. Scott actually makes an appearance, so it’s great to know that he’s not dead and stuff following his day long radio silence, but Stiles can’t talk to him at all, because Scott’s got Allison hanging off his arm, and Stiles is flanked by Dad and Stella. Stiles tries to communicate with Scott in a series of narrow stares that they really need to get to the bottom of this werewolf stuff before Scott is compelled by the Alpha into becoming a bloodthirsty killing machine and Scott had better call him after parent teacher night before all this spirals entirely out of control, because taking the day off isn’t really the smartest thing to do in the middle of a supernatural crisis, you dumbass, but that’s a lot to try to convey with the power of a glare to a largely unreceptive target.

“So, um, you should come over for a Call of Duty session after this,” Stiles says.

“Oh, no,” Dad tells him. “Don’t you make any plans, Stiles. I know I’m going to find out something tonight that gets you grounded.”

Scott flashes him a sympathetic smile, like he actually thinks this is about video games. “Another time, huh?”

“Yep,” Stiles says, resisting the urge to roll his eyes so hard he can see his brain. “Another time.”

He follows his Dad and Stella down the corridor, then sends Scott a text message that says, simply: Idiot.

Stiles sits on a bench outside Finstock’s classroom with Stella, while Dad presumably gets the full Finstock experience. Stiles hopes it includes the speech from Independence Day.

Stella eats the rice crackers Dad packed for her to get her through the evening, and fills Stiles in on her day at school. Highlights include Brian Cassidy falling off the slide, Stella signing up for a new Reading in the Community program her teacher has initiated, and Faith Johansen inviting Stella to her birthday party sleepover in a few weeks. There will apparently be two different kinds of cake.

“Who gets two birthday cakes?” Stiles asks.

“Faith and her twin brother,” Stella says. “Duh.”

Well, that makes sense, Stiles figures, and leans back against the wall to wait for Dad.

“You wrote your essay on circumcision, kid?” Dad asks when he reappears. “Really?”

Stiles isn’t sure what it says about him when Dad can spend ten minutes with Finstock and come out thinking Stiles is the weird one, but it’s probably not anything to be proud of.

“What’s circumcision?” Stella asks loudly, and the freshman and his mom waiting on the bench beside them look horrified.

Dad sighs, and looks at his sheet of paper. “Who’s next?”

Stiles dies on the inside.

Because Harris is next. And Harris hates him.

This night just got worse.

***

They’re walking through the parking lot on their way back to Dad’s car when Stiles hears the screaming.

The Alpha, his stuttering heartbeat tells him.

“Wait here,” Dad says, his voice suddenly tight. “Wait here.”

“Dad,” Stiles says, gripping Stella’s hand tightly.

“Wait here!”

And suddenly Dad’s gone, and it’s chaos, with people rushing through the parking lot, and car tires screeching, and Stiles lifts Stella up onto the hood of the car they’re closest to just to keep her off the ground, and then—

A dull thud.

“Dad!” Stiles yells, pushing his way through a knot of people. “Dad!”

“I’m okay!” Dad says, climbing to his feet. “I’m okay!”

But he’s wincing, and his uniform pants are stained with blood below the knee. The driver of the car that hit him is still sitting in the driver’s seat, hands white-knuckled around the wheel.

“Stiles, where’s Stella?” Dad asks. “Get Stella and get—”

And then Stiles hears the roar, and his blood runs cold.

He turns, heading back for Stella. He can see her standing on top of the hood of the car. She’s craning her head to look at something and then, as Stiles watches, she turns and scrambles up the windshield onto the roof of the car, and god, it’s close… the Alpha is close.

Stiles dodges through the cars, his heart in his mouth.

A shot rings out.

Stiles skids to a halt just in time to see Chris Argent, Allison’s dad, holstering his firearm. He’s standing between Stella and…

Stiles turns his head to look.

A mountain lion?

Seriously?

A fucking mountain lion?

“A mountain lion?” he blurts aloud.

Chris Argent shows him a narrow stare. “Expecting something else?”

“No,” Stiles says, his heart hammering. “Nope. Not at all.”

Chris Argent looks him up and down, nods, and then goes to inspect his kill.

Stella slides back down the windshield of the car, her shoes squeaking on the glass, and into Stiles’s arms.

***

“You thought it was a werewolf, didn’t you?” Stella asks later that night when Dad—his grazes patched up—has gone in to work and Stiles and Stella are eating cereal in front of the television. “The bad one? The Alpha?”

“I thought it was.” Stiles closes his eyes briefly. “How messed up is it when it turns out a vicious mountain lion is the better  option?”

“Pretty messed up,” Stella agrees. She falls silent for a while, chewing her bottom lip. “Stiles?”

“Mmm?”

“Is Dad really okay?”

“Yeah.” Stiles nudges her with his shoulder, careful not to make it too hard so they don’t both end up wearing her bowl of cereal. “He’s fine.”

Stella hits him with a wide-eyed gaze that doesn’t allow him anywhere to hide. “What would happen if he wasn’t?”

That old, pervasive fear rises up in Stiles again. It’s been there ever since Mom died.

“I’d look after you,” he says.

“You’re not a grown-up,” she tells him. “Not really.”

“No, but I’d look after you,” Stiles says. “Dad has cousins in Portland. We’ve met them before, but you were probably too little to remember. If something bad happened to Dad, we’d go and live with them until I’m eighteen, then I’d look after you.”

Their mom’s death, and the realities of their dad’s job. It’s something that Stiles has thought about, and that Dad has planned for, if worst comes to worst.

“Okay,” Stella says, and nods seriously. “As long as we’d be together.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, and thinks of Laura Hale. Thinks of Derek, who is all alone in the world now. Thinks of how he’s lost everyone. Stiles’s chest aches, and he wonders how Derek is even still standing. Stiles wouldn’t be. Not after that. Losing his mom fractured a part of him that will never really heal, but to lose Dad on top of that? To lose Stella? Even the thought of it makes panic spike sharply in his gut. “Yeah, we’d be together.”

He blinks, his eyes stinging, and wonders how Derek is even still here.

[paperficwriter]

My Own Worst Enemy

Here is a KiriBaku request I wrote for @batneko based off this fantastic prompt! Thank you for your commission, Bats!!

If you are interested in commissioning me for Boku no Hero Academia or other series, please check out my commission guidelines here!!

Cut is for length, not for content.

Of all the things that Kirishima had done in his life, including getting accepted to UA, the top hero school in the country, it all seemed like absolutely nothing compared to being able to kiss Bakugou Katsuki.

And not just kissing him. Kissing him in his room. On his bed. No one else had ever even been allowed to go into his space in the dorm, and although there wasn’t much to speak of so far as belongings went (Bakugou was pretty minimalist), he did have an actual bed. He could still remember the first time Bakugou invited him in, his heart pounding, and he lit up into a smile.

“Dude! No futon?! Seriously?”

Bakugou had rolled his eyes. “When my quirk manifested, I had to have more space, and if I didn’t sleep on a mattress I got pissed and burned holes in the floor.”

Kirishima stifled back a laugh as he jumped onto it. It was the most comfortable surface he had ever been on: a little firm but also soft. Pillowy. “That sounds like you, for sure. Does Momo know you have a bed too?” he teased.

“No. And it’s going to stay that way, Shitty Hair.”

He wasn’t sure what else they did that day. Probably studied, maybe watched some videos on his phone, but he knew that at some point he had put his head on Bakugou’s shoulder and dozed off. Class had been busy that week, he recalled, and he was stressed, and with his back pressed against the wall Bakugou had been so close and warm and…

If someone had asked a year or two before if he ever thought he would wake up with a blanket around himself and Bakugou stroking his hair...well, he would have just zoned out and fantasized about it for a minute, then shaken his head and said it would never happen. And yet. It happened, Bakugou’s fingers carding through his hair, quite obviously breaking up the product so it was soft and mostly down when he sat up.

“What?” Bakugou had asked, a pink glow brightening the bridge of his nose.

Kirishima didn’t know how to answer. In fact, he hadn’t known how to for weeks until finally he was in that room again, and he blurted that he had wanted so much for Bakugou to kiss him that night, and Bakugou stared at him and then…

Kissed him.

Had it seriously been that simple?

And sure, maybe he would like to say now that it was a romantic movie kiss with all the bells and whistles. He would have liked to look back and say that Bakugou Katsuki, who would never let anyone come even in arm’s length of him physically or emotionally, swept him off his feet, but...it was awkward, leaving him wondering if it was his first kiss too. One with too much teeth, a tongue thrust into his mouth like a creature seeking a hiding place, and at some point he thought he cut himself on one of Kirishima’s canines. A false alarm, but an alarm nevertheless.

“I guess we’ll just have to practice,” Kirishima joked, his smile turning melty when Bakugou fingered one of the spikes of his hair.

“Whatever.” Bakugou had been dismissive that day, but the following afternoon, he dragged Kirishima into his room. Then again. And again.

And he really had improved. He wanted to ask, to tease, if he had been practicing on some other pair of lips, but he was too busy falling into that warm afternoon of sunshine and ice cream and a cool breeze and all his favorite things wrapped up into one that was Bakugou kissing him. His memory about everything else sucked (at least that's what Aizawa would say) but this…this he gripped tight in his brain.

Bakugou's arm around his waist, holding him against his front where he laid on his side.

Warm, soft lips opening and then closing over his, brushing one moment, pressing hard the next.

The wet noises, the little breaths, even the brush of his fingers against his cheekbone.

If Kirishima opened his eyes - and he didn't often because Bakugou somehow always caught him and snarled at him to “stop fucking staring, weirdo” - he could see how soft Bakugou's face would become. The eyebrows normally knit in an angry 'v’ would go loose. Maybe even turn up a little. The angry line of his mouth now came in to touch his, open or puckered slightly or…

Bakugou's phone vibrated.

“Really?” Kirishima chuckled, balling his fist into Bakugou's black shirt like he was going to fight him. “You left your phone on?”

“Like you turned yours off.” There was the glare again.

“It's at least on silent!” The vibrations started again, obnoxiously loud on Bakugou's dresser. “Want to get that?”

“Fuck ‘em,” he grunted, and he gave Kirishima's bottom lip a wet lick, kissing him again as soon as his jaw dropped. “I'm busy.”

Busy. That was about the extent of it. Whenever Kirishima was in his room and either one of their friends or a classmate or even Midoriya came by, he was always “busy.” Or, if they called him while they were out together eating lunch or dinner in the city, he was “fucking busy.” And if they wandered back into the dorms together and anyone even breathed in Bakugou’s direction to ask where he had been, he’d scream that it wasn’t any of their fucking business.

Kirishima waited for that to bother him. He waited for some sort of pain to settle in, to feel maybe a little bitter or angry or upset, that Bakugou wasn’t telling everyone about him. But then...he liked this. He liked having this something with Bakugou. And he loved everything that went with it, too.

When the phone finally got to the edge of the table, Kirishima pushed Bakugou away to reach out for it. “Oh my god, dude, I can’t handle it anymore. If you’re not going to answer it, at least let me.”

Bakugou groaned as he rolled over on his back, and Kirishima had zero doubts that he would have just let it dance to the edge and clatter to the floor. “Do what you want.”

Kirishima pressed the button on the side of the phone, and there were several texts from Kaminari. Many of them were just Bakugou’s name, but the most recent one said, “Baku, you have to come see this guy. He’s huge. He has some apex predator quirk?? WHAT ARE YOU DOING??”

“Kaminari is talking about some...guy?”

Bakugou took the phone and glared at the screen for a second before he swung his legs up to stand next to the bed. Okay, maybe now Kirishima regretted messing with the phone. He wanted to go back to kissing, and instead Bakugou opened his door. A new challenger had approached and Bakugou clearly had to see if his territory was being threatened. “Come on. Let’s check it out.”

Once they were both out in the hall, they could see and hear clearly that there was a commotion down by the common room. Both boys and girls from not only 1-A but other classrooms were gathered around a single figure, a figure so tall that they loomed over the heads of the students. It was hard not to notice the dramatic bearing of the person who frankly looked more like a teacher than one of their own, and it was only the uniform that gave it away. He (Kirishima didn’t want to make assumptions about gender, but it was difficult not to, given his physical appearance) was broad-chested, and he had the traits of a lion. Kirishima had seen other people with animal characteristics - Tokoyami, of course, and Hound Dog came immediately to mind - but this guy was…a lion. With a gorgeous full mane around his head, gold eyes, and rich sandy fur that seemed to cover his entire body. When he smiled, he showed off perfect, sharp teeth.

“Wow,” Kirishima breathed.

“What?!” Bakugou snapped.

“Nothing! He’s just…” He whistled low, avoiding Bakugou’s narrowed gaze. “You have to admit he looks really cool.”

“Appearances aren’t everything,” Bakugou huffed, crossing his arms over his chest as they wandered up to where the crowd was a steady buzz of sound. When he heard Kaminari’s voice, Bakugou glanced up again when he joined them. “So what’s with this guy, Drooly?”

Kaminari’s face appeared as excited as Kirishima felt. “So his name is Yuri, right? I mean, that’s not really his name, but that’s what he chose for his exchange name. And he’s a transfer student from a sister city in another country and he’s going to live with us for a few weeks and he’s super nice and cool and --”

“Fuck, just suck his cock already,” Bakugou interrupted, rolling his eyes. “What about his quirk?”

“Oh yeah!” Kaminari, as always, was completely unfazed by Bakugou’s attitude. “He was talking about how he has this quirk that kind of jives with his lion genes from his dad’s size of the family, and he can, like, grow his fangs and his claws and run really fast and --”

“I guess it doesn’t suck,” Bakugou concluded. “Where does he rank in his school?”

Kirishima elbowed him lightly. “Somehow I doubt he’s bothered talking about where he places in grades, unlike some people...”

“Actually, he’s third! Just like you, Bakugou!”

He couldn’t be entirely sure, but did Kirishima see Bakugou just tense slightly? Sure, he could get pissy about the fact that Iida and Yaoyorozu were both ahead of him, but Yuri wasn’t even enrolled at UA. Why did he care?

“Excuse me.”

Bakugou, Kirishima and Kaminari turned at the sound of the voice. Yuri was standing right in front of them, two duffel bags casually over one shoulder, and the crowd had parted but remained hovering around him, watching the interaction with close interest. He smiled, and Kirishima had never thought that he would care that much about what someone’s voice sounded like, but Yuri could read the dictionary and he’d be happy. It was smooth and rich, the deepest voice he had ever heard, and despite his accent, he spoke their language flawlessly. “Are you Kirishima Eijirou?”

“Me? Yeah. Yeah! Hi!” Why was he feeling nervous? He shook his hand rather vigorously. “Nice to meet you!”

“I read about the fight you were involved in when you were serving as intern with Fatgum and cooperating with the professional heroes in this region. It was very impressive.” Man, oh man, that voice. So manly. “When I saw that I would be staying in your school’s dorms for a week, I hoped I would be able to meet you.”

Kirishima blushed, and it was only because he had turned his head down sheepishly that he caught the expression on Bakugou’s face, one that was close to scathing. “You’ve probably heard of Bakugou Katsuki, too!” Kirishima blurted. “He won the sports festival during our first year.”

“Ah, yes.” It was hard to read the tone Yuri’s words took on, then, but he spoke slowly. Deliberately. “You were quite something, Bakugou. Although it did not seem you were satisfied with the result, despite your success. I could not help wondering if your fellow classmates appreciated your careless regard for your win.”

Kirishima and Kaminari exchanged a glance.

“Maybe they should have been fucking better, and they could have gotten that piece of shit medal, then.” Bakugou squared his shoulders. Kirishima knew he was waiting for Yuri to throw some other slight his way so he could knock it out. That’s usually how these interactions went, anyway.

But it never happened.

It was like a light switch being flipped. Rather than following up, Yuri returned his full attention to Kirishima, blinking slowly as his dark lips spread into a grin. “I will be staying here in the city for some time. Perhaps we could go have some dinner together?”

It took Kirishima at least ten seconds to realize that he was being asked out. And maybe it wasn’t a date but...it wasn’t not a date either.

“Maybe!” he finally chirped. “That could be fun, right, Bakugou?”

He wished he was more surprised when he turned to see Bakugou stalking away. Yet somehow, that was just the way he was: Bakugou Katsuki, volatile and yet somehow completely predictable, more ticking time bomb than hand grenade.

---

“I don’t like that fucking guy,” Bakugou said as he stabbed his spicy curry with his chopsticks. He hated that he kept glancing up at Kirishima talking to that giant housecat. They would grin and talk, and now and then he would catch him flexing for Kirishima, or showing his sharp claws, or…

“I think he’s nice!” Ashido gushed, sipping her tea. Kaminari and Sero nodded in agreement, and he scowled at all of them. What did they know?

“You would.”

“I think he’s just pissy because Kirishima is spending more time with Yuri than he is with him,” Sero pointed out, like Bakugou wasn't sitting right there in front of them.

“Fuck off. I don’t give a shit who he hangs out with.”

“Oh yeah? Is that why you keep shoving Kirishima into the classroom when Yuri is calling for him down the hall?” Kaminari volunteered.

“Or why when Aizawa was going to partner Yuri and Kirishima for sparring you practically screamed that you volunteered to fight Kirishima instead?”

“Or when you pretty much yelled in his face that Kirishima had a study date with you and that’s why he couldn't go out for karaoke?”

“All right, you fucking asshats, I didn’t ask for your opinion!” When Bakugou got up, his chair clattered to the floor behind him. He didn’t have to listen to this shit. Flipping them off, he stormed over to the garbage can to throw away the remnants of lunch. Hell, he’d barely touched anything. He had thought when he bought Kirishima lunch that he would finally get a chance to just sit down with him and talk for five seconds, but the minute Yuri came over, that had been it. Maybe it wasn’t that big of a surprise that he lost his appetite.

As he shoved his hands into his pockets and headed out to the lawn, kicking the door open in front of him, he could still hear those three fuckwits laughing in his ears. They hadn’t been wrong, and that was the worst of all. It made his insides feel as explosive as his hands when he thought about each of those occurrences. And not once had Yuri been a shit to him about it, not like Bakugou would have been if the tables were turned. Despite his big, bad appearance, Yuri completely tuned him out, his entire focus on Kirishima.

Kirishima, who definitely didn’t seem opposed to the attention.

And it wasn’t like Bakugou had gone silently into this whole situation. He had mentioned it to Kirishima at least several times. “I don’t get why you even like hanging around him,” he said, lying on the bed. He had wanted to go back to where they were that first day, but Kirishima kept sitting up, legs crossed, looking at his phone and reading over snippets of translated articles about Yuri and his school. “Don't get used to him. He’s going to be gone before you know it.”

“He’s really an awesome guy,” Kirishima said, not looking up. “He’s in all these clubs, and he interned for a big-name hero in his country. He has a lot of great stories! Give him a chance!”

“I have to focus on school. And you should be, too, jackass.”

Kirishima had shoved him over, grinning down at him. “I’ll catch up on studying! I promise.”

The whole scenario had left a bitter taste in Bakugou’s mouth.

“Bakugou?” Even at the sound of his name, Bakugou didn’t turn as he kicked his way through the manicured grass. He didn’t have to. He recognized Yuri’s voice immediately, the cadence with which he said his name, the consonants popping on his tongue. “Can I speak to you for a moment?”

“Better keep up, then. I’ve got shit to do.” Maybe he would get tired of following him. Why was he here? He didn’t want to talk to this guy…

Even despite his efforts, he could hear the grass crunch as Yuri jogged up to his side. The wind rolled across the quad, ruffling his mane in a way that made Bakugou hate him even more, because it was perfect, like a goddamned commercial with his stupid face on it. “There is something I am not clear about, and I have been unable to confirm this with you or with Kirishima.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Is Kirishima your boyfriend, or is he not?”

That got his attention. Bakugou stopped walking. “What the...why the fuck are you asking me that?”

Yuri put his hands on his wide hips, and Bakugou hated how much taller he was, forcing him to crane his neck up. “I can tell that there is something between the two of you, but...you are never...particularly kind to him. There is a physical chemistry, but I cannot tell if you have a relationship or if you do not.”

Bakugou wasn’t sure what he was going to say but even the start of the word crackled and dissipated in his throat. He tried again. Nothing. “That’s none of your fucking business!” he finally expelled. That had worked fine before with everyone else.

And yet…

“It is my business, Bakugou,” Yuri said patiently. “Because I wish to court Kirishima, but I cannot do this if I do not understand the nature of your bond.” Now Bakugou was fuming. Courting? Bond?! “Are you intimate with Kirishima? Are you engaging in --”

“Shut up! Don’t ask me that shit!” For lack of further response, though, since Bakugou did not want him to continue that line of questioning, he finally allowed himself to admit, “But yeah, we make out and stuff.”

A slow nod. “But you are not boyfriends?”

“What the fuck does that even mean?!”

“So...you are not.”

“I...We…” Bakugou felt like he was choking. Suddenly he was reminded of the sludge monster, of drowning in the black ectoplasmic goo when he was trapped by the League of Villains. As much as he wanted to reply, he couldn’t. Couldn’t focus, couldn’t find the words, couldn’t get the air behind what might have been the words.

Yuri’s expression changed. Suddenly he seemed less annoyed, and more...sympathetic, and that only made Bakugou’s rage build. “Do you have feelings for him?”

Bakugou wanted to run away. “Do I look like the kind of asshole who would make out with someone I don’t care about?”

“Have you spoken with him about how you feel?”

“He knows!” Small explosions set off in Bakugou’s palms without him even intending for them to, and his voice had become so shrill it echoed in the field. Kirishima knew. He had to know. Right?

Yuri didn’t look away, not even flinching from Bakugou’s quirk triggering. His words were flat. Calm. “Are you certain? Perhaps your ‘making out’ is enough for him. Maybe you are not together because he is waiting for someone who is more deserving of him. Someone who will treat him like a whole person, who will do ‘stuff’ with him but also be kind. Who will love him.” He shrugged. “Maybe he does not want you.”

Maybe he does not want you.

Bakugou didn’t remember what happened between the field and his dorm room. He might have bitten off another curse at Yuri, or he might have just run away. It didn’t matter. His stomach was in knots, and it hurt worse than when All Might had gut-punched him during their exams in the first year. His brain was trying to play back recordings of every conversation between him and Kirishima, and each one brought back...nothing. He had always been left assuming that this - whatever this was - worked for Kirishima, that he was happy with it.

But now…

Doubt.

Doubt that left him lying on his bed for several hours until there was a knock at the door. One that he recognized. God, was that how well he knew him? That he could tell when it was him knocking on his dorm room door? Bakugou stayed where he was, until he knocked again.

“Bakugou? You around?” he finally called.

“Go away.”

“That sounds like a ‘yes’!” Fuck, he could hear his smile, and it hurt to picture it, to recall the taste of it. “Can I come in?”

“Which part of ‘go away’ don’t you understand, Shitty Hair?”

Of course the door opened, and Kirishima walked in like he owned the place. He had changed out of his uniform into his t-shirt and shorts, plopping down on Bakugou’s bed across from him. “You know that if you don’t tell me just ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ I’m going to interpret what you’re saying as Bakugou-speak for ‘I want you around but I’m too much of a baby to tell you.’”

“Oh, fuck off.” Bakugou grabbed his pillow and shoved it against his stomach. For a moment, everything in the room was silent. Why was Kirishima just staring at him? “So. Did Simba ask you out or what?”

“Yeah.”

Here it comes. Bakugou braced himself for it. “What did you say?”

Kirishima smirked. “What do you think?”

Maybe it was the way Kirishima responded, but it sparked at the circle of gasoline that had been soaking around Bakugou’s heart, and he all but yelled, “I think you should just fucking say ‘yes’ and get it over with. Have lots of fucking manly furry babies for all I care. You two deserve each other.”

And then something happened that Bakugou wouldn’t have expected in a million years.

Kirishima laughed at him. He laughed and grabbed him up, pillow and all, and pulled him into a hug that he refused to loosen. “Is that what all this has been about?! Is this why you’ve been acting so cagey the last few weeks?”

Bakugou figured he would push him away, shove him off the bed, or even roll away, but he didn’t. He might have slapped a little at Kirishima’s chest, but it only made him more intent to have his way and cuddle Bakugou into submission. “I said I don’t care,” he mumbled bitterly.

“Yeah, you very clearly don’t care.” Kirishima’s fingers stroked his wild blonde spikes, and even in spite of himself Bakugou could feel his body relax, his muscles loosen. “I said ‘no,’ you know. I wouldn’t do that to you. Obviously.”

“Don't fucking ‘obviously’ at me.”

Another laugh. “You're the one I want.”

“Even though we’re not…” Bakugou buried his face in Kirishima’s shoulder. “I’m so shitty with this kind of thing. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you weren’t serious.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious.” He reached his arm around his side so he could tug his shirt, pull him in closer. Even without his quirk, Kirishima was a rock. “Especially with you.”

“You don’t think I know?” Kirishima paused to kiss his temple, and Bakugou made a little sound at the affectionate gesture. “After all those study dates and massages and buying me meals and cheering me up? Those mean a lot more to me than any ‘relationship talk,’ dude.”

Bakugou was still, breathing in the clean scent of Kirishima, of his freshly laundered clothes, the shower he had taken. They had gone so long without talking about any of this, and he wasn’t about to start, but… “You’re really okay with this?”

“By ‘this,’ do you mean...you?” Kirishima sounded so tender, soft and sincere, and when he rolled Bakugou over to kiss him, Bakugou let him take the reigns.

“I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

[northernrainforest]

Budget Cuts

In case you’re too busy reading my blog to follow the politics of the state of Alaska, here’s a brief rundown from an admitted newcomer. Last October when he was up for reelection, Bill Walker, the previous governor and an Independent, stepped down in the aftermath of a scandal involving “inappropriate overtures” made to a woman by his lieutenant governor. That left two contenders. The Democrat, Mark Begich, had been a US senator; Flo actually met him at our local radio station when they were both being interviewed on the same day. Ladybug and I were listening for Flo to come on and talk about university events but Begich talked for awhile before Flo’s segment; I found him interesting, but Ladybug was not impressed.

“Ugh,” she said. “He just keeps talking!” In short, most people’s view of politicians.

I think it goes without saying (does it go without saying?) that I am a Democrat – though my recent move to the “coast” of the Tongass Narrows changes slightly my status as a member of the coastal elite. Regardless, Flo and I were pretty dang disappointed that Begich lost. The winner, Republican Mike Dunleavy, was elected on the campaign promise of restoring the PFD. Allow me to explain – again, forgiving my very rudimentary understanding of the whole thing. The Alaska permanent fund was established in the late seventies, in the wake of the construction of the Alaska pipeline; a lump sum is given to each Alaskan once a year, with the variable amount effectively contingent on the price of oil. This year it amounted to about $1600 for every man, woman and child in the state; in the past it’s been significantly more. (I should note that we won’t receive it until we’ve lived here a full calendar year, which will mean 2020 for the three of us and 2021 for Bronson, I believe – the indignity of having a birthday in early January.) To outsiders, those of us who just moved here from down south and aren’t yet eligible, for example – it can feel like a bonus. But to many Alaskans, it is the thing they wait for all year. A friend here told me that there are people in remote villages who rely on the PFD to pay their bills. The day before the dividends were handed out last fall, I overheard a salty dog of an old man, possibly drunk, talking on the phone.

“I’ll get you the money as soon as the PFD comes through,” he said, like a character in the Alaska version of a gangster film: To Live and Die in Ketchikan.

And it’s not only homesteaders and people living on the fringes. This money is important to people. One of my friends used hers to buy a new oven; they’d been out an oven for eight months, waiting for the PFD. In the lobby of the aquatics center last October, watching our kids practice the front crawl, parents debated about whether to use the money for vacations or household upgrades (middle-class concerns to be sure, but I did notice that none of the people I knew actually used the money for vacations – something else always seemed more urgent.) All that to say, Dunleavy was elected in part on the basis of his campaign promise calling to restore the PFD’s former glory, and to retroactively distribute funds he felt had been taken from the people by the previous administration. Now. I’m not going to delve too deep into the politics of a state to which I have just moved. I really don’t know what the right answer is. I do know this: a budget that allows for Dunleavy to award this money also includes cuts in the billions of dollars to the Alaska Marine Highway system and the University of Alaska. Obviously, the latter of those two would be a real problem for us. If Flo were to lose his job, the life that we’ve built here over the last eight months would be impossible to maintain. We would have to move. As I write this (and “write” should be in quotation marks, since I’m talking into my notes app like an old timey doctor into a dictaphone), I’m walking down Jackson from the top of a high hill, looking out towards snowcapped mountains on Gravina Island with the waters of the Tongass Narrows gliding by below. We had friends over for dinner last night, a chaotic group of kids and babies and nursing mothers, all sitting around eating linguine and clams and talking about hiking. I called Ladybug’s school yesterday to ask about serving on their board. Things are happening for us here – things we like. Bronson was born here. I won’t be dramatic and say that I plan on dying in Ketchikan. I have no idea where or when I’ll die. (Way to bring the mood down, Bolton.) But we’ve been very happy here. And frankly, I wouldn’t even know where to go next. So as it turns out, the looming budget cuts for the state of Alaska, which are probably not even national news, well, they’re affecting us on the most basic of levels right now. I will say, we have high hopes. I could go into detail, but the gist of it is that, though small, the Ketchikan campus features a maritime academy that the governor has toured and thought very highly of. Flo thinks that may be the salvation of the school. Then again: if the marine highway system shuts down, is there any point in a maritime academy at all? Any thoughts of buying a house have been tabled, at least for the moment. All this has gotten me thinking about the ways I inadvertently implement cuts in my own little life. I didn’t go on my regular walk today, the one where I tuck Bronson into the carrier and watch his eyes grow heavy and eventually close. Ladybug stayed home from school, Flo had several meetings at funny times, and the day just sort of got away from me. So it’s evening now, though it’s still light (it’s amazing how quickly the days have started to get longer) and I’m walking by myself. I didn’t start the walk by myself, though. When Flo got home and I handed off the baby, Ladybug chimed in and told me that she wanted to come on my walk. I started to say no. I fact, I did say no. A couple of times. But she was undaunted. My brother and sister-in-law had sent her a super-secret spy notebook today and some new crayons. She put on her shoes and a little stocking hat and grabbed her notebook. Off we set: me slightly annoyed that I wasn’t getting my time alone and would have to slow my pace; Ladybug all excitement.

We did start slowly. Ladybug kept stopping me so she could unbutton her little notebook, pull out a crayon, scribble something, and then reverse the process. She pointed things out, too. “Look Mama!” Ladybug said. “It’s a ketchup and mustard house!” It was true: there are two houses next to each other a few blocks from us, one bright yellow and one bright red, that I’d never really noticed before. “Look Mama!” she said, indicating across the street from the condiment houses. “That house is so cool!” It was a wide house with two levels and a big deck that looked sort of like a duplex but wasn’t; I couldn’t tell you why it was cool, but it was. “Stop!” she shouted, still only three blocks from home. “I have to look at my map.” Ladybug pulled out her notebook and consulted the scribbles she had made earlier. She pointed us in the direction that we should head. She found some berries. She noticed buses. She ran ahead, and lagged behind, and drew pictures and talked and held my hand and laughed and skipped. Eventually she’d had enough so we doubled back, I dropped her off, and I picked up my pace. If having a newborn means falling in love with someone you’ve just met, having a five-year-old when you have a newborn, at least for me, has meant something closer to a marriage that’s headed for divorce. The newborn relationship is a series of meet-cutes: “He spit up all over me and then looked at me so helplessly that I had to laugh!” Parenting the older child now consists of button-pressing and limit-testing, of the building up of micro-aggressions that lead to epic explosions: “She threw a tantrum because I put yogurt, then fruit, then granola, but she wanted the fruit on the bottom and I LITERALLY CAN’T ANYMORE.”

Children always ask if their parents will love them less when the new baby comes along. The parents always say no, of course not, there’s room enough in our hearts for all of you. Which is true. But what we fail to mention is that it’s really easy to love a newborn; it’s much harder to love almost anyone else. When Flo and Ladybug have argued in the past and she’s come to me in tears, I’ve often said to her, “It’s hard to live with other people.“ A new baby is a person, but with respect to Magda Gerber and Dr. Sears and everyone who preaches the importance of respecting our newborns – they are still just barely people. Yes, each baby has a life of his own, and I have immense respect for what what my baby has been through up to this point and the person he already is. But. A baby is also a vessel for all of our dreams, for the things we love about ourselves and our partners; he represents the abundance of life that we have been seeking and, in his shy smile and soulful eyes, have finally found. (We had that time with Ladybug too, I should say, and it was dreamy.) A child, though, is in many ways already fully realized. Ladybug is the most intense version of herself at five, even if that five-year-old self will only exist until she turns six. For the rest of her life she will embody the self that she is at that moment, in that season, and it will be fascinating and thrilling and scary for her dad and me to behold. Right now it’s intense, because five-year-olds can be intense. They can be bullheaded, attention-seeking, and mean. Ha. Sounds like me sometimes – must be my daughter. Which is what the walk reminded me. That this girl with her notebook and her rainbow-colored coat – because “rainbow” is her favorite color – is still the manifestation of everything that has ever mattered to me. The arrival of her brother has made it harder for me to have the patience to remember that, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I’d like to think that I’ll be kinder tomorrow, that I won’t snap at her when she lifts up a table and carries it, haphazardly and seemingly for no reason, directly over the tiny bed in which her brother is sleeping. I can’t guarantee that will happen. I’m growing too. I’m trying to be the best version of myself at this season in my life, and I’m not always particularly successful. But the magic of life and of parenthood is that I’ve made no campaign promises. I have no constituents that are going to send me packing after one term if I don’t deliver. My cabinet is populated by people who cheer me on and commiserate with me and make me laugh, and I can wake up every morning and decide how best to move forward.

So if Alaska Marine represents travel and the university represents education, then couldn’t it be said I’m cutting them out of my own budget by not taking a walk with my daughter, by not learning from her and helping her learn? How can I ask the governor to keep funding these institutions unless I’m funding them in my own life?

Ladybug’s maps were so clear in her own mind; all I saw were scribbles. That’s the way it is sometimes with maps. I’m just going to keep walking and looking for berries along the way, hoping for the best.

[s-riusblck]

ANGEL EYES

MARAUDERS ERA - Part 2 

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7

NOTES: I have to forewarn everyone that I live for angst and Sirius being protective and comforting and all those good things. And I love kind of slow build ups???? But don’t worry the next part should have a lot more fluff. Also I’m very new to writing so I'm always open to feedback and ideas. My plan at the moment for this era is seven parts, but that could definitely change. Altogether I want this series to be fourteen parts, but we’ll just see how this era goes first. Thank you so so much to anyone liking/reblogging or just reading this story!! p.s. I tried to incorporate little snippets of Sirius’ POV but I don’t know how well it flowed so forgive me if it doesn’t fit in well 

SHIP: Sirius Black x Reader

DESCRIPTION: Transferring from Ilvermorny to Hogwarts in your seventh year wasn’t ideal, and turning up late to the welcome feast on your first day? Probably not ideal either. But meeting Sirius Black? Maybe that would make it all worth it. 

WARNINGS: Cursing, conversation about death, mention of alcohol

**********

With a sudden jolt, your eyes flickered open. Letting out a sigh, you lifted your head up off the table, taking in your surroundings. How long had you been asleep? The library was practically empty, except for a few students flicking pages here and there, the tips of their wand lit up, and a couple of Slytherin’s, taking advantage of what they thought was a private location. Rolling your eyes, you stretched your arms out and checked your watch. It was half past midnight, and you shook your head, wondering how you managed to break rules even when you weren’t conscious. You had struggled with Hogwarts rules so far, especially when it came to tardiness. The were so many stairs and so many different corridors that it was impossible to find your way if you were on your own. 

“Oh for fucks sake,” You muttered, throwing your hands up in exasperation as you saw drool smudging your star chart for astronomy. Studying at Hogwarts was no joke, you had soon found out. Only a few weeks into September, you were already bogged down with work, spending every free moment working in the library to try and catch up on six years worth of different methods of teaching. You had always gotten good grades at Ilvermorny, but you were used to how things were taught there, you had fallen into a good rhythm. That rhythm didn’t come half as easy at Hogwarts. Lily helped you as much as she could, but things that seemed simple to her, were a lot tougher for you. The Marauders had helped you out where they could too, each paying extra attention to the subjects they were best at. 

Gathering your books, your jumper and your robes, your smudged star chart on top, you left the library and made your way back to the Gryffindor common room as quietly as possible. The Fat Lady huffed at you, refusing to open her eyes for a few moments. “Come on, I thought we were really starting to get along.” You whispered with a sense of urgency in your voice, spinning around to make sure nobody was coming. “Oh, alright.” She huffed, swinging open to let you in. 

You walked into the common room, when suddenly someone bolted upright from their position stretched out on the sofa. The sudden movement made you jump, dropping all your belongings. Letting out a groan of frustration, you stomped your foot and huffed. “Brilliant. Just brilliant.” You muttered, bending down to start gathering your stuff. You felt someone move in front of you, and looking up, your breathe caught in your throat when you saw Sirius bending down in front of you to help, your faces only inches apart. “Bad day?” He asked, with a small smirk and a cocked eyebrow. “No, not at all.” You replied, a sarcastic smile on your face as he let out a small chuckle. Your eyes flickered down to his lips when he looked down to start gathering your books, and a heat began to develop in your stomach. You shook your head and gathered up your robe and jumper and a few books. 

Standing up before you, Sirius looked down at the star chart sitting on top of the pile of books he had gathered. He shook his head in amusement, seeing the smudged ink. He looked down at the girl beneath him, gathering the remainder of her books and smiled. What was it about this girl? For him, she was so different than any other. So much more than any other. He had enjoyed every second of getting to know (Y/N) (Y/L/N), since the day she came trudging into the Great Hall, disrupting Albus Dumbledore in the middle of his speech. A thing not many people did. She always made an entrance. There was still so much more he wanted to know about (Y/N) (Y/L/N), and as much as he enjoyed flirting with her and winding her up, he was scared. Scared of what he felt towards her, because it was something he had never felt before, and quite frankly, he didn’t know what it was. 

You stood up to face him, pushing a loose strand of hair back out of your face. “Thanks. As you can probably see, I’m a real genius when it comes to astronomy.” You joked, noticing the amused look on his face, his fingers tracing over the star chart. “What star is this here?” He grinned, pointing at the drool stain on the parchment. 

“Wow. Here was I thinking astronomy was one of your best subjects, and you don’t even recognise that… unique constellation.” 

“Unique? Hm, it certainly is unique.” He chuckled, nodding his head towards the sofas surrounding the fire, gesturing for you to sit down. You deliberated for a moment, your eyes glancing towards the stairs towards to the girls dormitories and back to Sirius. It wasn’t a hard decision. You put your books down on the coffee table and fell into the seat next to Sirius, throwing your head back against the headrest. “I may be struggling just a bit with astronomy.” Head still against the back of the sofa, you turned to face him and he did the same. “I think that’s a slight understatement.” He joked, nudging his knee against yours. 

You cocked an eyebrow at him, internally wondering how he managed to read you so well. Sighing, probably a bit dramatically, you relaxed more into the sofa. “Okay, I’m struggling. With everything. Every. Single. Subject. And it’s my last year of school! How am I supposed to enjoy my last year of school, and make new friends, if I can’t mark a stupid star on a star chart without spending hours in the library? And I feel like I’m the only one struggling. Well, I suppose when your only friend is Lily Evans, that’s a given, but still. Why is nobody else drooling on their star charts?” Letting out a deep breathe, you felt a wave of relief wash over your body after letting all that out. Seeing the look on Sirius’ face as he began to talk you sat up, shaking your head. “Shit, now I just seem as whiny as all the girls fawning over you trying to get your attention. No, I’m not looking for pity. I’ll be fine. I’m not that whiny girl.” You told him definitely. As you tried to gauge his reaction, Sirius sat up, the same old smirk on his lips. 

“Can I talk now?” He asked and you narrowed your eyes at him, before nodding. “Let me help you.”

——

And he did. Sirius Black dedicated time nearly everyday to helping you keep up with the workload of Hogwarts. Evenings turned into nights spent on the sofa in the Gryffindor common room - laughing, studying and talking. He drove you crazy, but in the best way. You were both stubborn, and bickered about he stupidest things. But when you weren’t bickering, you were laughing louder than you had in a long time. You learned a lot about Sirius in that time. There was a lot more to him than people ever gave him credit for. You talked about the war that was brewing, and how it made him less and less interested in partying and goofing around. He told you about his family, his real family and his chosen family, the Potters. He told you about how he despised the morals of the Black family. And you listened. You listened to every word he spoke, falling more and more in love with him everyday. You’d never forget the day you realised you were in love with Sirius Black. It was a rainy, miserable Saturday in October. The majority of the school had gone to Hogsmeade, including the marauders and the girls in your dormitory. You and Sirius had decided to stay behind and work on a defence against the darks arts essay that was due. Wanting a more quiet place away from the common room, the pair of you sat on your bed. You sat at the head of the bed, and Sirius sat at the foot, your blanket thrown over the both of you. Looking up from your essay, you watched Sirius sitting across from you, his brows furrowed and his tongue sticking out slightly as his quill scratched against the parchment. Your eyes took in every inch of his face. His stubble, his lips and those gorgeous, gorgeous eyes. 

“Distracted?” He asked, smirking down at his essay. You chuckled, looking back down to your own. “No. Not at all.” You replied, glancing up again through your eyelashes, to see him watching you. 

“Distracted?” You teased, closing over your book and placing it down on your bedside table along with the piece of parchment and your quill. He followed suit, and leaned back, stretching. Your eyes caught a glimpse of the skin under his shirt, but didn’t linger too long knowing you’d be caught looking again. Sitting in silence, you both kept your eyes on each others. Silences with Sirius were never awkward, eye contact with Sirius was never awkward, nothing was ever awkward with Sirius and it was moments like this that made you realised you were falling in deep with him. 

“What happened your mum?” He asked suddenly, breaking the silence. A question like that normally caught you off guard, it normally made you angry, but with Sirius, you didn’t mind. There was no doubt you were a curious girl, and sometimes without a filter. You had blurted out questions like this to him before, and he had always answered. He had told you about his family, so you felt it was only fair you told him about yours. 

“She died. A few years ago.” You told him, giving him a small shrug. His lips parted slightly, before he closed them again and suddenly moved from his spot on the bed to up beside you. 

“Is there a reason you don’t talk about her?” He asked, watching you intently. 

“No, not particularly. I just… She was amazing.” You told him, a small smile creeping on to your face as you thought about your mom. You looked down as you felt his fingers move beneath yours, watching, you let your fingers lace with his, giving his hand a small squeeze. “She was the best mom a girl could ask for. A great wife. A great daughter. Her parents were muggles, but they were accepting of who she was. She tried to incorporate as many muggle things into our life as she could. She was proud of her origins. So, wherever possible, we always travelled by car. On Christmas morning, we were travelling to a friends house and… there was a crash. We crashed and, she didn’t survive. My dad has been great. He’s been a rock for me, even though he was mourning too.” Only when you felt Sirius’ thumb run across your cheek did you notice that you had shed a few tears. “Dumbledore told me what the death eaters stand for and what they’re fighting for, and that there was more than likely people in Hogwarts who stood for the same thing. I just want to protect her memory.” 

Sirius wrapped his arm around you, pulling you closer. Leaning your head down on his chest, you listened to the calming sound of his heart beating. You had never felt closer to him (or anyone for that matter) than in that moment, and you knew then, that you were in love with Sirius Black. 

——

Trying not to blow out the candle on the cupcake, you creeped slowly up the staircase to the boys dormitories. It was Sirius’ birthday, and although he had said he didn’t want any big fuss made, you wanted to at least acknowledge the day the man of your dreams had been born. You shook your head and sighed, muttering a few curse words when the flame on the candle flickered. He was your friend, you continued to remind yourself. A friend and nothing more. But you knew he had a lot going on. He had a strong passion for fighting against the war that was showing up more and more deaths every morning in The Daily Prophet, and it was sucking the life out of him. Your heart ached as you thought of the bags that had appeared under his eyes. He was so tired, yet he still devoted time almost every day to studying with you. You wanted to do something for him. Something to show him how much you appreciated what he does for you, and how much you and all his friends appreciated him. 

The door to his dormitory opened quietly, and Lily poked her head out, beckoning you in. You closed the door behind you, and made your way to his bed. Sitting down on the edge, you took a moment to appreciate how peaceful he looked. Placing a hand on his arm, you watched as he shifted slightly, before his eyes began to open, squinting a little as he adjusted to the light.

“Happy Birthday, Sirius.” You smiled, holding the cupcake out in front of you. 

Sirius felt a grin spread onto his face as he opened his eyes to see (Y/N) sitting on the edge of his bed. God, he couldn’t count how many times he had dreamt about that happening. His heart warmed as he spotted the cupcake, a single candle sitting in it. He pushed himself up onto his elbow, and placed a hand on (Y/N)’s lower back. “What does a guy wish for when all his dreams have already come true?” He grinned, wiggling his eyebrows at her. Hearing her laugh was enough to make his birthday perfect. Laughter was a thing he treasured so much in the darkening times, and only very few people could give him that now.

“Blow out your candle, idiot.” You joked, as his three friends in the beds around you began to wake up. As he blew out the candle, James, Remus and Peter all said their happy birthdays to him and after sharing his cupcake, you left the room to get ready for your classes. 

That night, the six of you sat around in the Room of Requirements. You, Remus Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, James Potter, Lily Evans and Sirius Back. It had set itself up for an evening of sitting around in cosy chairs, drinking fire whiskey and listening to music. Lowkey, just as Sirius had wanted it. Looking around as everyone engaged in their own conversations, you couldn’t help but smile to yourself. The transfer to Hogwarts had been tough to say the least, but these six people made it so much easier. They had welcomed you into their friendship group with open arms, as if you had been there for years. They confided in you, about what they got up to every time a full moon came up. Remus shared his notes you missed in class thanks to a certain distraction called Sirius Black, and you comforted him in the days following the full moon. You drank hot chocolate with him, and listened as he told you about how he struggled with it. James brought you onto the quidditch pitch, teaching you tricks he had picked up over the years of playing quidditch. You and Lily were as close as you could be. She was your first friend here, and every day you built upon that, gossiping and letting her rant about how James was distracting her from studying, even though you knew she loved it. Peter was always kind to you, although you noticed, a little bit nervous around you. And Sirius. Well, Sirius was your best friend. 

As the song changed to a slower pace, you snapped out of your thoughts. Placing down your glass, you stood up and made your way over to Sirius, holding your hand out for him to take. “Dance?” You asked, and he nodded, taking your hand. Your fingers interlocked behind his neck, and his hands rested on your waist. Swaying gently, you looked up at him, your fingers beginning to play with the hair at the nape of his neck. “Did you have a good birthday?” You asked him, moving your body slightly closer to his. 

“You know, I think it might of been the best one yet.” He replied, wrapping his arms further around your waist. A content smile on your face, you lay your head down on his chest, fully closing the gap between you both. 

[wow-thisismylifeiguess]

I truly don’t know what this is, so read at your own risk...?

Sheith fanfic that I came up with at 2:30am because my mind wouldn’t shut the fuck up. It’s stupid and probably poorly written, but it made me laugh a few times, so.....I dunno. Have fun

Keith Kogane was good at a lot of things. Navigating so called ‘human emotions’ was not part of that list, and it was something nearly everyone around him was well aware of, including himself. It wasn’t that Keith wasn’t capable of acting like a normal human being. On the contrary, Keith was excellent at pretending to be that exact thing. No, the real problem came from the fact that while he knew how to fake it, Keith couldn’t quite understand what he was faking. Because, as stated, emotions weren’t something that….came easily to him.

It would be easy to blame it on a childhood that consisted of a missing mother and a father who was gone for work more often than not, but that was a simple answer, and one that didn’t work so well when you delved into the details, such as Keith’s father, Akira Sr. (because of course Keith’s name wasn’t really Keith) being the best damn dad when he was home, showering his son with love and affection to hopefully fill in the gaps of missing time. Keith had a good childhood, if a bit unconventional. He spent a lot of time alone, but he didn’t mind it, and maybe it was that that truly led to the way he was now. But then again, that couldn’t be the full story. No, it was something much deeper than just a preference for being alone.

Perhaps it had to do with his missing mother…. He had never met her, his father telling him stories of how she had to go somewhere far far away when he asked repeatedly at the age of four. When he was five, he learned that ‘far far away’ meant six feet under in a grave in another state. All that she left behind were several letters she wrote when she first discovered she was sick, and a wicked knife that looked like it had come out of an alien flick, the kind his dad loved to watch. But, the letters were filled with as much love as written words on a piece of paper could hold, and more. Keith was quite frankly impressed, and even now, had the letters pinned to his corkscrew board in his dorm. The knife went with him everywhere, but no one needed to know that. Especially campus security.

So no, Keith’s mother’s missing presence during his life was also not necessarily a factor in how he had become such a strange and somewhat alien human being. There wasn’t much else on the list, and so it narrowed it down quite significantly. There were only three people Keith knew that had ever held some sort of reverent importance in his life. Two of those were his parents. The third was Takashi Shirogane. Pretty boy. Golden boy. Sports star spectacular. Thinking about it…yeah. It was definitely Mr. Perfect who had fucked up Keith’s rather decent like, leaving him weird and strange and just…abnormal (as Lance had a habit of calling him). But Lance’s opinions didn’t matter….is what he told himself at night to keep the other boy’s voice out of his head as he counted backwards from seventy-seven (his lucky number), hoping that maybe, maybe tonight he’ll be able to fall asleep before three am hits. It doesn’t work, but most of what Keith tries to do in life doesn’t work, and again, it’s all his fault.

Keith had met Takashi Shirogane (it should actually be Shirogane Takashi, but of course, Americans don’t fucking care about cultures other than ‘white’) when he was sixteen years old. His dad had finally managed to move them to a better town with a new job, one where his skills as a fireman were actually useful and where he could also see his son on a more daily basis. Keith was transferred to a new school, where he had to go through the customary ‘new student!’ introduction (“Yes, my name is Akira, but please call me Keith.”) which was an unfortunate necessity. He’d only done it once in the past, so the second time was significantly easier, and Keith was braced for what would be a sudden influx of people curious about his life before the excitement gradually died down after one or two weeks.

Except….this time was different. Because Takashi Shirogane, an upperclassman by only a year, was instructed to show him around and get him used to his new school. Keith was instantly starstruck, and it didn’t take long (maybe about...an hour?) for him to find out he wasn’t the only one. Not that Keith cared much about the opinions of others (the third letter from his mom, labeled on the front to be given to him on his first day of middle school, had said to never let the opinions of others knock him down because he was going to be a badass and that was because he was Krolia Kogane’s son). No, Keith ignored everyone else, other than a petite girl with round glasses that seemed to cover the majority of her face and a series of hoodies that zipped up to her neck, concealing even more of her features, and kept most of his attention firmly on Shiro, as he insisted on being called.

Keith had nearly swooned the first time he had actually called him ‘Shiro’. It had been because of an argument (friendly banter) over Shiro insisting on calling Keith by his legal name. It wasn’t that Keith didn’t like his name. It was a good name. It was just that it was his dad’s name, and Keith wasn’t a big fan of taking things that he didn’t feel were his. So, Shiro insisted on being called Shiro, and Keith insisted on being called Keith. The girl with the large glasses, named Katie of all things, insisted on being called Pidge (of all things).

Somehow, they became the trio™️, an incredibly ridiculous and lackluster name given to them by the rest of the student body (and, surprisingly, by some of the staff as well). Just because they hung out a few (lot of) times didn’t mean that they deserved to be called such a dumb name. Sure, Keith and Pidge would sit in the bleachers during Shiro’s lacrosse practice, watching as he barrelled through other teenagers who looked way too beefed up on steroids. Sure, Shiro and Pidge would sit in the audience of Keith’s art award shows that Pidge would secretly sign him up for behind his back (because, “Your art is beautiful, Keith!”). Sure, Keith and Shiro would hang around in the halls outside of Pidge’s technology class to dissuade any of those particular boys who thought it was fun to rifle through her bag and flick at her glasses. It didn’t really mean anything.

But, with two years of high school left for Keith and Pidge, and only one year left for Shiro, it was inevitable there would be a goodbye. Shiro was too good at lacrosse and quite frankly, a genius in academics as well, so of course it wasn’t a surprise when he was handed a sports scholarship that would be immensely stupid to reject. He took it, after way too long of an internal debate, and on the last day of class, he promised both Keith and Pidge that they would see each other during the summer before he moved away several states over to attend a fancy schmancy university.

What Keith had not been expecting from this sort of stereotypical cross-grade friendship had been a confession.

Standing in front of the building in which their high school annually held their graduation, Shiro had bent down, still clad in the stomach-churning yellow of their school’s graduation gown, and whispered three simple words:

I. Like. You.

Sure, maybe kicking Shiro in the crotch before running away wasn’t the best response to a confession Keith never in all his years of living thought he would receive. But, in his defense, he had been hardcore crushing on the one year older male for maybe over four months, and having his feelings returned in such a way was a shock. It left him feeling strangely numb, and his only way of reacting (as stupid) as it was, was to block Shiro’s number on his phone and then immediately call Pidge to ask if he was insane or not. Of course, she told him the truth (“You’re more than insane, Keith. Much more.”). He had been looking for comfort, not to be mocked, but he should have known better than to come to Pidge for that. Still, she tried her best to calm him down, but it didn’t mean it was the end of Keith’s descent into whatever it was he was now. No, it had only just begun.

Now, while Keith had made an absolute fool of himself on that particular day in June, he had tried to make up for it by promptly unblocking Shiro’s number (nearly four hours) after his call with Pidge. He waited patiently. And then waited some more. And then a little bit more.

Finally, overcome by the need to do something, Keith picked up his phone and called Shiro himself. After three rings, the telltale sign that whoever was trying to be reached was not going to answer, Keith nearly ended the call, only for the ringing to stop and for Shiro’s cool ‘hello’ to breathe over the line. Wow, a rare four ring pick up, Keith had only read about those before… It took a lot of effort for him to force any words from his throat, but when he did, he instantly regretted it. “So, about what happened earlier…” He muttered, and that wasn’t a line he should have muttered. It wasn’t even something he should have said in the first place. Regardless, it was out, but the response he got was much worse than anything that could have come out of his own mouth. Shiro’s voice was level, calm. Extremely normal, despite the circumstances surrounding this call:

“What do you mean?”

Keith nearly stopped breathing, which wasn’t a good thing seeing as human beings need air to, yunno, live. But Keith couldn’t help it. His breath hiccuped and Shiro seemed to shift on the other line, the sound of fabric coming through the speaker. “You okay, Keith?” Shiro sounded so damn normal and it bothered Keith. Because….because why??? Why was he acting like a CONFESSION hadn’t passed through his lips, what….five hours ago? No, no. If Shiro was gonna play this game, then Keith was not going to be the first one to crack. He refused. If there was one thing his mother had drilled into him from the moment he learned how to read and held the first of her letters in his hand, then it was that Keith would never be the one to break first. If he were to be kidnapped and tortured on government secrets (though he had no idea why that would ever happen), then Keith was pretty sure he’d be getting out of there with a few bloody knuckles and his lips sealed shut. Keith didn’t lose. He wouldn’t allow himself to.

So, he shut up all the errant thoughts running through his mind about how fucking weird this situation was, and cleared his throat. “Nothing. I’ll see you in a week for movie night.” And with that, Keith ended the call and threw his phone across his bedroom (making sure it landed in the pile of clothes that needed to be folded) before dropping his head into his pillows to scream.

This was the start of Keith’s eventual fall into absolute madness and numbness to ‘human emotions’. The summer passed by in a way that was not at all memorable, sprinkled in with movie and game nights, as well as three am group chat conversations that made the three of them sound like they were either high, drunk, or both. By the time Shiro left for college, Keith had already begun his change from regular weird boy to what Lance cheerfully dubbed as ‘what the fuck?’ weird boy.

In the end, the reason Keith was the way he was had nothing to do with his parents, but instead, had everything to do with Takashi Shirogane, the man who had cut off ties with both Keith and Pidge a week after his classes started, leaving the both of them bitter senior high school students, and eventually, even more bitter freshman college students. But, what had been the most shocking thing about this whole ordeal was that Keith never ever expected to run into the man who ruined his life again. Shiro had gone off to a far more prestigious university in another state while Keith and Pidge made a pact to both get into their own state university and kick ass.

Of course, Keith’s life had a habit of not going the way he wanted (again, all because of him), so seeing Shiro’s face on the first day of lower sophomore semester, sitting in the front row of his Abnormal Psychology class….well. Keith did himself rather proud. He held back all the screams he had building up for the past two years, and walked past Shiro, ignoring the scar along the bridge of his nose and the stupid white tuft of hair in front of his eyes, and made his way to the back of the room where Lance and Allura sat. He did not spare Shiro another look nor a glance. He did not say a word to him. And after his professor finished explaining their syllabus for the semester, he did not let his eyes wander over the man who had said such life-altering words to him, only to walk out of said life. No, instead, he laughed at Lance’s stupid jokes (“What’s Beethoven’s favorite fruit?” “What?” “BA-NA-NA-NAAAA!”), held Allura’s hand as they walked out the door (because guys loved to flirt with her even though she was about as straight as a rainbow colored slinky and Keith was intimidating enough to keep the majority of them away), and kept his gaze steady and firm in front of him.

What he didn’t know was that Shiro had completely blanked out on everything Professor West had said, his mind simply filled with the images of a boy who had grown, with hair long enough to be pulled into a ponytail, dyed a dark purple at the tips, and eyes that matched almost perfectly in color. In this respect, Keith had won the battle, not that either of them were aware a war was going on in the first place. Keith wasn’t going to let this ruin him. No, not again. But just because he had made that decision, it didn’t mean he didn’t immediately text Pidge once he had both hands free. Definitely not. He wasn’t stupid.