#people walked away from it before he had any of his real growth | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heyheydidjaknow · 2 years

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I am sick and I am tired but I finished this and that’s what matters. My years of reading this sort of thing have not helped me even a little and while I resent that I am choosing to still use this as a learning moment because you only get better with practice.

There’s sex in this. Just, FYI.

Sleep

Six months.

You looked yourself over in the mirror, smoothing out your clothes. It had been half a year since you had your first date with your boyfriend. The goings had been rough so far, admittedly; having a partner that was never home was a challenge and your friends had all but deemed him to be a figment of your imagination, but you were sure he was real because today was the day you were meant to pick him up from the airport, which was the twenty-sixth of April, six months exactly after that first date.

He was arriving in the afternoon this time after an especially long stretch of no communication—nearly two months-- and in celebration, you had made cake: yellow cake with chocolate buttercream. You had tried adding a “Happy 6 Months” on top, but you were stupid and put it on too early so all the icing melted into a barely legible mess, which was not unexpected but ultimately incredibly disappointing. You knew he would not care even a little bit; taste, after all, is the most important part of any cake, and it tasted like a good box cake, so who were you to say anything?

The drive was dreary—rain—but not unpleasant. There was something nice about it, refreshing; this was the smell of growth. You had grown, you would say, since when you first met; you were certainly more patient than you had been when you first got together, had read more books, had tried to see more things with more people. Ironically, it seemed that your social life had improved since the two of you had gotten together, and for that, you could not be happier. You missed him more than you would like to admit, had hugged pillows and reminisced and all that, but you were not resentful. He had a job. He was busy and important, and if you had to wait a bit to spend time with him, then you would happily embrace the anticipation.

You parked, ran inside. This was the terminal; this was the time. You were ready.

You did not see him, at first. You were looking for black hair; he was wearing a green beanie and a mask and a sweater. When he first approached you, moving usually fast, your first reaction had been to move out of his way before he grabbed your arm and started pulling you along. The first word out of his mouth was, “Walk.”

You looked back at the terminal, expecting someone to be following him. There was not. You followed. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” His grip tightened as the two of you began to walk closer in step. His voice was noticeably fragile. “Nothing. Just keep walking.”

You did. Taking the lead, the two of you made your way to the car.

He pulled off his mask as he sat down, face red. He shook out his hair, sniffed, rubbed his nose, stared down at his lap.

You did not start the car.

He folded his legs on the seat, wrapping his hands around his ankles. “How have you been?”

You glanced at him, almost nervous to look at him for too long. “Fine.” You leaned back in your seat as a car drove by. “What’s with the getup?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s warm out and you’re in a sweater and a beanie.”

He sniffed again. “It’s a style.”

“It’s a getup.”

He looked out the window. “It’s comfortable.”

You took the neckline of the sweater, gently tugging him towards you. He did not resist, head leaning against your shoulder as you pulled him into a one-armed hug. “You were crying. Why were you crying?”

He wrapped his arms around your neck, shifting so that he was leaning over the center console. “It’s nothing.” His voice was soft. “I promise, it’s nothing.”

He lied to you a lot. He was not particularly good at it, but he sure did try.

You leaned away from him, running your fingers through his hair—greasy—so it would go back to where it normally sat. “You don’t have to tell me right now.” You kissed him on the forehead, settling back into your seat. “Just know that if you need to, I’m here, alright?”

He folded his legs again, nodded. “I will.” He sniffed one last time, exhaled sharply, and looked back at you. “How have you been?”

“Same as always.” You started out of your spot. “My friends are starting to think you aren’t real, though.”

He snickered. “What a horrible thing to do, lie to your friends. How could you?”

“It’s hard to look at myself in the morning,” you sighed dramatically. “But we can’t all be saints, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately.”

This sort of menial conversation went on for quite some time as the two of you caught back up to speed. He was oddly closed-lipped about it this time around. It was not atypical for him to skimp out on details regarding his work, but he usually at least told you the basics: the type of climate in which he was staying, how his room was, whether the food was any good, how Watari was doing. This was not for lack of interest; you tried to ask him at least enough so you could form a mental image of what he might have been up to, but whenever you asked his answers were frustratingly vague; what little you could tell is that his room was hot and the internet was spotty, which did not narrow where he was down.

The two of you got home. He dropped his bag by the door, and before you even had the chance to properly step inside, he was on you, arms wrapped around your waist and face in the crook of your neck.

You did not say anything, kicking the door closed and stroking his head. “What, miss me?”

He nodded silently, grip around you tightening.

“I made cake.” You nodded at the kitchen. “You want cake?”

He nodded again.

“The cake is in the kitchen,” you stressed. “Which means we need to walk to the kitchen.”

He let out a quiet groan.

You rolled your eyes. “It’s five steps, you big baby. You can do it.”

He did not move.

You sighed in inflated exasperation. “I can’t carry you, you know; you’re too heavy.”

“I love you.” His fingers gripped the back of your shirt, voice muffled. “I love you more than cake.”

You felt heat creep up your neck. “You do?”

He nodded. “I do. You’re warm.”

“You’re weird.” You furrowed your brow. “Are you sick or something?”

“No.” You felt him smile. “You might be, though; you feel like you have a fever.”

Your voice raised. “You be quiet.” You huffed. “And here I was, making a cake in the early morning like a psychopath for you. You suck.”

“Not yet I don’t.”

“Shut up or I go without you.”

Reluctantly, he pulled away letting you actually enter the apartment before locking the door. “You’re very cold today.” He wrapped his arms around your arm, offering you more mobility.

“I’m not.” You headed to the kitchen. “You’re just weirdly touchy. When was the last time you slept?”

He considered it. “A week ago.”

You took a knife from a drawer. “And the last time you had real food?”

“A month ago.” He rubbed the side of his calf with his foot. “I had a stick of beef jerky and a bag of spicy chips to give myself a break as you told me.”

You put the knife back. “Alright, here’s the game plan: we’re gonna get you fed and watered and we’ll just turn in early. Deal?”

He scratched the back of his head, eyes unfocused. “I won’t sleep.”

“Bullshit.” You smiled, proud of yourself for knowing. “You only last a week at a time maximum; you’ll collapse any minute now.”

“I won’t,” he repeated calmly. “I haven’t slept properly for six weeks.”

Your stomach dropped. “Why?”

He sighed, reaching with one hand for the refrigerator. “Lots of reasons.” He pulled out a container, looked it over, put it back. “I dislike sleep at the best of times; I actively avoid it, as a matter of fact.”

You closed your eyes, reminding yourself that, despite all facts suggesting the contrary, your boyfriend was an adult capable of making his own decisions about his health and that you had no right to yell at him about he chose to live his life. You took a deep breath. “Why do you dislike sleep?”

He paused. “I’m not sure how to explain.” He was not typically this picky with what he ate; he seemed to be looking for something specific. “I am what you might call a somniphobe.”

You were unsure that was a real word. “Why would you fear sleep?”

“A lack of awareness of my surroundings, sleep paralysis, dying in my sleep, nightmares.” He set his desired container on the counter: a container of something you had made a few nights ago. “Mostly just nightmares; unfortunately, I have a good memory, so my dreams are vivid.”

“Fun.”

“That’s certainly an adjective.” He stuck the container in the microwave. “So, for about twenty-five hours at a time every week or so— that is to say, when I am forced to sleep— I am in hell. While typically I can stand sleep, because of work-related matters, my night terrors have gotten worse, so sleep has become unbearable, and because sleep is unbearable, I don’t sleep.”

“So you’re just in a great head space.”

He smiled tiredly. “In all fairness, I doubt sleeping in the same position as I work helps.”

“Probably not,” you agreed. “As someone he cares about you, this is incredibly troubling, for the record.”

“I can only imagine.”

You swallowed. “Have you tried exercising before you sleep?”

He let go of you to grab his food. “Let me put it to you this way.” He grabbed a fork. “Remember how I picked you up at the fair the one time?”

You nodded.

He took a bite, speaking behind his hand. “My job is almost entirely sedentary. The reason I am as strong as I am is that I have taught myself various martial arts in my spare time.” He swallowed. “Tasers are typically more effective than martial arts in close quarter situations and I certainly don’t need to know more than one form. Before I met you—even during our relationship, while you were asleep—if I had any energy in my body after work, I tried working it out of me. Still, I had night terrors.” He took another bite. “I have tried just about every medication on the market and then some; they also have not helped with night terrors. I have, over the years, bought enough therapeutic tea to last the rest of my life, and even then, I can’t fall asleep comfortably. I doubt there is anything that I could feasibly do apart from physically knock myself out to avoid it.” He shrugged at your horrified expression. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s an inevitability; it’s not something to worry about.”

You laughed incredulously. “Oh, I think it should be.” You rubbed your eyes with the heels of your palms. “For fuck’s sake—how long was it gonna take for you to tell me?”

“I wasn’t planning on telling you at all.” He was going through the container fast. “I was planning on abandoning the possibility of sleeping peacefully until I die.”

You took another deep breath. “Love,” you sighed, lips twitching into a smile, “I hope you know that some of the things you say take years off my life.”

“Hence my not wanting to tell you.” He swallowed his last bite of food, setting the container on the counter. “Again, it’s not anything to concern yourself about; unless you have a suggestion for a more effective way to force my body asleep, there’s no use worrying about things you can’t change.”

“I—” You paused, a thought occurring. It was a stupid idea. You knew it was a stupid idea when you thought of it; you sincerely doubted he had not tried it. Still, you considered it an option worth considering if nothing else was working.

He grabbed your arm again, pulling himself to your side. “Please, don’t worry about it.” He kissed your shoulder.

Your hands dropped to your side, face warming. “I have a theory.”

“Hm?”

You looked down at your feet. “The things you just listed—exercise, candles, drugs—is it possible they don’t work because you’re actively thinking about sleep?”

He chewed at his fingernails absentmindedly. “Elaborate.”

“Well,” you continued, “typically it’s harder to sleep when you’re thinking about sleeping. Sleep isn’t an activity; sleep is a state of relaxation your body reaches. It’s why people who are stressed all the time have hard times sleeping, because they are actively thinking about things, including sleep, which keeps them from reaching that state.”

“Sure.” He wiped his hand on his pants.

“Well, you think a lot.”

“Astute observation.”

You ignored him. “If you’re thinking a lot and doing a lot of things to compare methods to get yourself to sleep, you’re going to have a hard time sleeping, since instead of relaxing yourself, you’re making it work.” You twisted a bit of hair around your finger. “So, if we wanted to find a way to make sleep easier for you, it would make sense that the solution would be to find an activity that forces you to release a lot of energy while actively taking your mind off of sleep, something that necessitates being present and not thinking about much else.”

“Such as?”

You cleared your throat, shifting a bit on the spot. “Well,” your voice lowered, “sex would probably work.”

He did not respond.

“Love?”

Still nothing.

You waved a hand in front of his face, trying your best to play this cool. “Love?”

“Hm?” He looked over at you, blinking as if he had been broken out of a trance. “Sorry; lost in thought.” He took a step away from you, face growing noticeably redder. “I don’t think I quite caught that last part; could you repeat yourself?”

You looked back down at your feet. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.” You kicked the floor. “It’s just an idea. When I feel stressed or I can’t keep my head straight, I know masturbating usually helps, so I figured—you look like you’re going to pass out.”

He leaned against the counter as a novice roller-skater might the wall of the rink. “I don’t know what you are referring to.” He turned in your direction. “I—yebat, I…” He paused, took a breath. “I just… I believe this is the first time I have been propositioned for sex.” He laughed, anxious. “You know, when you see other people do it— handle these sorts of situations, I mean—you think that those who do not act particularly gracefully are just generally obtuse. This is likely due to the tendency of audiences to respect and flock towards men who are suave as opposed to those who are not. Unfortunately, it appears that I belong to the latter camp.”

You grabbed his discarded container, disposing of it properly. “You don’t have to agree, you know.” You were sure your attempt to seem confident was quickly failing. “I just—well, I figured it was worth throwing out. I just wanted to give it as an option.”

“I know.” He scratched at his neck. “I know that you have no intention of pressuring me. Words are just failing me is all.”

You nodded. “I get that.” You laughed, flustered. “I don’t usually proposition people for sex; I’m sorry if I did a bad job.”

He was quick to refute you. “You did an excellent job, given the circumstances. You are handling this situation much better than I am, which is a low bar to clear, but a bar nonetheless.”

You sighed. “How about we just agree that we both kinda suck at this?”

He was almost indignant. “No. We are doing fine at this.” He stood up properly. “We are just inexperienced; with practice, we will be able to handle the transition from general conversation to sex smoother.”

You gave an enthusiastic thumbs up. “Love the energy.” You could practically feel steam coming out of your ears. “So, we’re doing this?”

“If all of this talk has not put you off, Ii sure would like to.”

“It has not.”

“Then yes, we are doing this.”

You looked around. “What, in here?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Probably not. If the end goal is to fall asleep it makes more sense to do this in the living area or the bedroom.”

“Dope.” You nodded, holding your hand out for him. “You’ve never been in my room, have you?”

“I have not.” He took it. “I have also not slept in a bed since I was seven; I apologize if I turn out to be a bad bed-mate.”

You pulled him along behind you. “Do you kick in your sleep?”

“No.”

“Then you’re fine.” You pushed the door open. Your room was certainly a room in which you slept. It was, admittedly, not as tidy as it could be, seeing as you had not been expecting visitors, but it was your room, decorated how you chose, warm, cozy, and respectable for those traits exclusively. You gestured to it with your free hand, pulling him over the threshold without much fanfare. “The bed.” You let go of his hand, walking back to shut and lock the door. “Make yourself at home. I’d offer you a drink, but I think that comes after.”

He just stood there in the center of the room. He had that look on his face again, the one he used on you when the two of you first met; cold eyes scrutinized every surface of the space, studying everything from whatever you had hanging on the walls to the bedspread.

A different sort of embarrassment spread through you than the one you had been experiencing before. “It’s not that bad.”

He glanced back at you. “I never said it was bad.” He took one last look around the room. “You can tell a lot about a person from how they keep their room. Your room is very fitting; I like it.”

“Oh.” You nodded, taking a step away from the door. “Then thanks, I guess. You can sit down, you know.”

“Sit down?” He blinked. “Sex. We’re here because we’re going to have sex.”

You nodded, sitting down on the bed. “We are.” You patted the spot next to you, straightening your back. “Sit.”

He did.

“Alright.” You set your hands on your knees. “I’ll admit, I’m not the most sexually experienced person in the world, so bear with me here.”

“Neither am I.”

“Figures. Are you a virgin?”

“I am not.” He looked down at his hands. “Admittedly, my first sexual experience was not particularly romantic—I did it for the sake of it— but I think I am generally familiar with the mechanics of it.”

“Cool.” You nodded, wanting to die. “Cool.”

There was an awkward pause between the two of you. For once, at least, you were sure the both of you felt it.

He turned to face you properly. “Am I allowed to touch you?”

You raised your eyebrows at him.

“Consent is important.”

You swallowed, nodded. “Yes, you can touch me.”

He scooched over to you. Tentatively, he took your face in his hands, rubbing his thumbs along your cheekbones. “Your skin is soft,” he noted conversationally.

You snorted.

He cocked his head to the side, turning your head so he could more easily see your jaw. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” you smiled, tension melting away. This was ridiculous. “It’s just that I think you’re the first guy I’ve been with who’s given me a free physical.”

He looked up at you through his eyelashes. “I’m not giving you a physical,” he explained. “I’m planning.”

“Planning what?”

“Nothing in particular.” He brought your head back to its original position. “But according to you, the purpose of this exercise is to get me to focus on something besides my work and besides sleep. You can at least let me plan.”

You put your hands up. “Look, I’m not complaining about you being thorough.” You leaned into his touch. “It’s one of your better qualities, I think.”

He focused back on your face. “Is that what you see in me? My tendency to be thorough?”

“Stupid question.” You held your hands behind your back, letting him analyze you for once. “I think you’re great whether you’re thorough or not.”

He stared at you. “Then what do you see in me, exactly?”

“I think you’re beautiful.” You met his eyes. “And I love how your mind works. You make me happy, and that’s all I could want in a lover.”

He kept eye contact. “Is that all?”

“It is.”

It took him a second to process what you said. When he spoke again, it was slow, deliberate, as if he were struggling to come up with the words. “May I kiss you?”

You nodded. “You may.”

He was gentle. From the way he was moving, you doubted it was for your benefit; you could feel the slight tremor of his hands as he moved his lips to yours, how he practically melted against you. You propped yourself up with your arm, using your free hand to grip the front of his shirt loosely. From where you sat, it was, for once, abundantly clear that this was his first proper kiss.

He pulled away first, eyelids drooping. “I think,” he breathed, sounding almost drunk, “that your theory has legs.”

You giggled, wrapping your arms around him and pulling you two both down on the bed. You rolled on top of him, arms caging him in. “You think?”

He smiled, and for once, you could identify the look on his face: adoration. “I do.”

You pressed your lips back against him, unable to hold back your smile at the way he wrapped his arms around your neck, pulling you even closer. As the two of you finally fell into a rhythm—albeit not without fumbling and apologies and awkward laughs—you felt your moods shift from giddy excitement to a slowly growing hunger. You pressed further down into him, letting him clutch at your shirt as you slid a knee between his legs, eliciting a quiet gasp as you ground it into him.

Abruptly, he pulled away, eyes wide. “Wait.”

You froze, breathing heavily. “Yeah?”

He sat up, you coming with him. He took a moment to breathe. “Protection. STDs, STIs. Do you have a condom?”

You blinked. “Oh. Right.” You nodded, climbing off the bed and stumbling to the door. “I’ll be right back.”

He watched you leave from the bed, chest pounding. He fiddled with his shirt, looking back around the room, eyes settling on a mirror. He stood up, walked over to it, checked his reflection. He looked about the same as he expected: half dead with just a bit more color than what was typical. He pushed the hair out of his face as if that would make him look any less like a slightly more healthy corpse. In the past, even when he was a teenager, he had never been particularly bothered by how he looked; he rarely left hotel rooms long enough to care, and when he did leave the house it was never intending to impress. Still, here he was, in your room, nitpicking over an appearance that you were clearly not repulsed by if your enthusiasm was any indication because of an otherwise nonexistent insecurity. He supposed this was a sign of growth. It was typical for men his age to be insecure about their appearances; this was just the first time he had personally experienced it. If he were anyone else, he supposed that fixing the issues that he was observing— a lack of muscle mass, greasy hair he had not cut for years, dark circles under his eyes— could be remedied with a changing of lifestyles. This would imply, however, that the maintenance of such a lifestyle would be possible for him which, given how he had the impulse control and discipline of a toddler, was just about impossible. This would also imply that making an effort to take time to invest in something as objectively meaningless as his appearance was at all reasonable, which was ridiculous to think, and that he cared any more about the relationship than he already did, which he was adamantly against for pettiness’s sake.

Not that any of it mattered. At the end of the day, even if he were the most attractive man on the planet it would not make up for all of his other shortcomings. A more attractive man with a profession less likely to get you killed by a sadistic monster with the drive to murder everyone he ever loved— however useless that drive may be, given the circumstances— would come along and sweep you off your feet and so long as he treated you well that was fine by him. Still, he wished he had better odds than he did.

He just about had a heart attack when you came back in, lost in thought. “Alright, so I brought five.” You held up the packages, tossed them onto the bed. “We probably don’t need five but I figured better safe than— what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He took a step back as if guilty of something, hair falling back over his face. He cleared his throat, sticking his hands back into his pockets, unusually nervous. “Five is a lot.”

You nodded, starting to fiddle with the buttons on your shirt. “I know. Again, preparedness.” You glanced from the mirror to him and back. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you use a mirror.”

He looked down at his feet. “I don’t have much use for them.”

You made an active effort to not make this situation any more awkward than necessary, fingers making easy work of your top. “And why’s that?”

“I don’t leave the house much. There—“ He looked back up to see you, paused for a second to look at your chest, realized what he was doing, looked back down, and carried on with his sentence, face reddening again. “There isn’t much use in looking good if you aren’t leaving the house.”

You considered it. “That makes sense I guess.” You shrugged, unbuttoning your shorts. “I guess it depends on the kind of person you are. Do you own a mirror?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t leave the house much.”

You leaned down slightly to get yourself into his frame of vision. “You can look at me, you know.”

He scratched at his hair. “See, logically, I know that, but illogically, I’m worried about looking like a pervert to someone who just took their clothes off in front of me.”

You could not hold back your grin. “What does that make me, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re a pervert,” you repeated, taking a step towards him, “what does that make me?”

He stared at the ground, trying to come up with an answer. “Reasonable,” he decided.

“Mhm.” You held your hands behind your back, eyes softening. For someone so obviously capable, there was something nice about seeing him so obviously unsure of himself. He was, by your count, only inexperienced with two things; you were hardly about to complain about him being bad at something else. Still, you made an effort to be gentle. “You know, we don’t have to do this.” You took another step towards him. “I mean, the plan is obviously working, but that doesn’t mean we have to go all the way. You’re allowed to call it off whenever.”

He tugged at his shirt collar absently. “I know.”

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Alright.” You kept your voice soft. “Are you okay with seeing me like this, then?”

“I am.”

You reached forward, tilting his head up to look at you.

This look, you were unfamiliar with. It was not the same as his typical clinical stare, but they were not necessarily unrelated. The only difference was that this look was a bit warmer and a bit softer, the intent not to dissect and analyze, but to memorize, to drink in. Oddly enough, he did not look as lustful as he did fascinated, as if you were a piece of fine art as opposed to a sexual partner. The way you felt under his eyes, too, was not dissimilar to how you felt typically— nervous at the attention, slightly off balance from the intensity of it all— only now you felt as if you understood the intention for the most part, less like a creature to be dismembered and more like a painting on display.

You stepped back. You raise your arms, giving him a little spin to give him a full look at your body. “Like what you see?”

He did not respond, only taking your hands and gently tugging you closer to him, your chests pressing against one another. He wrapped his arms around your neck, pulling you into a tooth-achingly sweet embrace.

You responded in kind, linking your hands together behind his back. “So.”

His voice was muffled. “So.”

You leaned closer to his ear. “How do you want me?”

He seemed to seriously consider it. “On top,” he decided. “If I fall asleep, then I won’t fall on you, and there’s a higher likelihood of me hurting you than you hurting me.”

You rolled your eyes, words teasing. “Sound logic. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

“Would you rather I crush you?”

You sighed contemplatively. “I mean, yeah, but not today. Another time.” You kissed him on the cheek, letting go of him. “Well, lie down; I can’t ride you standing up.”

He started unbuttoning his pants, the subtle tremble in his fingers not lost on you despite his general outward indifference. “For someone so quick to mock rational thinking you are very frank about this.”

“Would you rather I not be?” You waved it off, deciding that staring at his crotch was probably not the most polite thing you could do for the poor man. “I could make a big thing of it, but then I’d be setting a precedent that, honestly, I don’t want to set.”

“Sound logic,” he repeated back to you, stepping out of his jeans. “Wouldn’t expect anything less.”

You crossed your arms, looking up at the ceiling in an entirely hypocritical show of modesty. “I didn’t say I was any better.”

“No, you implied it.” He sat down on the bed, crisscrossing his legs on the mattress. “I have a proposal.”

You straddled him, sitting down on his lap before reaching for a condom. “Listening.”

You were genuinely impressed by how matter-of-fact he kept his tone. “Seeing as I am likely much more sensitive than you are, I would like to suggest that I make you orgasm before we proceed.”

You swallowed. “Interesting. How?”

“I’m fairly dexterous and I have long fingers.” He looked over your shoulder. “This will also make what comes after easier, I suspect.”

You were conscious of how eager you sounded. “Can't argue with that.”

He picked you off his lap, setting you on the edge of the bed before kneeling on the floor in front of you.

He approached this task the same way he approached just about every task you had ever seen him handle, i.e. via a faithful use of the scientific method. His actions, to you, were unusually coordinated, running his hands along your skin and applying controlled pressure to certain areas, and taking mental note of how you reacted. He only took about thirty seconds on any specific method, constantly changing locations and patterns and speeds to find what worked for you, and when he found out what did work— which took him about two minutes of fiddling on his end and two minutes of quiet reassurance on your part— it took you an embarrassingly short amount of time for you to unravel, balling the sheets under you as he adjusted, took note, adjusted again. Your high came fast and surprisingly hard, and from his quietly satisfied expression— the same you would expect from him if he had solved a particularly difficult puzzle— you had to wonder if he had studied beforehand.

As you struggled to remember how to think, he pressed a kiss against your thigh, standing up and sitting down next to you. Curiously, he looked at the hand he had used, now covered in a mortifyingly thick layer of your drippings, and brought it to his mouth. He tasted it, paused, considered it. “Salty,” he decided. “Not overwhelmingly so, but it’s a distinctive taste.”

“Oh.” From the way the blood was rushing to your face, you considered if, between the two of you, he was the least prepared one. “Well, ain't that something.”

He glanced over at you innocently, continuing to clean his hand. “Oh, are you worn out already?”

You glared at him, heart still racing. “Fuck you.”

He wiped the excess off on his pants. “That is the next order of business, isn’t it?” He scooped you up, setting you back down on his lap. “Like this, right?”

Shaky hands gripped the front of his shirt. “Lean back on the pillow so if you fall asleep, then you don’t wake up with a bad back.”

He smiled. “You’re seriously concerned about me getting a bad back from that of all things?”

“Don’t make me drag you.”

He sighed, moving the two of you back and onto the bed, you still solidly on his lap. Carefully, clumsily, you tore the wrapper. Your hand reached down to fish his dick from his boxers.

You paused. “Huh.”

He shut his eyes. “What?”

“It’s bigger than I expected.”

His face reddened. “Should I take that as an insult?”

“No,” you backtracked quickly, pulling the wrapper open, “but your diet isn’t the best so I just figured it wouldn't be very big.”

“Penis size is genetic.” He looked over at one of the walls, the back of his hand laid over his mouth. “While lifestyle has some impact on its size, unless we’re talking about malnutrition, what matters is testosterone levels, and while that is something that—“

You slid the condom on in one move of your hand.

The man under you let out a gasp, shutting him up for the first time in your recent memory.

You smiled, kissing him on the forehead. “That’s all very interesting,” you purred, “but let’s save the biology lesson for after we get you to sleep, alright?”

His voiced raised an octave. “Alright.”

“Good boy.” You sat back up, placing your hands on his chest. “Are you all settled in?”

He closed his eyes“Mhm.”

“Okay.” You swallowed, reaching back with one hand to line yourself up with him. “Ready?”

After a few seconds, he nodded.

It was slow work, sliding down onto him. You had completely overestimated your capacity for this sort of thing; your attempt to just take it was impeded by your inability to stretch that far, and while you were stuck trying to take slow, even breaths and relax enough to get his appendage info you at all, your normally much more level headed partner appeared to be having a significantly harder time than you were, and though his voice was low— a problem not helped by his covered mouth— you did catch a couple of adjectives, “warm” being the most prolific.

He lasted a shocking amount of time. It was not enough time for you to get into it, but from how he was acting before you assumed he would barely go for a minute.

The first thing out of his mouth after you climbed off of him was an apology. “I am proving to be a horrible partner.” He rolled over, watching with unusually bleary eyes as you cleaned up. “I promise that I will make an effort to be better at this sort of thing in the future.”

“Don’t worry about it.” You picked your clothes off the floor, tossing them in a pile to be washed. “You got me off before; you’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

“In your opinion.”

You stretched your arms above your head. “My opinion is that one that matters.” You sighed, smiled. “Besides, I don’t care. I like you whether or not you’re good at sex.”

His legs curled up towards his chest, not unlike how he sat usually. “That’s how marriages end,” he pointed out. “Small things build up over time.”

You sat down on the bed, crawling over him to where you usually slept. “I will remind you that we are not married.” You slid under the covers, facing his back. “So, until we are, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He rolled over to face you, a fair distance away. “I would rather worry about that than most of the things I worry about.” He cleared his throat. “But worry in general wouldn’t help, I suppose. When under long periods of stress bodies tend to produce increased levels of the hormone cortisol which decreases libido, so if I were to hypothetically stress out about it I would probably only be exacerbating the problem. Not to say that I still won’t, but that’s an aspect of this worth considering.”

You reached over, cupping his cheek in your hand. “I only slightly understand the words that you’re saying because I’m tired but I want you to know that I love you regardless.”

His face warmed under your fingers. “That’s good. I would hope that this far into our relationship you would be at least somewhat fond of me.”

Your eyes slid shut. “I am somewhat fond of you, yeah.” You relaxed into the bed, ignoring the fact that it was probably barely sunset outside. “I hope I’ve been pretty clear about that.”

He watched you. “You have been.”

“That’s good.”

He nodded, taking your hand gently and holding it under his against the mattress. His thumb gently traced the back of your hand. “I think so too.”

You fell asleep before he did. That was fine. It was soothing in the same way the sound of rain or the ocean was soothing, watching as your chest rose and fell in a soft, slow, vaguely regular rhythm. Your breathing, he noted thankfully, stayed fairly even over the course of his brief observation. You were sleeping soundly.

He did eventually fall asleep. It took a longer time than usual, having to choose to fall asleep as opposed to pushing himself to stay awake for another hour or two or twenty, but he did manage to at least doze off. There was an advantage to sleeping next to you, he found; there was something comforting about being able to immediately confirm that his nightmares were just nightmares, to be able to squeeze your hand and remind himself that you were still a living, breathing person with a pulse as opposed to a mutilated corpse. This did not dispel all of the possible tortures his mind was fond of coming up with— his more ingrained memories still made their usual appearances— but at least there was something to ground him in reality.

He fell asleep of his own volition, at least. That was a start.

Previous Works

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robininthelabyrinth · 2 years

Note

Okay but wait, if Lan Quiren and his brother are twins...who is to say that "Teacher Lan" is actually Lan Quiren? Maybe the cultivation world has a mysterious masked musician who travels and fights evil, while "Teacher Lan" raises LWJ and LXC, and no one ever sets eyes the old sect leader who is surely behaving himself in isolation like he's supposed to.

It was a chance comment overheard from another sect elder one day that gave Lan Xichen the idea.

He'd known, of course, that his shufu was his father's brother, but he hadn't realized they were twins. Twins for real, not the way everyone liked to say about Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji, who were nearly two years apart and only similar in appearance rather than identical. And if they were twins...

Lan Xichen got very excited by the idea. After all, just because his father was nominally inaccessible, locked away in his private seclusion and unable or unwilling to see his children, didn't mean that that had to be the reality of it, right? They could just - switch. Lan Xichen sometimes swapped with Lan Wangji back when they were still the same height (for that brief period after Lan Wangji’s early growth spurt ended and before Lan Xichen's belated one began); he couldn't imagine it would be harder for actual twins. And of course since it would be terribly against the rules, it wouldn't be something they'd tell people, not even family, not even Lan Xichen - not until he was old enough to prove that he could keep the secret.

He started observing his shufu, looking for the tiny little tells that would reveal that the reason his shufu sometimes seemed to act like a different person was because he was, in fact, a different person. Things like not remembering prior conversations they had, preparing his tea differently, a slightly different way of holding his brush or walking at subtly different cant - Lan Xichen loyally cataloged every one, wondering which one was his shufu and which one was his father.

Lan Wangji seemed not as enchanted by the idea, when Lan Xichen told him about it.

"He could have just forgotten," he said stubbornly. "It happens. And holding things differently or walking differently is just because he got hurt in a night hunt -"

"He didn't."

"He wouldn't tell us if he had," Lan Wangji pointed put.

"The tea, then. Shufu always does it the same way," Lan Xichen insisted. "He likes routine."

"Maybe he got a new type of tea and wanted to try it."

"Why are you so opposed to this?!"

"Why are you so for it?" Lan Wangji scowled. "We have shufu. Why do you want our father, too? Isn't shufu enough?"

Lan Xichen scowled back, unable to find any words to respond, and he stormed off.

He’d just ask shufu, he thought rebelliously. Next time shufu invited him on his own – he’d ask. Then they’d see.

#mdzs #lan xichen #lan wangji #lan qiren #qingheng jun #my fic #my fics #alt headcanons

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a-painful-ordeal · 10 months

Text

1. I Was a Boy and I Was Good.

CW: Some Fluff. Scene Setting. Manipulation/Grooming. Underage Drinking. Non-consensual drugging/drink spiking. The after-effects of drink spiking. Mentions of extreme poverty. Slapping. Slavery and References to Branding.

Evan’s gaze skims the festival as he walks through the district gates. On a normal day, he wouldn’t have been able to get past the guards stationed in this part of town. But today isn’t normal. Thanks to M’s light-fingered handiwork in that damned tailor’s, he’s dressed smartly. A red, probably pricey, doublet covers his small bony frame. And a fancy hat masks the lack of shampoo in his long hair.

Evan puffs out his chest as he walks, mimicking nobles that he has seen in the past. Meanwhile, his eyes scan the crowd for an easy mark. He can feel his heart racing as he moves, the fear of being caught begins to tangle in his throat. The guards had been a real bitch recently, Evan can still feel the bruise on his ribs from his last encounter with them.

But fear isn’t useful right now. He needs to focus. He needs to relax. If he doesn’t, he’s fucked.

He takes a couple of deep breaths and swallows the anxiety down. Replacing it with a charming smile and as much confidence as he weaves his way through the crowd.

The marketplace bustles with an air of excitement for the spring festival. Travelers from faraway cities are gathered to enjoy the spring festivities. The usually bland streets are decked out with green and yellow ribbons that fly in the warm breeze. The air is filled with the scents of delectable foods from across the continent, foods that Evan couldn’t afford in a million years.

A small band plays on stage. They sound like they were good maybe two hours ago before the ale set in. Now each note is held for just a beat too long, the timing is out, and the fiddle player’s harmonies seem to slur slightly. But that doesn’t matter because at least for this festival, perfection is irrelevant. For this weekend certain imperfections add to the charm. Imperfections that are elegant, clean, and adhere to the rules. Perfect imperfections.

Evan’s eyes stop for a moment as he catches a glimpse of a familiar yellow dress, contrasted by dark curly hair. Good. M is here. That means he has backup if anything goes wrong.

He drops his gaze to prevent any association between the two of them from being formed. Evan doesn’t need to see her, if she has eyes on him, everything will run smoothly.

Since his most recent growth spurt, moving through crowds had become easier. Though it had constricted the number of scams they could run. It was easier to take pity on a whimpering child than a 5’6 young man with the beginnings of a beard. Nobody gives a shit that he’s only 14. Though, no one gave that much of a shit when he was 8 either. But out here, age means fuck all compared to experience. And right now, he knows he has all the experience he needed.

As the music finishes, Evan moves into the crowd, waiting for a moment when the sounds around him lull. He shifts his accent away from his normal voice, covering up any trace of the sing-song Skelesian accent and replacing them with a posh-sounding Vikryan one instead.

“Gods above! I’ve been robbed!” Evan pats himself down frantically. “My gold! They’ve taken my pocket watch and my gold!!”

Like magic, the crowd begins to panic. As the rich take a moment to make sure their own coin pouches are secure, they momentarily reveal the location of the gold. Evan continues to act panicked as his eyes flicker across the people before landing on a tall, spindly, well-dressed man whose coin pouch is at the most accessible part of his jacket. Perfect.

Evan’s hand reaches for a small, reflective bit of metal in his pocket and flickers it twice to signal the mark for M. His eyes then catch a nearby approaching guard. Fuck that’s too close. Time to manage them. Keeping the panicked mask on, Evan approaches the guards, beginning to describe a non-existent, watch, coin purse, and potential perpetrator. The boy slowly shifts how he’s standing until the guard’s back is to M and the mark.

He keeps his eyes trained on the guard as M ‘brushes’ against the mark in the crowd and vanishes off again without them noticing. Gods. She’s good. It's only when he’s sure she’s a safe distance away that he lets that guard go, slipping into the crowd himself, to find the next target.

***

It's been a few hours since entering, and M has already vanished back to their part of town. Evan finds himself lingering just a little longer than he thought he would at the festival. Taking a moment to genuinely feel the atmosphere, the music, and the smells. He should get going. Of course, he knows that. But knowing that and wanting that are two separate things. And right now, what Evan wants is just a few more moments.

His eyes slowly drift to the central fountain, which bubbles as it always does. There’s a pang of nostalgia mixed with anger. He rips his gaze away and turns on the ball of his foot. That was likely what he needed to leave. He makes his way back to the gates that separate the upper and lower districts of the town.

As he moves through the lower district’s streets, the décor fades and is replaced with a thick layer of grim. No one bothered to make this area look good. There’s no point, no one of import comes this far out of the main stretch of town.

Once he’s a decent distance away from the festival, Evan quickly pulls off the hat and doublet, to avoid inviting any mistaken muggers or cutthroats. He takes a moment to brush his hair down and make it look more like himself.

However, as he pauses the check his hair and half-elven ears, in the reflection of a broken window, he notices two figures heading straight toward him. A tall, looking tabaxi gentleman, with a large top hat, accompanied by a handsome man with slicked-back blond hair.

Evan spins. His hand goes to his belt where a small dagger is concealed, but he keeps it sheathed. “The fuck do you want?” He huffs, trying to seem relatively casual despite the bubbles of adrenaline.

The tabaxi puts his hands in the air “Hey hey hey.” His voice is calm and soft “We aren’t a threat. I just wanted to congratulate you for your fine work!” he smiles softly.

“What are you talking about?” Evan bristles slightly as his mind races on how to get out of the alleyway. If the guards catch him, they will kick the shit out of him before arresting and… gods know what else.

“You can stop the pretence,” The human says softly “No one ‘ere is gonna report ya. In any case. You did a fine job. You clearly ‘ave a lot of talent.”

The tabaxi nods “My partner and I noticed whilst working the other side. And you are impressive.”

Evan slowly relaxes “Thanks… I guess.” He can’t help but allow a small smile of pride to flicker onto his face. “Did you have good pickings yourselves?”

The tabaxi’s face lights up “It was fantastic. Well for us at least. I’m sure a few of those people are going to find that they are a… little lighter by the time they get back to their inns.”

Evan snorts with a grin “Doubt it’ll hurt them that badly!”

“We.” The tabaxi starts, “were actually looking for an additional member for our…” he pauses to think for a moment “Party. And you certainly have the skill and know how to help us.”

Evan’s heart bounds. That could be the financial boost that he needs- that they need to get off the streets. He finds himself standing a little taller. “I’ll have to think about it. And consult with my… associates.” Evan responds as clearly and concisely as possible.

“Of course! A smart young man like you wouldn’t want to get into a situation he can’t handle.” The tabaxi says.

“I’m glad you understand,” Evan responds quickly, nodding in what he imagines to be a business-like manner.

“ ‘ow bout this. We could take you out for a drink tonight. Get ya final say?” The human asks.

Evan shrugs, adjusting his posture so he looks more mature and attempting to look natural. “Sure. That sounds…” He coughs “Good.” He pauses, racking his brain for a tavern “How about the Cat and Owl?"

The tabaxi smiles softly "That sounds like the perfect place.”

The human turns to go, however the tabaxi pauses “What, may I ask is your name?”

Evan pauses, as his gut jumps in hesitation.

The tabaxi clearly notices the pause and cuts in with “My name is Cloak, and my friend here is Albert.”

Evan opens his mouth. What’s the worst that can happen?

“If ya gonna work with us, mate. We at least gotta know a name” Albert cuts in.

Evan takes a breath, “Evan. Evan Tyrnearth.”

The tabaxi, Cloak, takes off his hat, “A pleasure. We’ll see you tonight. At 8, in the Cat and Owl tavern.”

***

Evan is buzzing as he walks back to the house. There’s a small bounce in his step as he goes.

The ‘house’ is an old, ruined stone building on the outskirts of the town. It’s surrounded by some crates as a half-hearted attempt to block it off before its scheduled demolition that never came.

Evan tucks the hat and doublet into his belt, so his hands are free. He clambers onto two of the crates and scrambles up to the first floor ‘window’. It recently became the only accessible entrance since the weathering brought the doorway down.

He pulls himself up to the brick that sticks out slightly more than the rest and perches there as he removes a board from that window. It reveals a gap, large enough for him, M, or Meg to wiggle through. Once in, he replaces the board before moving his way down the stairs, ducking under the protective sheet, as he makes his way into the living quarters.

It's warmer than expected down there and relatively cozy. The large room is divided into 3 sections by sets of cloth. The ‘kitchen’ is directly at the bottom of the stairs, consisting of a couple of battered pans, and a fire pit, with some dry logs and tinder neatly piled in the driest part of the room. Next is the ‘bedroom’ consisting of piles of blankets and sleeping mats in one big heap, to make the stone floor more comfortable whilst also preserving heat. There are small colourful drawings on the brick, where the dribbles of rain haven’t washed off the pastels. And finally sits the washing pile, moved away from the rest of the stuff to try and keep the smell out and any small bugs. Meg hasn’t ever really cared about hygiene, but between M and Evan insisting, especially after the flea-bitten cat incident, she complies.

As Evan reaches the bottom of the stairs and the kitchen, he lets out an “I’m back!”

There’s a shuffling from behind the bedroom curtain before he is slammed into by a flash of green and a whirl of horns and tail. “You were gone aaagges!! M and I were worried something had happened!”

Evan leans down to give the small orc girl a squeeze “Actually… Meg. Something did happen…”

The ten-year-old looks up and backs away “Is.. everything alright?” Her hand creeps over to a smelly, grey, falling-apart toy unicorn, lovingly named Crystal after its ‘white’ colour.

Evan grins “Guess who just got offered a job opportunity!” He announces with

pride in his voice, puffing his chest out in a dramatic manner. He then pauses to look at her “So is M back?”

Meg wobbles her hand in a so-so gesture “She went to get some food for us. It sounds like you got a great haul!”

Evan nods as he goes about trying to neaten himself up, without looking too posh. An intermediate between normal and how he had looked earlier. “That’s sweet, though I don’t think I’m going to be eating here… I’ll see if I can get the offererers...?” there’s a pause before he brushes off the fact he can’t think of the right word “The people, to buy me some grub.”

Meg snorts “You’ll have to threaten ‘em for that!”

“Fuck you!” Evan flips her off before pulling on a more comfortable shirt. “I’m very fucking charming when I want to be.”

Meg sticks her tongue out at him “Aaaahh… you’re fine. Not anything compared to Sir Benadeve. He’s meant to be dashing and charming! A real gentleman”

“And also. Very. Very fictional.” Evan smirks

Meg huffs and folds her arms “Why are all the best men not real.”

Evan narrows his eyes, mumbling to himself “I… don’t know if I should resent that…”

Meg sits there for a little while before happily squirming.

“And ye’re fine? Right?” he cocks an eyebrow in her direction, his normally very neutral accent slipping slightly into the much stronger Skelesian one.

She nods “Between you and M and Me!!! We can maybe move out soon! Oh!!!” She wiggles in excitement fiddling with one of her tusks. “I got the old veteran down the road to agree to teach me ‘ow to use a sword!”

Evan lets out a whistle “So he’s not a prick after all?”

Meg shakes her head “No! ‘e’s kinda nice. You’re more of a prick!”

Evan takes the opportunity to chuck a cloth in her general direction, making sure to avoid hitting her “Oi!” though there’s a dumb grin on his face. As he makes his way back to the stairs leading out

Meg sticks her tongue out, launching the cloth back “Definitely a biiiig old grumpy prick!” She manages to hit him square in the chest.

Evan flips her off before grabbing the cloth and making a half-hearted attempt at folding it, before dumping his mediocre attempt over a slightly rotten banister. “I’m going to dash but tell M not to wait up for me, I’ll probably be back late.”

Meg nods “But you gotta bring me back something good!?”

Evan leans on the rotten banister, about halfway up with a shit-eating grin “A rock?”

“No!”

“Two rocks!”

“I hate you!”

He cackles slightly as he vanishes out of view.

***

Evan takes a moment and stands outside the tavern, excitement and nerves beginning to get to him. Taverns have never really been something he had experience with, being very clearly too young up until now. He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, before moulding his expression into one of faux experience as he steps in.

The tavern is busy despite being a lower-end place. Some drunkards roar with laughter as a handful of cards are slapped down. Elsewhere there seems to be a fully blown argument raging, but no one really takes much notice.

Evan’s eyes flicker at the large amounts of coins left unattended. It would be so easy. A faked slip and then you could pocket it. But one wrong move would probably get his lights knocked out. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because he’s here for something bigger and more rewarding than that.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spots Cloak and Albert, who flag him down. He turns and begins to make his way over.

Cloak smiles at seeing him, “Evan! Well, don’t you look like a fine young man? You’ll fit perfectly with us.”

Evan finds himself smiling along too at the compliment.

Albert stands and offers his seat, “Can I get ya a drink?”

Evan takes the seat next to Cloak and shrugs “Never say no to free things! Yes please, an…” his brain jumps at the first drink he can think of “ale. Please.”

Albert laughs “A man after my own heart.” He slaps Evan’s shoulder before vanishing. It doesn’t take long before he returns with an ale “ ‘ere you are.” Albert passes him the drink, before sitting down, on Evan’s other side.

“Cheers.” Evan sips the drink, wincing a little bit at the bitter taste of the alcohol, but he attempts to hide his reaction and continues to drink, as they begin to talk business.

Evan finishes the ale and is quickly offered another. Which he takes gratefully. The two men are both sweet, as they talk. Both are soft in tone with friendly gestures and smiles, that puts Evan at ease. But after the first drink, Evan begins to struggle to follow exactly what’s been said. Just smiling politely along, accepting drink after drink.

His focus is instead pulled to the noise around him. The cheers and whoops from neighbouring tables. The bartender’s tone of voice. The chatter.

Evan blinks rapidly as he’s addressed but can’t work out what was just asked. Instead, he nods, praying that he answered the question right. The effort of just nodding his head feels exhausting.

The noise around him becomes one loud cacophony. As the world seems to slur and colours blend into each other when he moves his head. Keeping his eyes open suddenly becomes far more effort than normal. That's when the panic sets in.

He makes to stand up but finds that once he's on his feet his balance is gone. He finds himself stumbling into one of the men but can't remember who's who and can't see properly. Hands tightened around his arm and his waist helping him to stand but not in the way that he wants them to. There's a deepened mumbling as if someone's talking to him but he can't make out for the life of him what's being said as he fights to retain consciousness.

And then he's moving out, into the dark night. He puts his feet down as if to slow the movement or try and break free of the grip, but he can't muster the energy to do more than drag his feet.

Evan manages to take a few steps before darkness takes over.

***

Evan’s head hurts.

The first thing he’s aware of when he regains consciousness is the pounding in his fucking head.

He groans and curls up at the chill on his chest before freezing as he notices the smell of bile and a sticky sensation around his cheek.

He slowly opens his eyes, squinting at the light, and pushes himself up into a sitting position. His eyes glance over a pile of vomit that he was just lying in, and a sensation of nausea spreads across his body. This isn't helped by the foul taste of vomit in his mouth, and the parched thirst, that has dry out his throat. A clump of stinking damp hair falls into his face. Evan brushes back with a grimace.

A shiver runs through him as a breeze enters through the bars of the stone room, he's in. It slowly dawns on him that whoever did this also took his shirt. He brings his thin arms around himself, hugging his torso. His brain fights to try and work out: where the fuck he is and what the fuck happened.

The room is almost entirely dark, which Evan is thankful for. Certain that bright light would only make his headache worse. His night vision is good enough to make out his surroundings.

The wall in front of him is entirely made up of bars. As Evan looks around, it becomes increasingly clear that he is in some kind of cage or cell. His heart begins to race, as he runs through the last events he can remember. He wasn’t arrested? Right? And where the fuck were Cloak and Albert? The fuck had they done? Evan brings an arm around himself just that little bit tighter as he looks around his surroundings, in a desperate attempt to make sense of everything.

There is a sound of a key unlocking a door. Painful white light blares into the corridor. Evan blinks and squints as the light encourages the headache.

There are footsteps. And voices. Evan can just about make out the strong Spuc Wa accent laced into the voices of both speakers. The accents are like some of the travellers who passed through the town. Evan finds himself straining to hear what they are saying, as they walk closer to where he is.

“As promised, Sir, we have a new specimen, brought in last night. I hope you’ll find him fitting for His Lordship.” The footsteps come closer before stopping outside of the cage.

Evan looks up at two men. One, a weasely-looking elf dressed in fine robes, who Evan is sure was just talking. And the other, a large hulking human man wearing high-quality plate armour with a seal of a roaring lion on the front of his chest. The armour goes right down to shining steel gauntlets covering his fists. He has green eyes and brown hair, which looks carefully styled. The man is adorned with a general look of distaste on his face.

The Weasel looks nervously at the hulking man, as if assessing his thoughts. The Hulk either doesn't notice or doesn't care as instead, his cold stare is on Evan. His gaze is clinical, seemingly focused on scanning and assessing.

Evan finds his skin beginning to crawl, he quickly chooses to get his feet rather than sit whilst this fucker looks at him like an animal at a zoo. Two can play that fucking game. Evan musters the dirtiest look that he can. Drawn from years of staring down grubby kids who thought the best thing they could do with their day is sling shitty insults at Meg.

The Hulk gestures at the cage, “Open it.”

The Weasel quickly jumps to it, “Yes Sir!” Unlocking the cage door, and holding it open for the Hulk, who walks in.

Evan backs up, trying to maintain the glare, his heart pounding, and nausea slipping into his throat. “The fuck do ye want? Ye giant can of Dogshite!-”

The Hulk looks at him for a moment, before wrinkling his nose and raising a gauntleted hand. It crashes into the boy’s cheek, cutting off the potential chain of slurs and insults. Evan sees stars as the fist collides with him. The force throws him to the ground. The stone cut into his palms and as he lands, and his headache increases tenfold.

The man takes two steps over to Evan and grabs a handful of his hair, wrenching the boy’s head up to look at him. “You speak. When you’re spoken to.” The hulking man growls. The tight, painful grip on his hair forces a small squeak from Evan. The Hulk releases him and turns the seller.

Evan drops to the ground. Hand clutching his cheek.

“So, what do you think? Is this what Lord Maynard is after?”

“Apart from looking like he’s a scruffy dog covered in his own filth? I suppose so. He could be good for kitchen staff or cleaning. Though that attitude is something that is going to take some beating out of him. And he needs a wash.”

Evan’s heart moves into his throat.

“So, your verdict Sir?”

“I’ll take him. I do like a good challenge. And breaking him in should be relatively interesting.”

“Very good Sir.”

“Whilst we sort payments. Have him marked. I had one of my staff bring Lord Maynard’s seal.” The man gestures to a quiet half-orc, who seems to avoid eye contact with everyone. The half-orc seems to be holding what looks like a brand with the lion symbol and the initials ‘CVM’ on it.

“Oh, course Sir, come with me.” The two exit, as there are more footsteps and three guards head towards the cage.

Evan scrambles back as far back as he can until he’s pressed into the furthest corner of the cell. “Don’t ye fucking touch me ye shits!”

There’s no answer as they approach him. Evan begins to throw punches, as he attempts to lodge himself in the corner. They roughly grab him by the shoulders, nails digging into his skin, drawing blood.

“GET OFF OF ME YE CUNTS!”

Evan tries to take a bite out of one for the hands, only to receive a blow to the nose.

Evan is dragged out, kicking, and trying to wrestle free. The third guard indicates to the half-orc carrying the brand to follow, “This way.” They begin to march Evan past rows and rows of cages to a room with a blazing fire, and a large table.

_______

AN: Mostly just setting the scene and circumstances, but there we go!! Do shout if there are any typos! And ask if you want adding to the taglist!!

Masterlist. Next

#whump writing #whumpblr #whump blog #whump stuff #kidnapped whumpee #tw kidnapping #tw drugging #tw drinking #drinking #tw drink spiking #defiant whumpee #fantasy whump #dnd whump #These Woods

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mimikiplovesgaming · 1 year

Text

Pokemon ⚡Violet⏳ Synopsis

Okay so I beat the main stories and after story of Pokemon Violet! Here are my personal thoughts on the game:

*Warning for spoilers*

From the start, the graphics were okay. When the npcs are in the further background, it looks like something out of the N64 days- and Kirby 64 looked better on the console itself

Controls were pretty good, felt pretty smooth for the most part. Riding Miraidon felt nice, there wasn't too much trouble. The only thing that bugs me is the glide. You glide at a nice sloping descent before falling down at a steeper angle and you pretty much fall straight down with no chance to slow yourself. I wish it was more like PLA, where you could dash and control how you glided through the sky

Arven and Penny were my favorite NPCs and storylines. Penny reminded me of my old middle school friends and there was a sense of wanting to care for and protect her. Arven, while having parental issues, was also dealing with trying to save his doggo partner Mabosstiff who he has had since he was a child. That need of wanting to help the only real family he had spoke so deeply to me. Because that proves that family doesn't have to be biological. Family can be your best friend or the pet you have, whoever you have close bonds with. And as an animal lover, I teared up when that part happened.

Okay- let's talk Nemona. I personally did not like her all that much. Her character trait is that she likes battling- and that's it. That's all she likes. Just combat. There's no real personality to her. She was more annoying to me than anything else. She didn't have any character growth or arc like the others did. Again, this is just my own view of things.

I know some people will complain and argue that some of the Pokemon designs are lackluster and "going downhill". Need I remind you that Gen 1 had very not so great designs too- Geodude and Voltorb are examples. I actually didn't mind the designs of the newer Pokemon! Meowscarada was a decent bipedal evolution for Sprigatito, but it could use a bit more detail. Miraidon was adorable, I loved Fuecoco, the Tinkaton line was simple and effective, and I enjoyed the Paradox Pokemon! My favorite is Iron Valiant, the way they combined Gallade and Gardevoir was so well done with just the right amount of detail from both evolutions.

Speaking of the Paradox Pokemon, let's talk the afterstory. Holy crap. The fact that the real professor died in an accident and was succeeded by an android they created to assist them was crazy. I don't think we've had a game where you fight the professor as a final boss- usually it's the champion or your rival or something. The turn this game took with the ending was shocking and I am here for it. I really wish there was a moment between the AI Professor and Arven where they hugged each other goodbye. That would've ripped my heart out even more and provided some form of comfort to Arven knowing that despite everything, that one moment of tenderness was what he needed to know his parent loved him. (Side note- the Professor's spouse walked out on them after Arven was born, which was even crazier when you realize that it's what started his abandonment issues

Then we come to the final thing on the list: the Ruinous Quartet Pokemon. Four cursed artifacts that became Pokemon and were sealed away for fear of their strength and the destruction they caused. It makes me wonder why they're a thing in the game. Will we eventually get more story on them? Will they become more prominent as time goes on? As for their oppositions, I strongly believe they were designed to oppose the Swords of Justice. Think about it- the Quartet are Dark Types and the Swords are Fighting. Then add the elemental types and they match the weaknesses of the Swords perfectly. It's just a theory, but there's some ideas behind it

Overall, I think the game wasn't too bad. It wasn't that glitchy for me and I had an enjoyable time playing. People were diverse, story was good, and gameplay wasn't half bad. I'll give this game a 7/10- good, but could be better. At least with the graphics issues and Pokemon going through walls XD

Give me your thoughts as well! Do you agree or disagree with anything I mentioned? Add your thoughts in the comments or reblogs, I'd love to hear what you think!

#L speaks #pokemon scarlet and violet #pokemon scarlet #pokemon violet #pokemon arven #pokemon scarlet spoilers #pokemon violet spoilers #pokemon penny #pokemon nemona #pokemon #pokemon theory

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shiiikigami · 1 year

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i’m right here. for megumi !

in any other case, he might have shoved him away. muttered something bitter. might have even told him to mind his own business. yet, this was different. this time, he couldn't find any words. he had his hands in his pockets, and he was looking in the other direction, trying to keep his face an impassive mask. he failed, and something of a snarl was resting on his young face.

tsumiki had been cursed. there was nothing even the strongest could do to free her from it. she would sleep... sleep for who knows how long?

of course it happened to her. she was kind, thoughtful and giving. life was unfair and unequal, and that meant people like tsumiki suffered while people like himself, who were likely rotten to the core, walked away without injury. he hated that. he hated that with all the air in his lungs.

"fine. i'll stop dragging my feet and become a real sorcerer, like you wanted. i'll find and kill the person who cursed tsumiki like this...." he trailed off, before he pressed his face into his guardian's shoulder. he was getting taller, after the last growth spurt he was starting to catch up to the man. i'm right here.... he sighed into gojo's jacket and closed his eyes, wordlessly needing a hug.

#godsbox #i took this and RAN WITH IT #fushiguro : threads

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rusteddreamsstories · 2 years

Text

Soulflesh

[Image ID: Illustration for the story below. A flat digital drawing. An outline of a steer in profile in pale blue with white tracks going through its body to denote cuts of meat. The words “Soulflesh” appears at bottom in Brush Script. / End ID.] Summary: In the near future, processes for growing meat without an entire animal (unattached to a brain) have been refined, if not perfected. It is efficient and popular, although some people prefer old fashioned meat. Join a newly hired overnight-shift worker during his first night at a plant - a spooky first night. (Based on something I’ve seen / read about scientists trying to do in the real world).

Soulflesh

Kenny was one of only a few people he knew who had ever eaten soulflesh. It wasn’t out of any religious sensibility, it was simply because he’d grown up on a private family-farm and his grandfather and elder brothers enjoyed hunting. “What’s it like…eating it?” Sally asked him as they sat in the break room before his shift. He munched on a cultured-ham sandwich and answered between swallows. “It’s not really much different than the stuff they grow here,” he said. “The game-meats have the biggest difference. The stuff from an actual wild animal tastes wild – like the grasses it ate. The technicians can’t quite duplicate true venison or elk yet, but they’re close. I don’t even think they’re going to try bear!” “Bear would be a little difficult,” Sally agreed. “So, it’s not like you feel the animal’s life-force entering yours?” she joked. “It’s not like that at all,” Kenny laughed, “not even with hunted meat. Put away all those thoughts you’ve ever read about the romance of hunting, or even about farm life. It’s as dull and grimy as anything you do in the city.” “Anything different about the texture?” “Anything that was once actually alive is going to be a bit tougher – unless you grind it up for sausage.” “Hmm,” Sally said, cupping her chin in her hands with her elbows on the table, on the edge of a yawn. “They’ve show you the skele-mechs, right?” Kenny’s shudder told the janitor all she needed to know. Kenny despised the skele-mechs and he’d only seen a few of them. They were supposed to come in diverse models. They were apparatuses designed to texture tissue by mimicking the movements of a living animal. They were, in his opinion, not at all pretty. One of the biomechanics nerds here charged with tweaking the designs and coming up with new ones thought they were the pinnacle of beauty, but she was considered an eccentric even among the higher-ups of the science team. Kenny had just taken a job at Fry’s Variety Meats, a laboratory-factory for the growth of artificial protein. It was one of the largest suppliers of meat to institutions and supermarkets in the Delaware Valley. This was a relatively new form of agriculture. It was common to the sensibilities of Kenny’s generation, had started to become an efficient process and widely accepted in his parents’ generation and was in the idea and experimental-stages in his grandparents’ youth. His grandfather still called factory-grown meat “newfangled” and insisted that he preferred “real” meat from real, whole animals, but he’d eat cultured fast food burgers all the same. Kenny had toured the facility and had done a couple of day-shifts in a general orientation process, but this was to be his first night working at what was to be his stable position – night watchman. He’d be sharing the duty with an older gentleman named Carl, who assured him that “nothing happens here” and who had warned Kenny of boredom. In truth, a promise of boredom was part of the reason that Kenny had sought the position. He’d been told that in between walking the rounds, that as long as he kept a reasonable mount of attention on the monitors that he could spend his time in the guards’ room studying if he’d wished. This made the job perfect for a college student. “Do you see too much weird stuff doing cleanups around here?” he asked Sally. Sally was a heavyset woman with sand-brown hair – not a color much different from Kenny’s own, save the graying, which was prominent close to her face. She was obviously a good deal older, and, Kenny hoped, a little wiser than he was. “That’s why there’s a bonus for working here,” she answered, reaching over her hair with both hands to tighten her ponytail. “I’d have to get a second job if I’d had my kind of position anywhere else. Custodial staff don’t exactly get hazard-pay, but a certain amount of creep-out pay is nice.” “Kinda like being a tour guide for a haunted house?” Kenny quipped, an edge of nervousness readable on his voice. “It’s not that bad, kiddo,” Sally assured. “I’d much rather do sanitation here than on the killing floor of any of the old fashioned processors. Most of my duties consist of emptying the trash, reporting leaks and scrubbing the toilets. The machines take care of most of the heavy work. The machines make up for human-error and we humans make up for machine-error. It’s that simple.” “Carl told me that as soon as I get used to the…um…sights… that the job gets pretty dull.”

“It does. Yours is a part-time thing. I’ll probably try to stay on here part-time if I ever get into a position where I can quit full-time and go back to school. I had to quit that a while back.”

“Aw, I’m sorry. What were you studying?” “I wanted to be a nurse,” Sally sighed. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a wallet. She opened it and pulled out a folding sheet of photographs. “Oh! An old accordion-folder!” Kenny chimed, “I didn’t know they made those anymore!” “I prefer my keepsakes in physical form rather than just keeping all my pictures on a phone,” Sally explained. She pointed to a little boy standing beside her in one of the pictures. The child had a browner skin tone than hers and tightly-curled hair. “If you ever catch me overworking myself, it’s all for him,” she said with a smile. “That’s Kevin. Takes after his father, you see. His dad snapped the photo. Ah! There’s a picture of Greg, right here.” She pointed to another picture on the sheet. “I don’t have a lot of him because he was the shutterbug – with that old Kodak of his. Have you ever smelled a darkroom? Worse than the bologna vats.” “Was?” “Was,” Sally sadly sighed. “Car accident a few years ago. He was alone, on his way home from the office. Some asshole kid drunk driving. The kid came out of it with no more than a few scrapes and a slap on the wrist from the courts. He had a case of ‘affluenza,’ you see – and appropriately ‘affluenza’-infected parents to get him all the right representation and probably more than a few bribes.” “Rough luck. I’m sorry.” “I had to choose: Pawn my kid off on my sister and keep up with my schooling or take whatever job I could find and hope for better days. I’m happy enough for now. I get a good balance of keeping us housed and spending time with him. I’d have no time if I tried to work and do school at the same time right now. This job pays well enough that I don’t much care what the skele-mechs do at night.” Kenny dropped his sandwich on the table with a dull plop. Sally laughed. “I’m messin’ with ya! They don’t do anything. Well, mostly. They have a low-level AI, but they’re still tethered by the nutrient-feeds and penned. You grew up on a farm. Real animals are much more dangerous.” “Yeah, you’re right” Kenny said, tentatively picking up the half-eaten sandwich. “I was almost gored by a bull once, our breeder. We were trying to move him to the secondary pasture. Interesting how a person can suddenly gain the catlike reflexes needed to leap a fence in two seconds flat when you’ve only got two seconds flat.” “I thought ranchers kept electric fences.” “We did,” Kenny replied flatly. “A critter might ignore it if he’s mad. And it wasn’t a whole fence – more like a hot-wire along the top of a fence. I just barely cleared it. Twisted my ankle when I landed.” “I ought to be getting home,” Sally said, pulling herself away from the table and standing up. “Yeah,” Kenny replied, munching the last corner of his sandwich. “Thanks for staying after your hours to talk with me. It was nice.” “I figured you might need a little pep-talk on your first full night. Thanks for coming in early and giving me someone to jaw with. I don’t get that often. Toodles.” With that, Sally grabbed a cherry soda from the vending machine and let herself out. Kenny looked at his wrist-screen to get the time and decided that a five-minute-early clock-in was in order. After he pressed his finger to the reader on the wall in the hallway, he walked down the back workers’ corridor to try to find Carl. Kenny walked past a long window with a view into a room with enormous stainless steel vats. There was water everywhere gushing down from sprayers in the ceiling and a chemical-foam all over the room. It was being cleaned out in preparation for a new batch of stem-cultures. The chrome-hoofed feet of empty skele-mechs hung from the ceiling along embedded rails. They were, if Kenny were to put it bluntly, like “headless horses,” not to be confused with the Headless Horseman – the alliteration first in his mind. These skels were not horse-based, however. There was not enough of a demand for horse meat in the area for it. These were beef-mechs, representative of cattle. The skele-mechs were made of various metal components as well as durable, food-safe flexible plastics. Aside from the wiring and tubes struck through them, they resembled skeletons – only with metal limbs, translucent white plastic joints and ribcages made from that same material. They were built for a certain amount of flexibility – a mimic to living bone. The mechs had no heads. There was not enough of a demand for head-muscle and fat to justify the expense of incorporating skulls into the design. Kenny was grateful for at least that. He was even more grateful that this factory didn’t try to clone animal brains for the meat-market. He had an uncle who was fond of the occasional fried calf-brain sandwich, a rare delicacy these days. They’d become fairly uncommon even before the days of meat-automation. In part, this was due to changing cultural tastes, but the larger issue was public fear of prion diseases. In Fry’s factory, this threat was eliminated entirely. The carrier of mad cow disease was infected cow brains. When brains were eliminated from the butcher-process entirely, so too was the danger. Brains: They were also the difference between common meat and soulflesh.

Soulflesh: That was the general name for any meat that had come from a once truly-living animal. If an animal had a working brain, it had a “soul.” This had become a common term even among people with no spiritual inclinations. “Soul” had just become a convenient shorthand in this case. A few people liked to brag that they “didn’t like to eat anything unless they knew it had a soul,” a bit of dark-humor among old fashioned farmers, hunters and the foodies that sought out their products, but the majority of society preferred to eat things that had never had a thought.

The process with the skele-mechs was pretty simple. Kenny had seen it described in orientation, even though he was a mere night-guard. He’d heard about it all long before then, but without the details. First, stem cells that were to become muscle-fiber and associated fat were suspended in a solution in the vats. The mechs would be dipped into this “primordial soup” fluid from their suspension-ports, lowered down from their ceiling-rails. After a few days of being submerged (this went differently every time, each mech was checked for progress daily), a “meat-moss” would begin to take on the chassis. After that, the mechs would be withdrawn and slide along their grid into another room with “pens.” These were sterile rooms separated by glass that had treadmills. Commands were fed into the remote-control modules in the necks of the mechs, as well as a nutrient-rich flow of artificial “blood” pumped into the meat-moss. The headless beasts would run and walk upon their respective treadmills with regular periods of “rest” and other movements, all while tethered by where their heads should have been. They were supposed to be in a resting state at night. Both muscle and a requisite amount of fat would grow on the things. There were no internal organs – those were grown elsewhere by another process to fill the demand for organ-meats - and no skin, at least not a true, full hide. The skele-mechs (sometimes called “meat-mechs” at this point) were treated with a transparent organic coating that formed a pseudo-skin to keep the flesh as juicy as it would be in a real body. Kenny did not know the particulars of the science of it all (he was majoring in business); he just knew that the other day, when he’d seen his first fully-dressed meat-mech ready for harvest in full daylight hours (though under fluorescent lighting) it had nearly given him a heart-attack. His new managers had explained to him that the skele-mech process was the gold-standard that their company had set for the industry. Mimicking life so closely was, apparently, the best way to get the correct texture for steaks and chops. Ribs were out of the question as the skele-mechs needed to keep them for future processing. Rib-meat was just flayed off them. For “bone-in” ribs, a different process was devised. It was still being worked out and no artificial-meat factory had gotten it right by the standards of anybody who’d had the soulflesh version from any animal. Kenny had tried a plate of cultured-ribs once at a barbeque restaurant and they’d tasted to him like so much mushy hot dog meat wrapped around a curved plastic stick. Artificial rib-meat did much better when flayed off a full-textured skele-mech carcass and pressed into patties for rib sandwiches. Rib-eye steaks, on the other hand, being meat located between bones, fared much, much better. The new night guard looked up at the empty skels in the clean room and mused to himself. “No thought, no guilt.” “Eh, you’d think some people would be on the dinner plate, then.” Kenny jumped at the voice. “Didn’t mean to spook ya,” Carl said. “But, yeah – if having not a thought in your head makes ya okay to eat, maybe ya oughtta slather some steak sauce on yerself, son!” The old man gave Kenny a wheezy laugh before clapping him on the back. “I was thinking,” Kenny said, trying to recover, “Perhaps…too much.” “Come on. Gotta show ya the West Wing – where you’ll be makin’ the rounds tonight.” Kenny followed Carl’s lead. “I thought you were going to be with me.” “Nah!” Carl answered; patting his hip to make sure the passcard was in his pocket. He pulled the flat piece of plastic and coding out and handed it to Kenny. “I’m sure they have your fingerprints in the clock-in system already so you can get your wages, but they probably forgot to do that on the lock-systems.” “Um,” Kenny responded, twiddling the card in his fingers, “They put me in the payroll at orientation. Ms. Pratch said that they wouldn’t get me into security until after a couple of shifts and that I’d be using the card. That’s why I figured on being with you. You know, the standard of a trainer watching me, making sure that I wasn’t some kind of risk, making sure I don’t screw up.” “I ain’t no babysitter!” Carl groused. “I’ll be in the East Wing and you’ll be in the West Wing. Everyone else you can hail on yer com-unit.” Carl handed him a small pin. “There ya go. Press the button and talk into it, just don’t bother me unless it’s important.” “That seems pretty risky.” “You don’t seem like a security-risk to me. A screw-up, maybe, but we’ll see by morning. Easiest job in the world, kid.” “You barely know me.” “You’re not the type to be a thief. You look too stupid be to be a corporate spy. You’re more the nervous student-type who really needs a job because yer loans barely cover the cost of course-materials, am I right?” “Yessir.” “Besides, things here have a way of taking care of themselves.” Kenny sighed. “If you say so.”

“The West Wing is easy. It’s the East Wing that has the butcher-floors and the Chicken Room.” “The Chicken Room?” “I don’t think you’re ready for the Chicken Room, son. All that pink.” They came to a sealed door. Carl pressed punched a number on a keypad next to the door and pressed his index finger to a touch-screen. He gestured to a slot mounted on the pad’s side.” “Slide your card.” Kenny obeyed and the two men entered a brightly-lit room filled with cylindrical glass tanks mounted top and bottom with metal caps and bracers. Gelatinous pink and reddish blobs danced within each tube like the “lava” in a lava lamp. “Pork cultures,” Carl explained. “Not to be textured. “This is the smooth stuff that’s grown for hot dog and bologna-meat – that kind of thing.” “Potted-meat food-product?” Kenny asked. “Exactly. It gets ground up all the same, mixed with spices, but, you know, there’s no need for it to be more than blobby.” “Well, common knowledge dictates that no one wants to know what hot dogs are made of.”

“One reason not to eat ‘em.”

“Not a fan of a good ol’ dirty water hot dog? Carl turned to him with a grin. “I’ve been vegan for about forty years now, kiddo.” “Bothered by the place?” Kenny asked, “Seeing how the sausage is made?” “Not at all,” Carl replied as they walked among the tanks. “No philosophical or spiritual reasons for it, either.” “Health?” “Nah, just never liked the taste of meat. Was raised with it as a kid. Drove my ma crazy bein’ such a picky eater. Never liked any of it much, not beef, not pork… could stand chicken just fine when fried… Don’t get me started on fish. Kept up with it for the sake of the wife, but after a while I just quit. As for eggs and milk… they just upset my stomach.” “I did wonder,” Kenny confessed. “It’s not like abstaining from meat is a matter of animal-rights anymore, well, except for those very strict folks who think of even cloned meat as exploitation.” Carl pointed ahead. “Anyway, some of the organ-rooms are ahead. They’re pretty small, not much demand… mostly beef and pork livers for stuff like liverwurst and scrapple. There’s a room that grows eggs, but that’s in the East Wing, next to the Chicken Room. Some of the skele-mech rooms up ahead. There’s cameras on all of ‘em. The main labs are at the north end. Benny’s the night guard there, and some of the techs work dusk to dawn hours.” Just as they were about to open the door at the end of the tank-room to further tour the West Wing, Carl turned around. “Hold tight,” he said, “I forgot somethin’ Lemme go back and get it.” “Hey! Wait!” Kenny called as Carl went back the way they’d come and the door closed behind him. The lights in the room immediately dimmed. “Wait!” Kenny called again. He punched his identification-code into the lock-pad and slid his card. The door refused to open. He repeated the procedure and found himself jostling the door-handle with furious motion. Meat burbled in the tanks behind him.

“Carl!” he cried out, “Carl, I’m stuck! Something’s wrong with the door. Can you open it from your side?”

“I’ll try,” came the muffled reply from the other room. “Hold on.” After a pregnant pause Carl cursed. “Dammit. Doesn’t seem to be workin’. Did you do something to the keypad? It’s got me on lockout.” “I didn’t do anything!” Kenny complained, balling a fist and bringing it down uselessly by his side in frustration. “The lights went on the dimmer-switch, too! I’m really eager to get out of here!” “Pretty damned spooky when yer alone for the first time, eh? I’m tryin’ kid.” Kenny jostled the door handle again, regardless of how brute force was not working. “Yer not gonna like this, son,” Carl said at long last. “I’m gonna go up to the labs, see if we can get you an emergency key-card. Meanwhile, if you don’t want to wait by the door, you can go through. The rooms lead out to the main hall. Go on through them and you’ll end up there eventually.” “That was not what I wanted to hear, Carl!”

“Yer gonna be walkin’ the round alone most nights anyway, kiddo. You might as well get used to it.”

“So I don’t even get a guided tour before digging on in?”

“Like I said, I ain’t yer babysitter. I’ll be back when I can. You can wait where you are or go on through. Your choice.” “Carl?” Kenny was met with silence. “Carl?” He sighed and fumbled in his coat pocket for his flashlight. The room was not completely dark – just dimmed as an apparent power-save. All the same, turning on the flashlight made Kenny feel a little safer. He walked through the room attempting to ignore what was around him. He gave thought to how he ate such material all the time. As he had said to Carl earlier, no one wanted to know what was in hot dogs – not really. It was, perhaps, worse in the days when factories processed soulflesh. He tried his com unit, pressing the tiny button on it until his thumb hurt. “Is anybody there?” Kenny called. “Hello? I’m Kenny – the new hire. I’m trapped in the first room of the West Wing! Bologna vats.” He carefully listened. There was no reply. He tried again. “Hello?” He fingered the device and something felt off about it. “Dammit!” Someone had apparently forgotten to put a battery in the thing. There was nothing more to be done but to move forward.

He passed through another room – liver and kidney-tissue. It wasn’t much different from the previous room. “Look ahead,” he told himself. “Just keep looking ahead. You signed on for this job. Watching Grandpa dress a deer was far more disgusting.” In spite of himself, Kenny began singing a popular commercial jingle designed to sell hot dogs. It was from one of those companies that had been around for a long enough time that they’d started with soulflesh and switched to automation, purchasing stock from Fry’s for their local plants. He entered another tank-room, yet another for smooth tissues – beef cultures. The lights flickered and then went out. Kenny bit his lower lip to suppress a scream. He had his flashlight already turned on full. “Just a lighting malfunction, Kenny,” he said to himself. “Keep it together. It’s not like any of this can hurt you. It’s just dead meat… technically-living dead meat, but it’s not like it’s a charging bull.” He stifled a short laugh. “Heh, Bruno this ain’t. Bruno made such good pot roast… a bit tough from all those years we kept him around, but flavorful.” That was one contention that Kenny had with cultured meat. It wasn’t much different from soulflesh most of the time, but when an animal had lived a rich life, slaughtered somewhat old or taken from the wild, there was something more to it. Of course, it took knowing how to cook it to make it tender enough to be edible. As he walked along, Kenny felt the muscles in his shoulders tense. “They sure have a weird way of operating, just one guard per wing…” He remembered his uncle taking a post-retirement pocket-change security job. It had consisted of him driving alone for a few hours nightly around a gated community. Kenny supposed that the outside security measures would keep any would-be criminals out before the likes of he and Carl would ever meet them. They hadn’t even been issued weapons. Kenny entered another room and dropped the flashlight with a start. It skidded along the floor, illuminating resting figures in brief flashes. “Good night,” he breathed. He clenched his teeth and bent down to retrieve the torch. He shook his head. They were still. They were all still. Meat-mechs nearing butcher-readiness lay curled up behind the glass windows of their pens. Kenny startled again as one of them stood to its feet, its shoulders and haunches bunching as the neck-apparatus raised it. It had a skinless tail, which it twitched. Kenny winced. “Just two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” he sighed. As his footsteps echoed upon the hard floor, he could not help but imagine the beasts coming loose from their mountings and surrounding him. “Perhaps I am in Hell,” he mused. Red flesh in the darkness: It was all uncanny. Here he was surrounded by skinned demons, catching his rapid breath. “They are not alive,” he assured himself. That was when he remembered the words that both Sally and Carl had said about things around here having a “way of taking care of themselves.” He made haste for the next room on the row. He slammed the door behind him as he found a source of light. The lighting flickered back on from pitch to merely dimmed. “An office of some kind?” This room was not like the others. There were rows of sterile white desks, set into the wall and black office chairs with wheels. There were thin computer monitors and narrow tower-units. Kenny’s errant hand found a touch-pad as he braced himself on one of the desks. He spooked when a monitor came to life, adding illumination to the room. A moment later he smiled. It seemed that some folks here favored cheesy old desktop images. Flying toasters. Classic. His eye caught a window on the right-hand side of the room from where he was standing. It looked fluid-filled. Great, another tank, even in here. Maybe this was some kind of experimental area that he was not told about? In the low, gray light an image formed. His jaw dropped. “No…no…” the young man whispered. That was when he decided that Carl had sinister intent in regard to him and that he wasn’t getting out of here without a fight, maybe not alive. A distinctly humanoid shape bobbed within the tank. “Good God!” Kenny gasped. “They’re growing long pig?” The hair on his arms rose. His heart was racing. His blood pounded in his ears. Why? Why would they do this? What possible reason would there be for human tissue-growth? Some part of him tried to explain it. Sure, a lot of the reasons for the new ways of growing meat did lie in environmental protection and issues with land-allotment, but the world wasn’t at the level of 1970’s dystopian films just yet. He thought to the strange ways of gourmets. Human cells would be easy enough to come by. It wasn’t likely that cannibalism was for the general market, but Kenny knew enough about rich people to assume that some of the super-wealthy grew bored with the same old thing and wished to break taboos – without committing actual murder to do it. Kenny ventured into the room beyond the window. His curiosity got the better of him and he had to observe this. “What the-?” he began. A small fish darted in the tank. Kenny blinked. The human shape he had found beyond the glass had, in an instant, disappeared. Turning around, he found a coat haphazardly draped across a chair in the interior office. He looked from it back to the tank. Tiny fish that he hadn’t seen before swam about. He’d been fooled by a distorted image behind an ornamental aquarium – one with murky glass, in bad need of cleaning. He breathed relief and smacked himself in the forehead. “Get it together, man!” What he’d thought he’d seen was merely a product of the distortion of the aquarium’s glass and water, the dim light and his own runaway imagination. Even so, he remained wary as he exited the room and examined the office equipment. After that, he entered what he was sure and hoped was the final room before reaching the main hall. At least, he thought it was the last one from the facility-map he’d been reviewing before he and Sally had gotten to talking. He’d absentmindedly left it in the break room and sorely wished that he had it right now. The scrap-metal sculpture of a stag’s head on the wall above him was a nice touch. Below it was a sign reading GAME ROOM.

“I don’t think this is the place where they keep the foosball table,” he joked to himself. He hitched his breath when a mech turned to “look” at him with a metal, box-like head. It and others – all draped with growing muscle tissue, milling behind the glass of a large “pen” had the lithe forms of deer. They were different from the other skele-mechs Kenny had seen so far in that they were not tethered to feeds in the ceiling, but roamed independently, their “heads” alight with sensors colored red and green. They must have had their required nutrients administered in some way besides tubes in tethers and were apparently gifted with a more advanced AI-model, probably for the sake of twitchy, deer-like movement. Two of them jumped when Kenny moved, getting the whole of the small herd riled. He shook and clenched his teeth. His grip tightened on his flashlight so hard that his knuckles turned white. At least it wasn’t pitch in here, but the dimmer made it feel distinctly too much like a horror movie in here for him. He caught something in his peripheral vision. He looked to his left. Another glass-walled cage held small mechs with “heads” that roved curiously. A few jumped in simulated fear, a stimulus response to Kenny’s own responses, caught by their sensors. He thought that the cattle, lambs and deer were bad enough – they had nothing on meat-mech rabbits. Kenny let loose with a scream as the lights came up to full and the door on the far end of the room opened. “Glad to see you came this way,” Carl greeted, “Finally got the first door workin’, then saw you weren’t in there, so I came around.” “Well, I didn’t’ see any intruders,” Kenny reported with a shrug and a half-insane grin. “Yer as white as a ghost,” Carl observed. “Come on. We’ll get you to yer guard station and you can spend the rest of the night viewing the monitors.” “There was an issue with the lights.” “Well, they do like to keep ‘em dim to save on power at night.” “No…they went completely out for a while.” “Happens sometimes.” “I think I almost died.” “Why do you think they demanded a physical report when they hired you? No new hires with heart-conditions.” Kenny spent the remainder of the night looking up at screens in a cold metal chair in a room where the air conditioning was turned up too high. It felt safe and warm to him, like sipping hot cocoa before a fireplace despite the actual air temperature. Every so often, he found himself nodding off to half-dream of leaping deer and skinless cattle screaming vengeance at him. The world owed a lot to the popular abandonment of the use of living animals in agriculture. Facilities like Fry’s existed as a way to cut down on the waste of the livestock industry. They had become a necessity in a rapidly changing climate. The technology also fed people while alleviating the guilt many might otherwise have had for what they ate – by need or by choice. Kenny knew that and the new processing labs did a fine job. However, the un-naturalness of all he’d seen grated upon his soul. In the end, the artificial beasts and the lava-lamp vats were harmless. There was no conspiracy of growing human flesh here and no demons, even if some things looked the part. Sally met him in the morning as he was clocking out, just as she was clocking in for a day on the morning-shift. Kenny told her his story. “Carl’s a jerk,” she said flatly, her hands on her hips. “Oh, I was hoping he wouldn’t pull that crap on you, but knew that he would.” “What do you mean?” Kenny inquired. “The door-jam? That was no accident. Carl does that to everybody. It is his way of testing the mettle of the new guys.” “Does he even have the authority to do that?!” Kenny demanded. “Yeah,” Sally replied. She regarded Kenny with a sympathetic gaze. “Everyone knows about it.” Kenny gesticulated with his hands. He could have strangled Sally, or preferably, Carl, if he was the murdering-type. “Why didn’t you warn me?!” Sally made a “zipping lip” motion. “Sworn to secrecy,” she said. “Send the watchmen in alone, mess with the lights… it’s an initiation ritual, of sorts, to see who is fit for the job. The place has electrical emergencies now and again. Carl wants to make sure his juniors can stand the weirdness around here.” Kenny rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I…uh…survived,” he concluded. “Most new folk quit right away. So, Kenny, wasn’t it? Will you be here tomorrow?” Kenny set his face grim. There was no way an old man fond of pranks was going to get the better of him. “You can count on it.”

#original writing #short story #science fiction #horror #slice of life #blue collar jobs #meat #artificial meat

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littleapocalypsekitten · 2 years

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Soulflesh

Science Fiction Short Story Summary: In the near future, processes for growing meat without an entire animal (unattached to a brain) have been refined, if not perfected. It is efficient and popular, although some people prefer old fashioned meat. Join a newly hired overnight-shift worker during his first night at a plant - a spooky first night. (Based on something I’ve seen / read about scientists trying to do in the real world).

Soulflesh

“One reason not to eat ‘em.”

“Carl!” he cried out, “Carl, I’m stuck! Something’s wrong with the door. Can you open it from your side?”

“Yer gonna be walkin’ the round alone most nights anyway, kiddo. You might as well get used to it.”

“So I don’t even get a guided tour before digging on in?”

#short story #science fiction #horror #slice of life #robots #meat #artificial meat

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alignandrealign · 1 year

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Deep Breaths

Chapter 1

I'm sitting in my best friend's spare bed and my heart is racing. The room around me feels hotter then five minutes ago and I cannot muster the strength to get up and strip myself of my clothing to cool down. It's been three weeks since I walked out of my long term relationship, which means I don't really have a "home" anymore, I'm pretty much just drifting through the motions of my day to day life while stumbling through this unknown territory of being 32 years old and single again.

Being single isn't new to me but where I am now wasn't what I thought my life would look like at this age, especially when I had dreams of meeting my soul mate, travelling the world and making cute babies in a warm comfortable home together. Boy was I wrong.

I was synchronistically introduced to the Audiobook "Single on Purpose" by John Kim just the other day. I started playing it in my car on my way to work to help setup my morning in a positive mindset. Single on Purpose – making a choice to walk away from everything you know and everything that's comfortable, for the promise of growth, a better future, a more fulfilled life or maybe just peace. That's what it was for me, peace. I take another deep breath and kick the covers off my legs and allow my body to cool down. more deep breaths, I centre myself. The choice to jump was mine to make, the big leap of faith into the scary abyss that ended up not really being too scary at all. There's much scarier things than walking away from something that's not for you anymore, even if it's uncomfortable. Staying is definitely scarier. The decision to leave my relationship has lead me into three weeks of deep rest, growth and a chance to experience deep love and support like I have never experienced before, so I know now it was the right choice. Maybe it was meant to be or maybe I just refused to repeat the same patterns any longer. Either way I was out. I was free and I was writing again.

The last three years has been a total whirlwind of a ride. I met Steve just as the pandemic was kicking in for us. We live in Perth, Western Australia so it was pretty much 6 months after the rest of the world got hit. We didn't even think it was real at this point, just a lot of media swirling around about people getting sick and dying with equally as many conspiracy theories about it being fake, an overly dramatic cold or a declaration of biochemical warfare. I was in my own little world, living in a cosy duplex at the end of a cul de sac in Carine, a leafy suburb close to the beach about 20km north of the city. I had worked really hard to get to this place in my life – after several relationships had broken me down, this was now the manifestation of two years of being single and putting my self and my own dreams first. I wasn't about to compromise it all for just anyone.

Steve was someone I met online through a typically lousy dating app called Tinder – I know what you're thinking, what did I expect? You're right, there were so many reservations I had about even dating anyone at this point, but online was the way to do it and Tinder was familiar to me following two years of being single. I wasn't overly active online though, simply hoping on every now and then for a late night swipe in my bedroom before falling asleep. Sundays were also a good time; slow and quiet mornings meant people were laying in, relaxing and reminiscing on their ventures from the nights before – more reflective and open to talking about deeper things rather than what they do for work or how many bitcoins they own. It wasn't some strategy I had, I just felt softer on Sundays and was happy to indulge in lengthly conversation with strangers.

I had seen Steve's photo pop up and I was instantly struck by how mysterious he seemed. His profile consisted of four or five casual photos of him in various locations but none of them were very clear. They were pictures of him at a distance, standing in shadow or with sunglasses on. I could see his face, his stature and his style, but not his eyes. I'm big on eyes. They speak a truth no words or actions could and it's how I like to gauge the depth of a person. I didn't swipe left or right that morning. I read his words and looked through his photos, then read his words again, contemplating whether he was a good fit, even just for a conversation or exchange of energy. I was pretty protective of my energy at this point and didn't want to just give it away in exchange of a fleeting feeling of validation or attention. I reviewed his profile again then closed the app, packed my duffel bag and drove up to mums. We were heading into a lock down and Mum and I both lived alone so we decided to spend it together.

#relationships #acceptance #breakups #moving forward #healing #self awareness #growth #love

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aesterblaster · 2 years

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yknow what.. also @kryptic-krab who talks with me about which characters we could beat up lmao and @honeybachira

How The Blue Lock Boys Fight HCs

[most characters]

Rin

He honestly knows nothing about fighting

Throws his fists super ineffectually but with enough sheer rage that it lands

Just flailing around but somehow all the punches still do damage

Will literally try to overwhelm you with a flurry of blows

Doesn't even untuck his thumb or anything

He constantly brags about how he can beat people's asses but hasn't been in a fight fight since 5th grade

Don't let that trick you bc he will not hesitate to initiate something if he sees the chance

The type of guy to be talking shit even when he's losing

Isagi

He took karate for a while in 5th grade and he's not afraid to use it

The type to watch self defense vids and then forget every tip like 30 minutes later

Throws a pretty good right hook though

He prefers not to fight and pretty much has never been in a fight

No one has any real reason to fight him anyway

Once when he was smaller he kicked someone for insulting his mom

I think that's about it

Bachira

Has been in the most fights out of the whole fuckin cast [except shidou who is an outlier.]

Not by choice he just had to shut up his bullies ok <3

Uses flying kicks a lot

Also knows how to use nun chucks because he went though a TMNT phase

Has amazing reflexes when it comes to fights, cordination 100

He prefers to not get in as many fights now especially since he has a bit more inner peace now

Type of person to say some weird catchphrase beforehand

Just saying if you talk shit about him/his friends you will end up getting hit

Gagumaru

Will just fucking grab your face to stop you from getting close to him

Considers fighting a waste of time and trying to fight him will not get you anywhere

Doesn't even get angry when you insult him he's just like "..ok"

Has fought wild animals before though so maybe it's for the best that he's so passive towards people

Why would you even try to fight him honestly

He does know some taekwondo though from his childhood before he hit his growth spurt

Hiori

He has never fought in his life

0 skills even though he likes to think he could hold his own in a fight

If he HAD to fight he would try to go for pressure points or something strategic like that

What can I say he's a gamer

He has had people get into drama with him online and it always stays online and he prefers it that way

Would rather verbally talk it out than actually get into fisticuffs

His dad is obsessed with martial arts movies though so he has picked up a thing or two

Niko

Yes somehow he can see through his bangs

Has fought people before suprisingly and he's always won

Is very secretive about his fighting ability and no one's ever seen him fight because to him it doesn't have to be a public thing

But he's done judo/is good at flips

You try to come at him? Boom you're gonna get flipped over his shoulder

In the winter he does in fact train at a gym

Got into it because one of his friends was into it and ended up being better at it than him lmao

Also is good at predicting his opponet's moves for obvious reasons

Kunigami

Since he looks like a walking "don't fuck with me" sign he hasn't been in many fights

Once he has stopped a lady from getting robbed so that was something

Kinda just slapped the knife out of the criminal's hand then punched him

His strategy is 100% act first think later

His uppercut is in fact lethal

He has been beaten before though

One of his younger sister's absolutely whopped him because he lost her dog and didn't look for him that well

Yeah his only big weakness is that he won't fight women or people much younger than him

Nagi

Is the first to walk away

Never runs away from a fight but has walked away from several

He does insult people a lot, luckily it never comes back to bite him

His baggy clothes do hide the fact that he's a trained athlete so most people fighting him think he'll be weak

He does have a suprise advantage because usually he's so chill

The few fights he does get in usually end in him just tripping them/embarassing them

Calls fights annoying and then talks shit about people constantly

Raichi

Eats and breaths fighting montages for breakfast

He has bitten someone and he will do it again

Fights with him are like a fight with a wild animal, he starts out fucking headbutting people

Is always fired up so it's not hard to persuade him into trying to knock you out

At his school the file on him probably deserves it's own drawer

Posts videos of him flexing on tiktok with captions like "hey [insert random name here] wanna rematch 😂😂😂😂

Plan? Where? Just goes out doing every move in the book and probably all at the same time

Sae

Knows how to fight really well

Will go for a knock out straight away

Defends karate on insta and hates people who do other martial arts lmao

Has been in a decent amount of fights

But honestly he wins it from sheer power not his beloved karate

Will harp on how cool karate is and how he's a black belt but get in an actual fight with him and he will just start punching/pummeling you

He avoids lawsuits som e h o w but has done serious damage to people

Nanase

Can and has picked people up like they're a lamb

Although he's very passive and kind if you get in a fight with him you will get handled like a farm animal

Has only been in two or so fights and he won both of them

Afterwards he brought the kids to the nurse and everything TT

Says sorry the whole time

Talks to his parents about it and they're like "violence isn't the way" or whatever

It takes a LOT to get him riled up, he's more often breaking up fights than actually in them

Oliver

He had a bunch of siblings so of course he had to get good at fighting

Usually he does n o t play around when it comes to that

But sometimes he does playfight with his friends

Often wins those too

You wouldn't know it from how his exes slap him though lmao

Is more the type to finish fights but not start them

And he doesn't like getting into really serious fights, doesn't want to risk his health or anything

Reo

Kind of overreacts

It's either nothing or everything with him in fights

Look he tries to aim but he always misses/is pretty predictable

Has been in a good amount of fights (mostly because of above thing about going from 0 to 100)

Usually he loses though

The nurse knows him better than the principal even though its a pretty elite school

However he can copy moves so watch out for that

Also Nagi usually comes in at the end and saves his ass

Barou

Look, he came out of the womb kicking and screaming and that's pretty much how he fights

Very loud about it/will be screaming the e n t i r e time

His favorite thing to do is use his knee especially kneeing people in the stomach

Has only gotten into one fight at his school because everyone heard and saw him just fucking screaming like he'd been waiting for this day while tearing the poor kid apart

Yeah no one's started anything with him since

Also will go out of his way to make whoever he fight's life a living hell after the fight

Is pretty damn intense about fighting if you couldn't tell

Otoya

Well first you have to catch him

He's really good at getting out of slippery situations and pretends to despise fighting especially to girls

Has never gotten into a fight but will hang around and record fights he sees at school/on the street day to day

Runs a drama channel tracking fights and disputes happening throughout the city

And honestly if he were ever in a fight he'd just automatically go for the eyes and groin

Talks about how skilled he is at fighting but will never prove it lmao

Aoshi

He has been in a fight and honestly he just took blows until the other person tired and moved on

His entire strategy is to just be a living shield

Luckily no one knows about his main weakness which is his lower back lsmeniudrbfyui

If he weren't so muscular he'd get absolutely demolished by bullies

He's the type to be like "One of these days I'll learn to fight back!" then never does

Just tries to keep to himself and not start anything honestly

Kenyu

Yeah he's a pacifist but he also knows like 5 martial arts "just in case"

But also is so good at dissing people

If he did get in a fight it would probably stem from him back talking people because he knows that he's good if something actually starts

"What are you gonna do, dirt breath? Hit me?"

Honestly this side of him only comes out if you're an asshole first/known for being rude

He treats most people with respect but has threatened to beat up a couple of people

Chigiri

Fought much much more when he was a kid than now

Now sure he gets bitey but never actually throws hands bc of his knee

Thinks it isn't worth it

But his record was pretty win lose and usually just scrabbling and pulling hair with no real consequence

His sisters would give him tips on self defense like "if someone's trying to kidnap you do this!!"

Low key adults were afraid to approach him before or after school bc he'd go karate kid on them and be like "GET AWAY"

Never learned martial arts but just copied moves he saw on tv with varying sucess TT

Igaguri

Acts all big and bad

Gets himself into sooo many fights and loses all of them badly

Comes home with a bruise or something and his family goes on a whole rant about how he's a training monk

He legit gets himself yanked out of school and has to be at the monestary full time

He'll vauge post on social media about being taken out of school bc he was a huge bully and someone (otoya) responds with a video of him running home while some kids way younger than him chase him on a bike and he deletes the post TT

Tabito

Refuses to fight with people that are "mediocre"

But when he does fight he goes for the weak spots and pressure points

Usually wins

Has only been in like 3 or 4 fights and all of them were over something said about his appearance

He's sensitive deep down ok

Also makes sure he won't get in trouble for fights/tries to not get it on any record or anything

Shidou

His high kicks are painful as hell

Likes just kicking and rarely uses his hands

Side kicks, roundhouse, flying, straight out you name it he's used it

Is constantly learning new moves for fun

Has started fights with complete strangers on the street bc he was bored

He's just a fucking fighting fiend ok

Can and will fight a kid for something arbitrary

and finally.. the cursed extra

Ego Jinpachi

If he were to get in a fight he'd use his surroundings as a weapon

Would smash a coffee cup over someone's head

When he's bored in meetings he doodles drawings of him beating up the executives for not letting him go through with his plans

Is rather physically weak but you best believe he'd still win

As a kid he pummeled people for looking at him the wrong way lmao

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kissochako · 2 years

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Candied Love.

summary; @shoutocakie asked: How about buying all the candy you loved as a kid for Todoroki Shouto because he never got any growing up - because, you know, his dad. So you make him try them all with you until you both feel sick and need some real food, aka soba.

tags; Shouto x gender neutral!reader, fluff, mentions of childhood trauma if you squint

Long fic; 1.2k words. might be a part two in the future.

The shopping centre was bustling and hustling of people, who were predominantly shopping for Easter celebrations as the day was approaching quickly. Stores had advertised sales, as there was a boost of customers in time for Easter. Most students were going to go back home to celebrate Easter with their families, as the school provided a free-day for the holiday.

In time before the arrival of Easter, you and Todoroki had decided to buy easter-themed gifts for your class. Well, you suggested the idea and he just went along with your idea. Wandering around Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall, you noticed a small candy shop which had displayed nostalgic easter lollies.

“Todoroki, what was your favourite childhood candy?” It was a question out of curiosity, as you knew his family is rich and probably spoiled their children.

“I wasn’t allowed candy,” Todoroki answered bluntly, as if it was normal. “My Old Man thought they were going to stunt my growth and limit my ability.” You looked taken aback at him, regretting such an insensitive question.

“I-I’m deeply apologetic, I completely forgot about your upbringing.” You entwined your fingers together and darted your eyes anywhere else remote from his view. Despite the clear apology, your skin quavered at the feeling of him glaring intensely towards you.

After a few prolonged seconds, his eyes alleviated. “Do not worry about it, y/n. I don’t mind any inquiries.” He tried his best to reassure you, but there was still tension lingering around you two.

Eventually, the tension passed, you and Todoroki continued to walk around the shopping centre, discussing gift ideas for the teachers, browsing shop displays and buying individual personalised gifts for each of your classmates. It turned out to be a great time with Todoroki , with no other classmates to distract him or any surprise villain attacks. Thank goodness there weren't any fangirls present who recognised him too! Imagine what they would’ve done if they caught their beloved Todoroki out alone with a girl?

While you and Todoroki chatted away lightheartedly, concerning matters about each other’s internships and modifications you guys would like to your hero costumes. Until, your stomach bubbled and growled, interrupting the current conservation. You tried to ignore the sounds and hoped that Todoroki wouldn’t notice.

“I heard that.” He stopped in his path. You feigned confusion, tilting your head and looking around the place. “Heard what?” You replied with a hint of stammer in your voice.

“Your stomach, you’re hungry,” Regardless of his monotone voice, his voice was soothing to you. “After we’re done, we could go to the food court.”

Once each classmate had a designated gift, he was true to his word and you and Todoroki concluded the shopping trip to browse the centre for a place to satisfy you and Todoroki ‘s hunger after roaming around for a long period.

Except, none of the places at the food court seemed suitable for you and Todoroki ’s appetite. You furrowed your eyebrows and rubbed your chin until a light bulb flickered in your head. You could give Todoroki a taste of childhood treats instead!

“I have the best idea ever!” You exclaimed in enthusiasm and seized his wrist before he could protest against you.

While holding on securely onto his wrist, you took off in a paced run, ignoring Todoroki ’s questions of confusion and hesitation. With adrenaline coursing through your veins, you continued running despite the earlier pain in your calves of walking around, looking behind you occasionally to see Todoroki huffing and puffing.

Todoroki stared at you in disbelief as your hair bounced with each step across the ground. How could he tell you that he was short of breath because of your smile which made his heart beat quicker than his actual speed? He was always fond of you, your quirky personality and how easy it was to be with you…

As people stared and small children pointed at you and Todoroki, you two did not stop for anything or anyone. Except when you guys would occasionally bump into families or other teenagers your age and had to sincerely apologise towards them. Other than that, it felt as if nothing could hold you guys back from anything and everything.

“Earth to Todoroki!?” He was snapped out of his little world and was found back to his current reality, at least he’s with you. “Sorry, I was just recovering after that.. run.”

“Todoroki, if you need to recover after that small jog, then you better start practising your run if you want to make it pro!” You wittily remarkarked on his statement before giving a playful nudge to his arm. However, even when you’re making fun of him, he doesn’t ever re-evaluate how he feels towards you.

“I just need to warm up before cardio, that’s all.” He replied with a subtle curve on his lips, internally wishing you could see what you’ve done to him. “However, where are we, y/n?”

With a sly smile displayed on your face, you gestured your finger for him to follow you inside the small shop. It was flamboyant and vibrant, the walls had illustrations of dainty sweets, all of the surfaces were overflowing with advertised pastries on sale. The store had just been decorated for the upcoming Easter holiday, with plastic painted eggs placed erratically throughout, triangular banners had been hung spelling ‘EASTER’.

Shouto looked around in surprise, he thought he would’ve never in his lifetime stepped foot in one of these places. “Enjoying the sight? You can grab anything you’d like, it’s all on me!” You commented on his face of bewilderment, restraining your giggles of the stoic Todoroki being amazed by a candy store.

“Are you sure? I am certain that I can afford these myself–” You shoved your finger on his mouth, interjecting whatever he was going to say. “Nuh, ah, ah! It’s my treat, I'll buy you all of my favourites.”

You pulled Todoroki everywhere, and showcased him all of your childhood favourites and some stories of Easter when you were young. Luckily, there were some samples provided so you guys could properly choose which lollies you guys wanted to purchase.

However, you kept on stuffing Todoroki’s mouth with all kinds of sweet foods, along with him feeding you candies he thinks you’d like. One sample of each lolly, turned into three, into five and eventually eight.

After indulging in the pastries and candies, you guys had decided which to purchase and you paid for both you and Todoroki according to your promise despite Todoroki’s offers to pay instead.

You guys had to drag your feet to the car, often having to pause for one person to pour out a puddle of rainbows, scrambled eggs and rice. Once you guys had finally got there, you both slumped in the backseat in exhaustion and ache.

You took a long glance at Todoroki, admiring the fact that regardless of all the walking, running and consuming a whole month’s worth of candy, he still manages to have porcelain type skin, gratifying lips and silky hair. You rip your eyes off him once you realise what’s going through your head, failing to prevent your cheeks from getting warm to embarrassment.

“Y/N… Would you like to stay over at my residence to eat soba?”

“Of course.”

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joealwyndaily · 2 years

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With lead roles in the Sally Rooney adaptation Conversations With Friends and Claire Denis’s new film, there may be nothing the notoriously low-key actor (and Grammy-winning songwriter) can do about becoming deeply, irrevocably famous

When Joe Alwyn was starting out as an actor, he went to great lengths to psych himself up for scenes that required deep emotional excavation. 2016’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Alwyn’s plucked-from-drama-school debut, in which he played the titular American soldier with undiagnosed PTSD – featured a scene that required him to conjure a full emotional breakdown, blubbering in the arms of Kristen Stewart, who was playing his sister. In the lead-up to the scene, he plodded around a car park set in Atlanta, Georgia, at 5am, like a stroppy teenager, getting himself in the headspace to force hot, salty tears out of his eye sockets. It wasn’t just him. “Kristen was storming around the car, hitting the car and working herself into whatever place she needed to get to,” Alwyn says. “I remember not wanting to go back and rest [while they were waiting to get started]. Hopefully I’ve chilled out on that a bit now.” At the time, they were two young actors carrying the weight of a £30 million movie on their shoulders, believing that if they didn’t sell this key moment, the whole project could be undermined. In the end, though the scene was well executed, the film didn’t quite wash its face at the box office. There’s only so much you can do.

Now, six years into a career that started in a whirlwind, Alwyn is realising that it’s better to just relax and let things happen. “Sometimes the more I sit apart and turn it into this thing – that you have to generate an emotion – the harder it is once you get there,” Alwyn says. He’s sitting in a London hotel’s banal restaurant picking at a French omelette. His hair, no longer carrying the weighty, pandemic locks he’s been sporting for the past two years, looks like it’s been tousled minutes ago. In Conversations With Friends – the new Sally Rooney TV adaptation that threatens to turn Alwyn into an object of great thirst like Normal People’s Paul Mescal before him – filming the emotional crescendo was a comparative breeze. As Nick, a married actor in his 30s who’s been having an affair with 21-year-old wallflower Frances (Alison Oliver), Alwyn wears his sadness in his facial expressions. But in a scene that arrives late in the 12-part series, sitting in a vintage BMW, on the phone to someone he loved and lost, Alwyn tries to prevent his voice from shaking and halt the quiver in his lip, the tears streaking down his face betray him. “I wasn’t being weird that day,” he says. “I think [the waterworks] probably did [come easily].” He chalks it up to the quality of the writing, but accepts that it might have something to do with his own personal growth, too. “There’s something weirdly cathartic about it. Even though it’s not you.”

Alwyn doesn’t remember the last time he cried in real life. But the most pivotal moments in his career to date have revolved around heaving sobs. While he has developed a reputation among the press as one of the most guarded rising stars, predominantly for his unwillingness to spill details on his relationship with Taylor Swift, he is becoming known in the industry for his sensitivity and vulnerability. “He’s an exceptional actor,” Billy Lynn director Ang Lee told me in an email. “He had a talent which is rare in my experience, and I can spot it a mile away.” Alwyn was in his second year of drama school when he was picked for the role, which represented a gamble for Lee and the studios that backed the film. A middle-class, first-time actor from Tufnell Park being flown into Georgia to play a Texan? It was a rogue move – there were any number of fresh-faced young actors with bums-on-seats star power that could have gone in his stead. But Lee wanted to make it work. “Because he was fresh, he had a certain innocence and honesty that I could explore. That was important to the movie, because it was a story about innocence and disillusionment from war.” You can see it in the film, too – a face that could be anywhere between 12 and 21 years old, those big, wet eyes that can express joy, hope and pain from one second to the next.

Conversations With Friends represents Alwyn’s career coming of age. In the time since Lee’s film catapulted him onto the upper echelon of Hollywood’s good-looking, boyish Brits wish list, he’s been hopping between supporting roles in films by auteurs such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Joanna Hogg and Claire Denis, and acting opposite (and learning from) the likes of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Saoirse Ronan. At 31, he’s just about aged out of teen roles and into a far more interesting space. In Conversations, his eyes are weighed down by bags that tell us much more about Nick’s backstory of depression and exhaustion than he is initially willing to. Like Lee before him, the show’s director Lenny Abrahamson (who also helped Rooney adapt the wildly successful Normal People) saw what Alwyn can do. “Subtlety, vulnerability, charisma,” Abrahamson says. “Watching Nick, the audience needs to feel how deeply attractive and compelling he is to Frances, while at the same time accepting that, from [Frances’ best friend] Bobbi’s perspective, he might plausibly come across as muted, even flat. Joe managed to find a kind of glow to the character when really closely observed – like a force that only operates over small distances.”

Abrahamson recalls a moment where Alwyn elevated Rooney’s work. “Frances tells Nick she doesn’t want to wreck his marriage and Nick’s line is that his marriage has survived several affairs already... but that he’s never been a party to them. Joe chose to play this with a self-deprecating humour which made what could have been a bitter or diminishing moment into a vulnerable and somehow impressive one.”

If the wider public hasn’t yet fully understood why so many important people want a piece of him, they soon will.

To hear Joe Alwyn tell it, the last six years have been... pretty normal, actually. Sure, he made his big-screen debut as a leading man while most of his drama school peers were fighting over panto gigs, and yeah, he did start dating one of the most famous women on the planet, but other than that, nothing to write home about. “[Newfound fame] was not really something I thought about a huge amount. There was no awareness of some kind of shift, I still felt exactly the same,” he says.

Billy Lynn didn’t totally complete his takeover of the zeitgeist, but he’s been landing supporting roles in high-profile films ever since. Alwyn’s life remains largely the same. He still has the same close-knit group of friends from school, he still lives in North London. When he’s not away working, his day-to-day involves going to the pub or the cinema, reading scripts (he fell in love with a Paul Schrader film he was attached to, but it ultimately fell apart due to the pandemic), playing football – that kind of thing.

Not even the paparazzi or the tabloids, who would dedicate a double-page spread to him if he sneezed and it sounded vaguely like “Taylor”, have been able to dampen his spirits. “I think because the precedent was set – that our choice is to be private and not feed that side of things – the more you do that, hopefully, the more that intrusiveness or intrigue drops off.”

Throughout our conversation, Alwyn directs lots of questions back at me, but he’s not deflecting, he’s genuinely interested. He tells me he still doesn’t get recognised in the street, but that may change once Conversations lands.

Luckily for Alwyn, there was already a Sally Rooney Male Lead Starter Pack waiting for him when he landed the role (short shorts, gold chain, inability to communicate feelings, check, check, check). He had seen and loved Normal People in lockdown and admired how tonally different it felt to everything else on TV at the time. “[Rooney and Abrahamson] are so good at just spending time with people in a room talking or not talking. It’s not hugely narrative-driven. I like the messiness of it, and the complexity of it.” Soon after he was cast, a mutual friend created a WhatsApp group with him and Paul Mescal called The Tortured Man Club, “which is I guess a reflection on [Mescal’s character in Normal People] Connell and Nick.”

They exchanged texts and eventually met in Abrahamson’s house in Dublin while the show was filming. “He’s a lovely, lovely guy,” Alwyn says. He still hasn’t met Rooney, though she was involved in the casting (she stepped back after the early planning stage). He has exchanged a few emails with her, including one discussing a playlist she made for the character of Nick (she does this for all of her characters, Alwyn says), which features songs from The National, Pavement and Kanye West. “I remember Sally saying about The National, Nick has that kind of downbeat, tired, but still vaguely charismatic quality to him as they do in their music.”

Arguably the biggest challenge he faced along the way was nailing down Nick’s very specific south Dublin accent. Abrahamson gave him the option of keeping his own, but they eventually agreed to stick to the original text (Sasha Lane’s Bobbi was already retrofitted as American). “I listened to people like Andrew Scott and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and that kind of middle-class south Dublin accent. [Nick’s] is quite anglicised, there was the idea that he would have been to drama school in London, and he has a British wife and so maybe some of those sounds have been softened as well.” (Like fellow Brit Daisy Edgar-Jones before him, he ended up more or less spot-on).

He’s not currently worried about how the show, if it’s received even half as voraciously as Normal People, will impact his super-normal life. “I know it sounds slightly lame, but my only thought about it is that I hope people really like it.”

Alwyn's pandemic wasn't quite so normal. Somewhere in the stagnation of lockdown, he wrote a few songs with Swift on a whim, which went on to win some Grammys. Mucking about on the piano and trying his hand at composition for the first time since being in a band at school (they were called Anger Management and performed Marilyn Manson and Korn covers), he wound up creating the melody and first verse of “Exile”, arguably the standout track on Swift’s eighth studio album Folklore.

“It was really the most accidental thing to happen in lockdown. It wasn’t like, ‘It’s three o’clock, it’s time to write a song!’ It was just messing around on a piano and singing badly and being overheard and then thinking, you know, what if we tried to get to the end of it together?” It was surreal when his musings that quickly became sketches and then an actual track would go on to be produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner with vocals by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. “Sending it to Justin with the idea of doing a duet and getting voice notes back of him singing over the top and stuff was surreal. It was a perk of lockdown.” On the album’s credits, he goes by the pseudonym William Bowery (a mash-up of his great-grandfather’s first name and an area he likes in New York), but Swift eventually gave the game away. They kept his participation in Folklore and its follow-up Evermore (two co-writing credits on the former, three on the latter) a secret because they knew it was all people would talk about. “The idea was that people would just listen to the music rather than focus on the fact that we wrote it together.” While he has no plans to write more music, he cherished the experience. “It was fun to do it together, and I was proud of it. It was nice getting such a positive reception.” Is there a version of “Exile” out there with him singing on it? “Jesus, there’s probably a voice note somewhere that should be burned.”

After our dimly lit breakfast, we head for a walk by the canal in King’s Cross. It’s a warm, grey day, and there’s a woman running backwards down the path, glancing over her shoulder every other second to avoid clattering into us. “Maybe she’s in Tenet,” Alwyn quips, and then later, when she runs past us again the correct way, “maybe we’re in Tenet”. He’s dragging along a suitcase, as he’s about to head to Paris to put down some additional dialogue for Claire Denis’sThe Stars At Noon, the other massive project he’s got dropping in May (it’s premiering in competition at Cannes). He shot the film straight after Conversations last year, swapping Belfast for Panama. “The premise is two strangers meet in Nicaragua amid climate and political turmoil. They fall for each other and have to escape to the border. It’s a romance/ thriller... Jesus, I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Before he rushes off for his train, I ask a question that’s been looming over our conversation. Given the reputation he has developed among journalists for keeping schtum about his relationship (fair enough), how comfortable does he feel answering questions about his own life? “I honestly don’t mind. I’m probably not very good at talking about myself.” He hesitates. “I’m sure I’ve come across as guarded in the past. And it’s a mix of me being British and having a private life. But I don’t want to be going into these things guarded.”

There’s a difference between being guarded and being quite understandably private, we agree, before parting ways.

The day after our conversation, Alwyn goes viral for the most inconsequential thing – tell- ing an interviewer that he’s got no intention of confirming whether or not he and Swift are engaged. There’s only so much you can do.

PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Fumi Homma Styling by Angelo Mitakos Tailoring by Faye Oakenfull Grooming by Jody Taylor Set design by Molly Marot Movement director, Harry Clark

#joe alwyn #interview #gq hype #conversations with friends

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