#terrestrial paradise | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pupcuck · 2 months

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BLIND ITEM !

ft. og re4!leon s. kennedy x fem!reader

tags. actor au, smut, leon is an ass, some misogyny duh, reader vomits once like non-sexual context, breaking and entering, dub-con that turns to just consensual sex, only one threat of violence :3

note. comm for the sweetest ever @liableperfections / 🪩 anon :3 plot credit goes entirely to her literally had to cut so many words down it was 10k before bc i was so excited ab it so if it seems choppy I’m so sorry… 😭 ignore my attempt at navigating la.. it’s so confusing usa system is so confusing .. ignore any typos :3 feedback n rbs always appreciated!!! REPOST CUZ TUMBLR HATES ME.

Malibu Beach is a terrestrial paradise. A post-apocalyptic Eden of sorts ‘cause there’s no tree of knowledge or any apples— Only thing Malibu Beach and Eden have in common is the naked ladies. It’s the best part of both. Which to Leon is factually correct, but to be politically correct as Hunnigan, his PR manager, would say it’s an opinion.

No need for serpent-induced bedlam, hedonism is at its peak, the fall of man is in full swing. There’s more snow than grains of sand. Leon’s world comes to life in bottle greens and muted blues, water glittering like a diamond behind the dimmed lenses of his aviators.

He snags a cabana close to the shore, draping curtains to keep him safe from blinding cameras and prying eyes and drab women who are more naked than they are clothed. From afar it’s a great sight. Up close it’s a whole lot of cellulite and over-plumped lips and over-plucked brows. Leon’s not picky, his standards are not high, he’s only asking for the bare minimum. Nice face, nice ass, nice tits— It’s expected, but it’s not an expectation ‘cause that would mean girls have to try and live up to it, but most of them come that way. Well, they’re supposed to come that way, but some girls got a little busted on the flight over from heaven.

Ashley faces him, she should be careful when Leon’s around, he pulls on bikini strings more than he tugs on his own dick, and her bikini has started to look especially stringy.

“Can you get my back?” In the light, her lashes twinkle like gossamer wet with morning dew.

Don’t need to ask him twice. Leon’s hands traverse the plains of her back, he coats her skin in lotion like the finest of pâtissiers would a cake, angling the spatula downwards to smooth thick buttercream into pastel swirls of perfection. It’s only SPF10 ‘cause Ashley’s more focused on getting an even tan and less worried about skin cancer.

They’ve been hanging out between filming. Ashley pisses him off with her hoity-toity shit, someone swapped out her brains for that rack, but she’s hot so Leon keeps her around. And to be completely honest, his perpetual state of ennui had been smashed like brittle glass by Ashley alone. If it wasn’t for her, he’d still be riding the Raccoon City wave. Biggest blockbuster to come out of 1998. That’s a big feat. Competition was big names like Deep Impact, The Horse Whisperer— Oh, who is he kidding, nobody remembers that crap, but everybody remembers Raccoon City, the Resident Evil sequel that hit the ball out of the park.

The Resident Evil series is on its fourth instalment, and Ashley Graham insisted he come back to reprise his role; she wanted to act alongside Leon S. Kennedy and no one else. She stinks of money and Chanel Cristalle. Her dad is the studio head, so Leon’s kissing up to her, takes her cruising in his Bugatti Veyron up and down Rodeo Drive. They never breach the Platinum Triangle, he fears Ashley’s diaphanous skin would erode the moment unfiltered air hits her, melt off her bones in fleshly strings until there’s a skeleton rattling around in his passenger seat.

Ashley’s back is real nice. Like, the skin is super clear and creamy white and her shoulder blades stick out the same way a slinky feline’s do. If he could use anorexic as an adjective he would. Not quite, but almost.

“That feels so good, Leon.” He catches the tail end of the glance she casts over her shoulder, it’s flirty and he knows what’s coming next. Ashley’s spine straightens, skin pulled taut to the jagged bone, she twists her upper half and pouts directly at him. She pouts a lot for someone so scared of wrinkles. but when you’re this rich, the de-ageing secret is just Botox he guesses.

“C’mere,” Leon adopts a wider stance, spreading his thighs so she can curl up between them like a cosy pup in bed. “Hey, cutie.” He traces a thumb over her lips which are a milky shade of pink, fingers curling up beneath her chin to tilt her head up towards him.

She’s giving him bedroom eyes. Feathery lashes fanning his skin with the pace at which she bats them, like hummingbird wings beating against the wind. Leon is so going to get laid. Ashley’s nails rake over the sinewed flesh of his sculpted thighs, a testament to his athleticism, he does all his own stunts you know? Shit, he’s about to get the sloppiest head of all time, his dick is about to be degloved by that perfectly puckered pout, suction must go crazy—

In a single sweeping motion, the flimsy curtain is drawn back, fluttering in the same way Leon’s gut lurches. He can’t tell the difference between butterflies and nausea. It all feels the same to him. He half expects to be struck dumb by celestial flashes of camera light that gets him hotter than the sun.

However, in a much more pleasant turn of events, he spots a black whale tail that leads his sharp eyes to a bead of sweat dripping down a toned abdomen— Her belly button sticks out which Leon hates, but those tiny hotpants make up for her faults. They’re so short the flappy pockets are visible, distressed denim fringe brushing nice thighs that have got to mean an even nicer ass is right behind.

The face is even cuter. Round cheeks yet to shed baby fat, the apples smattered with charming freckles, her reddish ponytail is stiff with salt water. “Move,” she demands in a dictatorial fashion as if the world would bend to her will, rolling over and baring its belly like an appeased dog under her command.

Leon, against his better judgement, stays put. Who even are you, lady? The audacity of some girls, must be a fan of some kind. A clammy hand lands on his leg. Feels more like a dead fish left to rot on the docks. He shivers inwardly, prying sticky fingers off of him to clarify what the actual fuck is going on.

There’s a pretty girl in your peripheral. Not Claire. She’s not pretty in the way Claire is. She’s model pretty, might be a model or an actress or both, or neither. Just plain old pretty. But, it’s not plain, it’s extraordinary really. Polly Pocket dolly plucked from her compact home— Oh, gosh, your stomach is fucking killing right now.

Life is crazy, right? One minute you’re sucking face with a cute guy from Europe, and the next minute rotgut Mai Tais are not pairing well with the sweltering Malibu heat. And now you have reached the gates of heaven, fat-bellied clouds and Polly Pocket and something firm in your hand like a muscled calf. Not like a muscled calf, it is a muscled calf and it belongs to the most devastatingly handsome man you have ever laid eyes upon.

You anticipate the sprouting of wings from his back, the halo of Malibu sunlight that crowns his dirty blond hair to form an actual fucking halo. Holy fuck. You hope God can’t read your thoughts right now. Praying is out of the question, that’s like directly asking God not to press the big red button— Everyone presses the big red button, and then God would cast you down to hell in a fit of disgust. All ‘cause you want this angel to put your thighs to your chest and fuck you boneless with his seraphic dick.

“What the fuck, man?” Is the angelic knowledge he imparts upon your dying body. You feel like you’re being cooked alive, hot oil bubbling your skin.

“What is your problem, man?” Claire’s utterance comes at the same time.

“Hey, Claire,” you greet weakly.

“Hey, babe.” The back of her cool hand rests on your forehead, the heat is going to sear her skin like a piece of Grade-A beef. “Listen, man, can you just take your girlfriend and go?”

“She’s not my—“

“Leon, let’s just go.” The blonde girl loops her arm around this divine being’s bulging bicep.

Claire closes the curtain to shield you from the sun. It brings forth a wave of relief to your sizzling body, doused in floral breeze and sea-salt-infused linen.

“Aw, babe, you’re fucked.” She fans you lightly with her hand in hopes that man-made wind is enough to combat heat stroke or alcohol poisoning or whatever it is.

“You can head back, ‘m good here,” you slur, “gonna take a nap”

“You sure?” Claire pets your head, you see past her composed exterior, inside is a girl who’s mourning the loss of that cute beach bunny who ran for the hills the moment you started to emanate the smell of sickness.

“Mhm.” You nod, a sluggish movement that makes your liquified brain slosh about in your head. “I’ll be okay.”

“I’ll come check on you later, yeah? Just stay right here for me.” She lays a damp towel over your lower half and you feel like a bit of a beached whale. Like, fucking slack and stupid and heavy with sleep. It’s so unfair. Your one day off and the excessive day drinking comes to bite you in the ass.

Your nap is plagued by divine visions - getting to sink your teeth into that angel’s biceps. So life is not all bad. At least you’ve still got wet dreams to keep you going. The sun has sunken beyond the horizon, dwindling light paints the landscape a burnt orange, the deepening blues of the water taking on a coral hue as you poke your head out past the cotton curtains.

In the distance, you spot a mildly Claire-shaped dot with a ponytail. She’s still having fun so you make no move to bother her, instead you gather your belongings in a methodical manner. Beach towel folded at the bottom of your bag, cover-up slotted neatly into the side pocket. Water bottle and sunscreen on top - making sure to check the caps on both are tightly screwed on. Purse, keys, phone. You’ve got it all.

Though you’ve regained a sense of self - whatever you were going through a few hours ago that was an out-of-body experience - a tight knot lingers in the depths of your gut. It’s lodged in your throat. You proceed to the bathrooms located near the car park, beach bathrooms are not the nicest place on earth, but you’re not going there for a relaxing retreat, you’re there to unload the unholy amount of vomit that sits in your stomach like sunken rocks in a burlap sack.

Your gait is slightly off, it’s hard to navigate the beach in rubbery flip-flops, limping as your feet are anchored into the sinking sand with each step. After a treacherous journey over the colossal (read: totally flat, flatter than a brown rat’s feet) dunes, you’re granted access to the mildewy washrooms— The door swings open and collides with your delicate skull. A surge of nausea hits your system like adrenaline, pumping through you, and you pitch forward, hands on your knees as you hurl.

“What the fuck? Are you stupid?”

His voice is like the gentle tinkering of bells or a choir of angels, it’s thick and smooth like molasses, a knife through hot butter. All of the above. Even when he’s swearing the unholiest words you have ever heard under his breath. It’s him, the guy from before. And you just missed vomiting on his feet. Narrowly. He did hit you with a fucking door though. So there’s that.

“Oh my gosh, are you okay? I saw that!” The cute blonde from before has swiftly joined his side.

“I’m fine, Ashley, she ran into me.” Ashley… Ashley…You might’ve seen her on a billboard somewhere in Hollywood. Certainly looks the type.

“Not you, asshole, oh my god, Leon. Are you serious? You hit her!” Her voice is like money. Papery thin, but there’s substance to it. Makes the world go round. Makes you happy. This concussion might be making you woozy enough to feel happy. “Oh my god, are you, like, okay?”

You clutch at the wall of the beach hut-shaped washroom, steadying yourself. “I’m good, yeah, I’m really good, thanks for asking.” The vomit is gone from your system, that’s a step forward, but now there’s an ugly bump forming on your head.

“What if you have a concession?” Ashley frets, she makes no move to step closer as she would have to manoeuvre the puddle of vomit.

“A concussion.” Leon corrects, he side-steps to make a swift and graceful exit from this situation, making a beeline for the topless convertible parked a few rows over. Oh, shit this guy is like a big shot, and you almost puked on him. Keyword almost.

“Leon! Hello? We can’t just leave her!” She waves her arms at him wildly, like she’s flagging down a rescue helicopter.

“Oh no, my friend’s still here, I came in her car,” you begin, smiling sheepishly as she has made you feel a little like an abandoned puppy. Or a nuisance.

“No, no, you’re sick, like, really sick, and Leon hit you. He totally owes you.” Ashley insists, a delicate hand grasps your wrist in a surprisingly firm grip. “Get in the front.” She’s demanding not in the same way Claire is, but in the way of a spoiled little girl. It works for her, and you plop down on a leathery seat that sticks to your skin. “Leon, I’m gonna meet daddy over in Carbon, so don’t worry about me, okay?” She flutters her fingers at him. “Behave yourself!”

Shit. This car costs more than you would on the black market. That makes you nervous. The guy makes you even more nervous. The way he’s glowering at you— What an asshole. Ashley’s right, he hit you hard, you so deserve a swanky ride home.

“Are you stalking me?” He asks, sunglasses perched on the top of his head, he looks like a total asshole, levelling you up with those glacial eyes.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you stalking me?” He’s like dead serious right now.

“Why would I be stalking you?” There’s genuine confusion on your face, at least that’s what you want Leon to believe.

“Funny,” he scoffs, “real funny.”

“I’m sorry, what’s so funny?” You blink at him stony, gaze unwavering.

You, bitch. Acting like you don’t know him, like his face isn’t plastered all over California. In every nook and cranny. From flagship stores to beige vegan cafes that are frequented by a handful of hipsters and bored trophy wives alone. “Nothing,” Leon settles on, you can play dumb all you want, but this isn’t his first rodeo with stalkers.

In your hand, your Nokia beeps, and much to his annoyance, you pick it up to make casual conversation with whatever creep that’s put you up to this plan. “No, I didn’t mean to scare you, Claire. I literally kinda, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, but I’m safe, okay? I’m in a…” You trail off, casting a sideways glance at him, “I’m in a taxi right now.”

He squeezes the steering wheel white-knuckled. You’re playing with him right now, and it’s not fucking funny. A little pathetic if anything.

“Yeah, I got enough cash on me to make it back, don’t worry about it. I will, I will, yep, okay. Bye, Claire.” You drop your cell phone into your beach bag and it falls quiet apart from the prowling growl of his engine.

“Where you need to go?” Leon asks, his teeth grinding together, offset by his clenched jaw.

“Santa Monica.”

“That’s helpful,” he says dryly. “Long way over.”

“I’m just being safe.” You shrug. “It’s half an hour, where’d you come from anyway? Beverly Hills?”

“You’re being unhelpful,” he repeats to cement the fact that he is going out of his way to be an upstanding citizen and help stupid girls who walk face-first into doors no matter how stupid they fucking are. Leon’s soft spot for girls is clearly limited. “Bel Air,” he adds a moment later, “but you know that, don’t you?” It’s in every tabloid, don’t gotta be a stalker to know where he lives.

“No, I do not, I seriously don’t know who you are, man.” Your profile is nice enough, not an eyesore, lips look kissable, you would look nice at his feet he decides. Girls like you need dick in your mouth to learn a few things about shutting up.

“You got in my car.” Leon points out.

“I was forced into your car.” Comes your rebuttal.

“Listen, I don’t have time for your shit, just tell me.” Leon never raises his voice at women, that would be a brash decision, girls hear a slight shift in tone and go cuckoo. When you talk to them all nice and sweet they turn to putty with no regard for the subject matter at hand. Could be harvesting a few organs or taking a couple billion out of their trust fund, it doesn’t matter, they’ll be stuck swooning.

“Don’t talk to me like that.” Look at you, you think you’re the shit. “I can get home from the boardwalk.”

Leon is a lot of things. He is an asshole, he would feel like more of an asshole if he made a chick walk home in the dark. He swallows his pride and he swears his Adam’s apple bulges out further than usual. “I’ll take you home, no sweat, I owe you one.”

“I’m good, I want to walk.” You are one stubborn bitch.

“You could use the walk,” Leon says, a slip of the tongue. He didn’t mean anything by that. Listen, it just came out. Promise. You’re testing his fucking patience.

You bristle beside him, to his surprise you make no move to insult him in turn. “Who are you, even?” It’s thrown over your shoulder coolly. “Like, am I supposed to know you?”

“Leon,” Leon says, and to his knowledge there are no other Leon’s in Hollywood - Leonardo DiCaprio does not count.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” You’ve gotta be messing with him. It’s working, you’re driving him insane.

“Okay, sure.” He bites his tongue, and soon enough you tell him your address. Not the nicest part of Santa Monica, not the worst part. Definitely not Downtown L.A. so that’s good.

The velvet sky is frosted by stars, and it is a beautiful night for road head which Leon really fucking deserves for putting up with so much shit. If it were Ashley by his side he would’ve been forced to pullover more than a few times on the drive over to The Flats.

He pulls up in front of a house that looks to be made of paper mache. Wow, you’re slumming it. Leon makes an unmitigated promise to himself to never be seen around these parts ever again. The air is different, and there’s so many bad smells and oh my lord is that a homeless woman? He better leave before she knocks on his car door to offer him a good time.

“Bye, sweetheart,” Leon tells you because he is the prime example of a gentleman. “Not gonna thank me?”

“What an asshole.” You don’t even bother to say it under your breath, just to his fucking face after he dropped you off in this ugly, grey neighbourhood in his gorgeous convertible.

He forgets about you by morning. Leon has seen more women than a gynaecologist will in their lifetime. You’re another forgettable rack. That is until the following week. A blind item drops. He skims the page.

Blond guy… Plays a lot of action-hero roles… Good with women… Total Asshole… Something about harassment… Something about a full article dropping next week…

Sounds like Leon alright. Hunnigan is on his ass about it. Ashley is on his ass about it. The director is on his ass about it. The staff are looking at him funny. The room is spinning. Leon is going to take a prop gun and shoot himself. He’s managed to keep his asshole status under wraps, money and dick go a long way for girls— Shit, that bitch from Santa Monica. You were not an easy lay, there was no laying in fact. He didn’t offer you sympathy dick to make up for whatever he said to get your panties in a twist.

Leon checks his watch— Filming can wait, Ashley can wait, he won’t be long. Traffic is a nightmare, this sheepskin jacket is sticking to him - only time he has ever lamented having a roofless car. He shrugs off his costume, lays it over the headrest of the passenger seat. Your place is the crumbling stack of bricks tucked into the far corner of a street that is more litter than street.

He knocks on your door firmly, afraid it’ll knock down the paper walls. You don’t answer. He knocks again, taps his foot, and you do not answer. Leon tries the handle, he’s fucking desperate, okay? This film— The premiere has to go smoothly, he has to be back in the limelight and then you can go around making as many accusations as you please, send the pitchfork-wielding mob his way the moment promotions are over.

The door opens. Leaving your door unlocked in a neighbourhood this rough, oh, honey, you’re just begging for it, aren’t you? He steps over the threshold, the door clicks shut behind him, he moves forward in deliberate strides like he knows his way around. To be fair, there’s not many rooms to explore, not Ashley’s sprawling marble landing. From the top of the stairs, he hears your voice.

“Claire, is that you? I just got out the shower, wait there!”

Babe, you got ready for him? That’s cute, he hopes you shaved. The floorboards creak under his boots, climbing the stairs to face the open door of the bathroom. You’re in there, facing the mirror, wrapped in a baby blue towel. Easy access. When you spot him in the reflection, you drop the tub of cleansing cream in the sink basin, it splatters at the same moment your scream shatters the silence.

“What— How did you get in? Why’re you in my house? Get out!” All questions that Leon would answer if you shut up. You’re a stupid little thing, backing yourself into the wall until the back of your knees bump the bathtub. “Oh my god—“

“I let myself in, door was open, babe,” Leon says smoothly, “That’s real dangerous, y’know?”

You clutch at the shower curtain and almost bring it down on your head, Leon pries your fingers from the material as his hands find purchase on the fat of your hips. “Get off me— Get off, get off, get off!” Your spine straightens when he taps your cheek sharply. Huh. That worked. Is that what you need to loosen up? A nice, hard fuck. Some dick in that lonely pussy of yours.

“Hey, calm down, it’s just me.” The guy you think you know all about. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“You’re breaking into my fucking house, you fucking psycho, why would I want to talk to you?” Little fists hammer away at his chest, nails catching on his chest holster that looks more like BDSM gear than anything useful.

“You kidding me?” Leon captures your chin, his touch is anything but tender, a tactile intrusion that leaves crescent-shaped impressions on your jaw. “Had a lot to say in that article.”

“Is that… Is that what this is about?” You catch your breath, trying to appear nonplussed, though you tread carefully in trepidation. “The article isn’t even out yet-“ A soft whimper betrays your confident front when Leon bows his head to meet your eyes.

“Look at me when you’re speaking,” he instructs, and you do. What a good girl. “Okay, there you go, baby, continue.”

The disdain that spoils your pretty face intensifies at his words, and yet you can’t look away. Cute. Head says one thing, pussy says another. “I’m not- I’m not making Claire drop the article, this is the biggest scoop she’s ever had, and you’re gross.” You stand your ground. “You’re an asshole, I hope nobody ever has to deal with your shit again, I hope you get blacklisted, like, forever and fucking ever. I watched your shitty movies, I could do better than that and I got a D in drama class, you’re just hot and you get away with it-“

“That’s not very nice.” Leon talks to you like he is scolding a misbehaving child. Which you are. A rash little girl driven forward by noisy temerity. “We talked once, sweetheart. I wanted to go on a second date, what a shame.” He’s glad you find him hot though.

“Fuck off.”

“C’mon, you’re too cute to be using nasty words like that.” His teasing is not taken in stride, you elbow him in the gut and squirm out of his grip. Leon recovers fairly well, his fingers catching the hem of your towel, unravelling it like a spool of thread. He draws you closer, naked, wet body flush to his clothed one. Nice tits, tick, cute ass, tick, he wants to see how you’d look in a tight skirt, one that hugs your stomach and hips and the tapering of your waist. The type Hunnigan wears when she means business.

And shit. Your pussy is the only thing cuter than your face. Shaved bare like you knew he was coming. You wanted it. You did. Leon doesn’t see any other hot dates waiting for you. “Aw, baby, you shouldn’t have.” He coos, tracing your puffy pussy lips with the pad of his thumb.

“Don’t do that…” Your voice is merely a whisper, and you’re not scared, girls like you don’t get scared. They get pissed off. Heated. Angry and upset. But never scared.

“Is this what you want, babe? Some dick ‘n you’ll shut up? Just wanted my attention.” Leon’s voice is a low rumble in your ears, he drawls like a slow trickle of sticky honey. Nothing is stickier than your cunt. He parts your lips, catching the dribbles of slick that form in beads along your slit. “Jesus, you’re fuckin’ wet, baby. You needed this, didn’t you?”

“No,” you croak out, throat dry from only a few minutes of disuse.

“No? You want me to stop then, sweetheart?” Leon slows his touch, it diminishes until it’s gone entirely and you whine at the loss so sweetly. “You’re not making any sense, babe.”

“Oh my god.” You suck in a breath, trembling not out of fear, but out of unadulterated rage and dizzying lust for a piece of his dick. “Fuck you.” He takes that as a Please, fuck me!

“How about we do something easier, baby.” Leon forces you onto your knees, and he was fucking right. You look so good like this. Knelt by his feet. His belt is unclipped, pants unzipped, boxers lowered. He guides his dick into your mouth, and you really are the most cock-starved thing he's ever met, ‘cause you open up and swallow him whole.

Then you do the sluttiest fucking thing a girl has ever done for him - reach back and jab your nails into the meat of his ass to force his dick deeper down your throat. “Shit, that’s right, baby— Fuck, you’re a fucking freak, huh?” Leon rewards you with a skull fuck. Balls clapping wetly and obscenely against your chin.

You gag on it, and you love it. God, he feels the pulse of your cunt through his boot when you grind yourself down on the steel toe cap. It’s round enough to do no damage, cool enough to help that hot cunt out, and the perfect shape to part your folds and stimulate your swollen clit.

Leon slaps it on your cheek a couple of times, then he tightens his hand around the shaft as you play with his balls, try to fit ‘em in your mouth like jawbreakers. Shit, fuck, his brain fucking blanks. He’s gonna cum if you don’t stop. His hand comes to rest on your forehead, hoping to snuff out the pleasure that builds too soon in his belly, you pop off his cock, refusing to stop making out with his tip, tonguing the slit like you’re getting paid to do this.

The bedroom is a couple metres away, it’s an awkward shuffle over with his lips slotted to yours, tongue running over your teeth, licking at your gums. Your back hits the handle, then less than a metre after that it hits the squeaky mattress. He kisses down your body, you smell like fruity body wash, it might be strawberry or raspberry. It smells like pink, that’s all he knows.

A sloppy kiss is placed on the very front of your mound. “You want me to play with your sticky little pussy, baby?”

“Ew,” you whimper out, nodding anyways, legs bent at the knee to bare your sweet pussy to him.

He laps at you like a dog. Eating pussy is tedious, Leon likes pushing heads down on his dick, it’s way better. But to hear you moan like that, shit he would do it a thousand times over, latch onto your clit and suck till you see stars. “Did you like that, baby? Fuck, creamed on my fucking tongue, sweet little thing.” He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Sure, Leon's going to go back to set smelling of your cunt, it’s not so bad. He quite likes it. Better the tang of pussy than sweat.

“Jus’ put it in,” you beg, “please, please—“

“I heard you the first time, sweetheart. Be patient.” Leon takes your ankles in his hands, puts them by your ears. See this? That’s when Leon can tell a girl really fucking wants him. When she holds her thighs up for him, and then she puts her palms flat to spread herself as open as she can get. “Jesus, baby, you’re a slut.” He laughs derisively, it rolls off his tongue as sweetly as any other pet name.

You’re left keening when the head of his dick sinks into your weeping cunt, your toes curl, and Leon cranes his neck to kiss your ankle. He runs his hands over the backs of your plush thighs, circling his hips as he eases into you— He’s lying. In his world, there’s no easing. Leon’s dick is mean, and he can tell you’ve been dying for a rough fuck. He bottoms out the second his head pops past your fluttering hole. Then he’s balls-to-the-wall. Like, literally. They’re heavy against your ass, slapping loudly with each measured thrust.

“Baby,” Leon starts, he’s breathless, rolling his hips into yours, “I swear on my life, sweetheart, if that shit drops I’ll beat you fuckin’ bloody.” That article dropping would signal the end of his life as he knows it. Your pussy clamps down on him at his words. “Oh, you nasty little bitch, you liked that?”

There’s a string of yes, yes, yeses! and then a string of expletives, and then a drawn-out call out of his name as he drives into you with all the force of a freight train. Your nails are scratching down his back, and your pussy is coating him in the same wetness that pools below your ass.

“Take it, baby, take it, fucking take it.” It takes one last thrust for you to come undone, your orgasm has your body going ramrod straight, and then your pussy fucking gushes. And Leon in all his years of sex and women and pussy and fucking has never made a girl do that. Half of him is convinced you’ve gone and pissed on him, the other half is sure he’s made you squirt like girls do in porn— Holy shit. He’s twenty-seven years old and he only just made a girl squirt.

You cry out as he grinds into you, his dick bumping your cervix, his pelvis grinding into your clit— And you sob, shaking your head as another burst of liquid spurts out of your cunt, soaking his abdomen, soaking his fucking shirt that belongs to the costume department—

Fuck, he’s gonna cum. He’s cumming hard. Leon’s balls tighten, and his shaft twitches as his load shoots out of the tip of his cock into your tight cunt. He didn’t pull out. If there’s one thing, he’s good at, it’s pulling out. Leon made a girl squirt, and he didn’t pull out. All in one day. What an accomplished man he is.

“Mmm.” You roll onto your front, face in the pillows as you catch your breath, still shivering as aftershocks zap at your nerve endings. Leon wipes the sweat built on his forehead, strands of his hair stuck to it. “I’m not convinced, the article’s still going up.”

What a bitch.

“Right.” He delivers a brisk swat to your ass, it elicits an involuntary yelp. “Guess I’ll have to convince you. I got a week, don’t I?”

“A week and a half,” you say, not bothering to bid him bye as he zips his cargos, “I’m pretty hard to convince.” Cheeky.

“It can be done.” Through another round of dick from Monday to Friday.

#leon s kennedy x reader #leon s kennedy x you #leon s kennedy smut #leon kennedy x you #leon kennedy imagine #leon kennedy x reader #leon kennedy smut #resident evil x you #resident evil x reader #resident evil smut

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tnsophiaonly · 5 months

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"A shift within reality hurts."

Devotees stated, feeling their body duplicate and travel within different realities.

Part 1, Part 4

TW:

Bad words, (word) graphic mentions of tearing limbs, uhm very bad bad writing (as always) and short (?)

—y—t—i—l—a—e—R—

Out of all the odds in your room, it has got to be that little mirror ball. It reflects your reflection.

It's like those things fortune tellers use to know your fortune? Like this -> 🔮

You don't know how or why you have that but you just kept it, what if you somehow need it soon?

—t—f—i—h—s—

The Zapolyarny Palace, a cold and magnificent establishment where the Cryo Archon, The Tsaritsa orders her subjects.

The Tsaritsa's orders were simple yet held so much meaning and danger, "The Creator has descended upon this lands, and has ascended back to thy's world, they have the answers to this world that we don't, the power and the position. They will be a critical need against Celestia. Bring them here, alive."

It echoes through the halls, the order, sharp and clear. The tinge of cold lingering in her voice.

The 11 Harbingers are currently in the Il Dottore's laboratory,

Only a certain ginger was excited, hopelessly waiting to be able to get to his creator's world.

"Could you cut it out already?!" A purple puppet punched a ginger's arm as the ginger won't shut up about the Creator.

Apparently, only Childe was a devotee, and some Fatui agents too. But the others can't be said the same.

Example.. well The Balladeer. The Balladeer, well is self explanatory...

—s—l—a—o—g—

On the other hand, researches among other nations were also moving, thrilled of the possibility of being in their creator's world.

After the spreaded news of the creator descending, and with the Oracle, '(S/M)' finally talking about the creator event,she has given out wisdom that those who are gifted are finally capable of ascending to the creator's world.

—n—i—a—p—

"Devotees and Acolytes, I, the creator's humble oracle, hereby knowledge that it is my utmost honor and privilege to deliver a message of the utmost significance, Our Grace, who has descended to bless the flowers and very terrestrial of Teyvat has ascended yet again, but now, with a way for us to reach that heaven. The time has finally come for all those who seek ascension, for the pathway to our heavenly paradise has finally opened. Only those who possess the strength and determination to overcome the rigors of the world shall emerge victorious and bask in the eternal glory of our Grace. Let us now offer ourselves in humility and devotion, for our purpose has been revealed. The paradise we seek is within reach, and we shall reap the rewards of our efforts in this life and the next. Come forth, and I shall guide you through this gateway, which will lead you to eternal bliss and utter contentment.." every exact word the creator's oracle spoke with every possible happiness and admiration. As they set off to Mondstadt, other nations were envious of the nation but as so still came either way, (S/N or M) has led them to the very Creator statue, sitting in mid air with its hands in offering,

The statue looked ethereal, but didn't match the Creator's actual look of graciousness, but then, no statue or anything can ever match the Creator can it?

As they stood, (S/M) walked slowly, then, the blonde traveler came in a swoop out of nowhere, in the creator's hands, with a look of shock and confusion, a transcendent mix of the color blue, pink and gold appears in a stair like form.

Guiding and ending to the heavens above. The traveller went up first, then disappeared on the top, turning into primogems, then (S/N) went, turning into primogems too, then archons, then gods (even non-playables), then adeptus, then just at this point every character playable, then vision users, then the last ones were the npc's some were able to get in, some were not.

All came except for the Fatui Harbingers, The Tsaritsa, fully knowing what they're up to, decided to let them be under orders, because unlike Dottore's machine, there's no knowing where this gate will take them. Then she went in, then turned into primogems.

—r—e—w—o—p—

Ever since the creator's descending, deceased ones lived again, La Signora became alive again, Teppei, Tomo... Etc... But those who perished without the Traveller with them were not saved again. They lived in peace yet.

No one knew how Scaramouche came back, but he was definitely with Dottore now, apparently, Dottore exchanged Scaramouche and his clones for the electro and Dendro gnosis to Nahida in the negotiation. That's what they were told then.

And here they were,

Here in Dottore's lab with the help of Sandrone's machinery and Dottore's knowledge and shit, they were able to create a machine to be able to shift.

It was understandable that some were skeptical about the choice, it had a 49.88% out of 100% chance to work isn't it? But, there was no choice but to comply, as it is strictly under the Tsaritsa's words that they should go through a legitimate machine that can bring them to the creator.

Then one-by-one they entered the metallic machine, then felt immense pain as soon as they got in,

It's as if their body was warping with another, their body ripping apart, limb-to-limb, if you were a normal person, it would feel like a punishment for trying to shift into another reality,

Unlike the gateway from the Creator statue that'll feel like going to heaven and all, this machine felt like you were a doll that's been ripped apart when two little girls fought over you, stretching your body apart that it ripped into two.

—-—-—-—

Holding on to your consciousness in class as math class/history class started, it was Monday again unfortunately, school started yet again, you just want to bop your head and cry, why are you studying when you die it's all just gonna get tossed away either way? You wasted your life struggling in stress, pain and all, but it was all for nothing, then again if you just sit there it's also considered as wasting your life isn't it?

Suddenly you want to go back to that strange dream, lucid dream..? Or..

"(Y/n).."

Your name was called out by a classmate, asking for an extra pen sheepishly. You stared at them, eyeing them, then went through your stationary and gave them an extra pen, with a thanks, they started scribbling again. You look at the board, oh shit, you had to take notes or else!

Then you started writing again, with few silly doodles on the pages,

As class goes on, you're unaware that the world you've just went to, has come to you.

Pls ignore to the fact that I disappeared then just appeared out of nowhere, class started becoming HORRID and really a pain in the ass-

+I was not satisfied with the things I wrote in here so it took so much time 😭

Anyways here ya go, I'm dropping another thing connected about this dw.

Taglist

(I still don't know what is this)

@khalhaimdad @yourlocalstranger123 @undecidingfate @urog1 @mmeatt

#genshin impact #yandere #yandere x reader #genshin x reader #yandere genshin #yandere genshin x reader #genshin impact sagau #genshin sagau #sagau #reader

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journeytothewestresearch · 7 months

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JTTWR Story Idea Directory

I was influenced by @digitalagepulao's recent post to list my own collection of story ideas.

These are set in the Buddo-Daoist disc world system of the original novel.

1) The Origin of Sun Wukong

This provides three fictional origins for the Monkey King based on my past research. He is ...

The spiritual offspring of supreme ape immortals who have served as teachers of countless mortal and divine beings, the later including the Buddha and Master Subodhi. The couple rebels against the heavenly hierarchy for failing to keep an ancient promise.

The offspring of an ancient evil who intentionally bred him to destroy the gods.

A former hot-tempered, Vajra warrior-like Bodhisattva who is exiled from paradise for killing a being who seemingly offended the Buddha. He is punished to ten lifetimes as a figure of great strength who is continually bested and forced by circumstances to protect something or someone weaker than him.

Each origin has pros and cons.

2) Immortal Warriors and Shaolin Monks

Master Subodhi's mountain is the training ground for an immortal monastic army similar to Shaolin. Monkey gains combat experience as a monk soldier.

3) The REAL Reason Subodhi Expels Sun Wukong

Sun's much, much older spiritual brothers and sisters attack him out of jealousy for quickly climbing the ranks of the immortal monastic army. Forced to defend his position, Monkey's anger drives him to take on a monstrous, 100,000-foot-tall cosmic form to defeat his opponents. Subodhi fears Sun's limitless potential and great anger will lead him down the path of villainy, so he uses the pine tree incident as an excuse to expel him.

4) The Reason for Sun Wukong's Rebellion

Subodhi warns Monkey to protect himself when mastering the "Multitude of Terrestrial Killers" (i.e. the 72 changes) because said deities are considered baleful stellar gods who bring bad luck and disease. But the Terrestrial Killers exploit a chink in his spiritual armor and feed him small suggestions that have compounding effects on his personality, making him increasingly egotistical and combative. This eventually leads to his rebellion against heaven.

These are set on our Earth.

1) Sun Wukong vs Heracles/Hercules

Heracles, the Buddha's protector, is called in place of Erlang to end Monkey's rebellion. After the latter attains Buddhahood at the end of the journey, the Tathagata asks the son of Zeus to escort Sun through the Greek world system.

See the 07-08-22 update (refer also to section 3 for background info):

2) A Realistic Retelling of Journey to the West

The story follows the itinerary of the historical monk Xuanzang, and the various episodes from the original novel take place both on the way to and coming back from India. The disciples are acquired during the initial journey; however, their order is reversed—Sha, Zhu, and then Sun.

The past punishments of the disciples are still the same. But Monkey's history is changed because Taoism didn't exist in ancient India. Instead of becoming an immortal, he is a Hindo-Buddhist rishi who rebels against heaven.

See updates here and here.

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amphibiousmercurial · 10 hours

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From Pandemonium to Gotham: Is There Heroism in the Heart of the Anti-Hero?

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. (Freud)

Milton’s Paradise Lost and Nolan’s The Dark Knight deliver two of the most compelling anti-heroes in Satan and the Joker, respectively. Both characters offer a fascinating exploration into the shadows of heroism, where the line between hero and villain blurs into intriguing moral ambiguity.

Satan, once the brightest angel, now the proudest fallen, declares from the fiery abyss, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” His defiance against divine authority is portrayed with an eloquence that almost makes you root for him. This isn’t just a rebellion; it’s a tragic fall from grace, wrapped in the grandeur of self-assertion and liberty.

Switching to the grimy streets of Gotham, the Joker turns the city into his anarchic playground. With a grin, he challenges the very foundations of order: “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos.”

Unlike Satan’s celestial coup, the Joker’s methods are terrestrial and visceral, striking fear and fascination in equal measure.

Freud would likely argue that our fascination with these figures is due to their embodiment of the id’s desires—unrestrained, primal, and taboo. Jung might add that they reflect our shadow selves, the parts of our psyche that we are both drawn to and frightened of. Sociologically, figures like Durkheim would interpret our collective captivation as a break from the normative monotony of societal life, where such extreme deviations from the norm temporarily unify society in their wake.

Yet, their appeal is paradoxical. While intellectually stimulating, their philosophies, when stripped of glamor, reveal a landscape of chaos and destruction. This brings us to a complex realization: we are drawn to the idea of breaking free from constraints, but the reality of such freedom, as embodied by Satan and the Joker, is often catastrophic.

These reflections prompt us to question not only the nature of heroism but also the underpinnings of our moral and societal structures. Are these anti-heroes, with their profound challenges to order and morality, carrying a torch of truth, or are they merely reflecting our own hidden desires for disruption and change?

In a world grappling with power dynamics and authority, characters like Milton’s Satan and Nolan’s Joker challenge the established order, prompting us to reflect on the socio-political structures that govern us. Their narratives stir debates on freedom, control, and the moral complexities of rebellion against oppressive systems.

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illustratus · 1 month

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The Boat of Souls (Dante's Divine Comedy) by Gustave Doré

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zukotheartist · 8 months

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There are people out there who can articulate this better than me and I just woke up and barely slept because I was listening to Unreal Unearth (and i could be wrong about a lot of this stuff, we all interpret songs differently) but

Hozier assigning circles of Dante's Inferno to the songs and putting First Time in the First circle which is Limbo (brief rundown: where pagans like Virgilio, Dante's guide in Hell, and unbaptised infants end up - doesn't have a punishment like the following circles except for the souls there having the desire to meet God) is making me go Feral.

Because immediately as the song starts we have:

I love the fact that you can read this in multiple ways because according to Greek Mythology and The Aeneid (with Virgilio) the River Lethe is situated in the Underworld, around Hypnos' (god of sleep) cave (which lures you to sleep/makes you drowsy in its presence), and it's where souls about to be reincarnated go to forget their past life so they can move on to the next.

But in Dante's Divine Comedy he actually places the River Lethe in the terrestrial Purgatory and souls that enter Paradise have to be dipped there first, to be clean when they enter the realm of God.

Yet either way it keeps these forgetfulness-past life-reborn themes going.

Then, right after the "And the first time that you kissed me / I drank dry the River Lethe"

"Some part of me must have died" = the forgetfulness from drinking (dry) the River Lethe.

"And some part of me came alive" = because of the rebirth/reincarnation post drinking from the River Lethe (i also love that, unlike the other line, it starts with an "And" because it underlines the plot of continuity>rebirth imo).

Then

This whole part about mothers and flowers and death and again re-birth being important because we're in the circle of hell where unbaptised babies end up.

And finally

Because the Lethe was not just a river but also a Goddess whose description is literally "Goddess of forgetfulness and oblivion".

I'm actually gonna be sick over this whole song ajaksksksks Hozier do I need to pull out my Divine Comedy and high school textbooks for this??? Cause I will.

#feeling sick to my stomach but at least some of the italian educational system paid off in the end #hozier #unreal unearth #first time #first time hozier #al's post

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losprimeros · 4 months

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altima down presents document in conjunction with neurotek sound | free party los angeles | 16th december 2023

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demifiendrsa · 1 year

Video

youtube

DC Studios | Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters

Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters:

Creature Commandos: An animated seven episode series, written by Gunn, that is already in production. Originally a team of classic monsters assembled to fight Nazis, this is a modern take on the concept. The voice actors have yet to be cast but the executives are looking to find people who can voice the animated characters and also portray the live-action versions when the anti-heroes to show up in movies and shows.

Waller: A spin-off of Gunn’s own HBO Max hit series, Peacemaker, Viola Davis will return as the ruthless and morally ambiguous head of a government task force. It is being written by Christal Henry (Watchmen) and Jeremy Carver, the creator of the Doom Patrol TV series.

Superman: Legacy: The movie featuring the Man of Steel that Gunn is writing and may direct, although no commitments on that end have been made. While the two previous titles are meant to be “aperatifs,” in Safran’s words, Superman is the true kick off for the duo’s DCU plans. “It’s not an origin story,” Safran said. “It focuses on Superman balancing his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing. He is the embodiment of truth justice and the American way. He is kindness in a world that thinks that kindness as old-fashioned.” A release date of July 11, 2025 has been penciled in.

Lanterns: Greg Berlanti’s long-in-the-works Green Lanterns TV series has been scrapped and the duo have parted ways with the longtime DC series steward. In its place will be a new take on the space cops with power rings. “Our vision for this is very much in the vein of True Detective,” Safran described. “It’s terrestrial-based.” It will feature prominent Lantern heroes Hal Jordan and John Stewart and is one of the most important shows they have in development. “This plays a really big role in leading into the main story we are telling across film and TV.”

The Authority: a movie based on a team of superheroes with rather extreme methods of protecting the planet that first originated in the late 1990s under an influential imprint known as Wildstorm, run by artist and now head of DC publishing, Jim Lee. “One of the things of the DCU is that it’s not just a story of heroes and villains,” said Gunn. “Not every film and TV show is going to be about good guy vs. bad guy, giant things from the sky comes and good guy wins. There are white hats, black hats and grey hats.” Added Safran: “They are kinda like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. They know that you want them on the wall. Or at least they believe that.”

Paradise Lost: The duo describe this HBO Max series as a Game of Thrones-style drama set on the all-female island that is Wonder Woman’s birthplace, Themyscira, filled with political intrigue and scheming between power players. It takes place before the events of the Wonder Woman films.

The Brave and the Bold: “This is the introduction of the DCU Batman,” said Gunn. “Of Bruce Wayne and also introduces our favorite Robin, Damian Wayne, who is a little son of a bitch.” The movie will take inspiration from the now-classic Batman run written by Grant Morrison that introduced Batman to a son he never knew existed: a murderous tween raised by assassins. “It’s a very strange father-and-son story.”

And, importantly, it will feature a Batman not played by Robert Pattinson…

Booster Gold: an HBO Max series based on a unique and lower-tiered hero created in 1986. Safran said of the series, “It’s about a loser from the future who uses basic future technology to come back to today and pretend to be a superhero.” Gunn described it as “imposter syndrome as superhero.”

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow: Taking its cues from the recent Tom King-written mini-series, this movie project promises to have a different take than what most think of when the idea of Superman’s cousin comes to mind. “We will see the difference between Superman, who was sent to Earth and raised by loving parents from the time he was an infant, versus Supergirl, raised on a rock, a chip off of Krypton, and who watched everyone around her die and be killed in terrible ways for the first 14 years of her life and then come to Earth. She is much more hardcore and not the Supergirl we’re used to.”

Swamp Thing: a horror film that promises to close out the first part of the first chapter.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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By: Sam Harris

Published: April/May 2024

This article was adapted from a transcript of the November 7, 2023, episode of the author’s podcast, Making Sense.

We have witnessed extreme moral confusion since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Some of it has been just frank anti-Semitism, but much is actual confusion. Most people in the West still don’t understand the problem of jihadism. We often speak about “terrorism” and “violent extremism” generically. And we are told that any link between these evils and the doctrine of Islam is spurious and nothing more than an expression of “Islamophobia.” Incidentally, the term Islamophobia was invented in the 1970s by Iranian theocrats to do just this: prevent any criticism of Islam and to cast secularism itself as a form of bigotry. Islam is a system of ideas, subscribed to by people of every race and ethnicity. It’s just like Christianity in that regard. Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam are both aggressively missionary faiths, and they win converts from everywhere. People criticize the doctrines of Christianity all the time and worry about their political and social influences—but no one confuses this for bigotry against Christians as people, much less racism. There’s no such thing as “Christophobia.” As someone once said (it was not Christopher Hitchens, but it sure sounds like him): “Islamophobia is a term created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In any case, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are. We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others. What could turn ordinary human beings into suicide bombers, and what could get vast numbers of their neighbors to celebrate them as martyrs, other than their entire society being oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power? So, in the case of Israel, many people imagine that the ghoulish history Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.

Now, there are many things to be said in criticism of Israel, particularly its expansion of settlements on contested land. But Israel’s behavior is not what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do.

These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians on purpose, not as collateral damage, and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to Hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.

If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.

It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without being confused about the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel but to open societies everywhere. My friend Christopher Hitchens was extremely critical of Israel and openly supportive of Palestinian statehood. But he wasn’t even slightly confused about the problem of jihad.

There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the past forty years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that an undercount.1 Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews. There have been eighty-two attacks in France and over 2,000 in Pakistan during this period. Want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, which is a transformation that can happen very quickly—just as quickly as new beliefs can take root in a person’s mind. You just need a wider Muslim community that doesn’t condemn jihadism but tacitly admits the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.

In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these facts. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, Paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

When one asks what the motivations of jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society, if only they were given the chance. Secular liberals imagine that jihadists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove he was doing anything for religious reasons.

Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if a white supremacist goes on a killing spree in a Black church and says he did this because he hates Black people and thinks the White race is under attack, this motive is accepted at face value without the slightest hesitation. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate Islam every time. The game is rigged.

Do not mistake what I’m saying now for anti-Muslim bigotry. I’m talking about the consequences of ideas, not the ethnic origins of people. Not a word I’ve said, or will ever say on this topic, has anything to do with race. And the truth is, I’m not remotely xenophobic. I’m a xenophile. The Middle East has produced some of my favorite parts of culture—some of my favorite foods, music, and architecture. Despite my better judgment, I absolutely love the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Everything I’m saying about the problem of jihadism is about the problem of jihadism—the triumphal belief by some percentage of the world’s Muslims that they must conquer the world for the one true faith through force and that Paradise awaits anyone who would sacrifice his or her life to that end.

Of course, many religions produce a fair amount of needless suffering. Consider the pedophile-priest scandal in the Catholic Church, which is something I’ve written and spoken about before, I hope with sufficient outrage. One can certainly argue, as I have, that Catholic teaching is partly to blame for these crimes against children. By making contraception and abortion taboo, the Church ensured there would be many out-of-wedlock births among its faithful; by stigmatizing unwed mothers, it further guaranteed that many children would be abandoned to Church-run orphanages, where they could be preyed upon by sexually unhealthy men. I don’t think any of this was consciously planned; it’s just a grotesque consequence of some very bad ideas. And yet the truth is that there is no direct link between Christian scripture and child rape. However, imagine if there were. Just imagine if the New Testament contained multiple passages promising Heaven to any priest who raped a child. And then imagine that in the aftermath of an endless series of child rapes within the Church, more or less every journalist, politician, and academic denied that they had anything whatsoever to do with the “true” teachings of Catholicism. That is the uncanny situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam.

The problem that we must grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Qur’an, in the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.

There are many, many verses in the Qur’an that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Qur’an; there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident; it’s in the Qur’an and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.

Worse, in my view, is the moral logic one gets from the doctrine of martyrdom and Paradise. If you take martyrdom and Paradise seriously, it becomes impossible to make moral errors. If you blow yourself up in a crowd, your fellow Muslims will go straight to Paradise. You’ve actually done them a favor. Unbelievers will go to Hell, where they belong. However many lives you destroy, it’s all good.

Again, most of this horror has nothing to do with Israel or the West. In 2014, six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar. These jihadis came from outside of Pakistan; there was a Chechen, two Afghans, and three Arabs. They murdered 145 people, 132 of whom were children. They burned a teacher alive in front of her students and then killed all the children they could get their hands on. They didn’t take any hostages. They had no list of demands. They intended to die to achieve martyrdom. And they did die, so they got at least half of what they wanted. It is very difficult for secular people to understand how this behavior could be possible. They assume only madmen would do this sort of thing.

But that’s the horror of it—you don’t have to be mad to be a jihadist. You don’t even have to be a bad person. You just have to be a true believer. You just have to know, for sure, that you and all the good people will get everything you want after you die and that the Creator of the Universe wants nothing more than for you to kill unbelievers. Here is what a supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said when interviewed about the school massacre:

Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does. Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.” Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet … They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”]. Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169–170] that they are not dead. You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.

My point is that we have to take declarations of this kind at face value, because they are honest confessions of a worldview—and it is a worldview that is totally antithetical to everything that civilized people value in the twenty-first century. This problem is much bigger than the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.

Taking Anti-Semitism Seriously

I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive. This follows directly from my views about organized religion in general. So, obviously, I don’t think there should be Muslim states either—or Christian ones, for that matter. However, there are over twenty countries in which Islam is the official state religion and over fifty in which Muslims are the majority—and there is exactly one Jewish state. Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.

In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust, was denied entry into Cuba, the United States, and Canada and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then systematically murdered.

I’ve never taken modern anti-Semitism very seriously. I think I’ve done exactly one episode of my podcast on the topic. I’ve studied it. I understand its roots in Christian theology—despite the fact that Jesus, his apostles, and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. I’m a student of the Holocaust. And I’m well aware of the anti-Semitism that existed in Europe and the United States at the time. Read David Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews to understand how widespread anti-Semitism was in America, even as Jews were being killed by the millions in Europe. And, of course, I’m all too aware of the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam—and of the way it has been compressed into a diamond of intolerance and hatred throughout the Muslim world by the modern influence of Nazism. There’s some very depressing history there for anyone who wants to read it.

And I’ve been aware that year after year in the United States, no group has been targeted with more hate, and hate crime, than Jews. This is something that many Americans aren’t aware of. As I said, the American Left would have you believe that “Islamophobia” is a major concern. Vice President Kamala Harris is now heading a commission on “Islamophobia” in America, as though that’s the problem we’ve been seeing recently—just a massive outpouring of hatred for Muslims in America by non-Muslims. Has that ever happened?

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Jews were targeted far more than Muslims. And that has been true every year since. According to FBI statistics, though Jews are just over 2 percent of the population, they receive over half the hate in America and five times the level that Muslims do (and I think it’s safe to say that much of this hate comes from Muslims themselves). Jewish schools and synagogues have always incurred greater security costs than non-Jewish institutions, and for good reason, because the threat to them is greatest.

While this status quo has been despicable, I have always believed that it was tolerable. And I say this as someone who has received death threats for two decades, and many of these threats are often explicitly anti-Semitic. Even given all this, I have felt that anti-Semitism, as a real threat to Jews, certainly in the West, was behind us. I can’t say that now. In the past few weeks, with Jews being openly reviled and threatened all over the world, in the immediate aftermath of the most shocking atrocities committed against them since the Holocaust, I’ve begun to think that anything is possible.

Incidentally, if you ever wondered how you might have behaved had you been a German on the morning after Kristallnacht—if you’ve ever wondered whether you would have just gone about your business or done something to resist the slide of your society into absolute depravity—more or less everyone on Earth is now getting the chance to see just that. There was a mob chanting “Gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House. We have Jewish students in Ivy League universities cowering behind locked doors in fear for their physical safety. All university administrators, Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of the Palestinian cause—without taking a moment to understand what actually happened on October 7, or understanding it and not caring—you are all now part of history.

The outpouring of anti-Semitism that we have witnessed since October 7 really seems to mark a new moment, both in the United States and globally. And for the first time, I now worry that my daughters will live in a world where their Jewishness will matter to people who do not wish them well, and they will be forced to make certain life choices on that basis, choices that I never had to make. Apart from being a public figure and having to deal with disordered people of every description, I have never been concerned about anti-Semitism for even five minutes in my life. I now feel that I have been quite naive. That’s putting it charitably. I’ve been utterly ignorant of what has been going on beneath the surface.

Of course, the boundary between anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and, yes … babies; and who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields; who are killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents; who burned people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace,” decapitated others, and dragged their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is great.”

If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics who, again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as a religious sacrament; if you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.

What is more, you don’t even care about what you think you care about, because you have failed to see that Hamas, and jihadists generally, are the principal cause of all the misery and dysfunction we see—not just in Gaza but throughout the Muslim world. Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews. A rational government in Gaza that cared about the fate of its citizens could have made something beautiful—or at least not awful—out of that strip of land on the Mediterranean. But Hamas has spent billions of dollars on terrorism. The suffering of Gaza is due to the fact that it has been run by a death cult, against which Israel has had to defend itself continuously. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel—that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide”—happens to be true.

But now we have college students at our best universities tearing down posters of hostages held by Hamas—some of whom are Americans, and some of whom are children—imagining that they are supporting the Palestinian cause. It boggles the mind. We have LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas—when they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza because Hamas throws anyone suspected of being gay off of rooftops. They’re directly supported by Iran, where gay people are regularly hanged.

We’ve got feminist organizations such as CodePink going all in for Hamas and accusing the Israelis of genocide. Do they understand how Hamas treats women? Did CodePink support the women of Iran who were thrown in prison and even killed for daring to show their hair in public? Do they realize that women are treated like property throughout the Muslim world and that this is not an accident? Under Islam, the central message about women is that they are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives. Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want as long as these theocrats are Muslim.

If anything good comes from this outpouring of hate and moral confusion, it will be the end of identitarian politics of the Left. A friend of mine was just at an art opening, where they were passing hors d’oeuvres, and someone she knew came up to her and asked if she had any food in her teeth. And my friend said, “No, your teeth are perfectly white and beautiful.” Unfortunately, the woman herself was Black and considered the association of the terms white and beautiful a microaggression. She got greatly offended and stormed off. What, did she want brown teeth? I know nothing about this person apart from this anecdote, but I guarantee you that this prodigy of social justice is completely confused about Israel and Hamas and jihadism. This is the sort of person for whom words are violence but massacring women and children with knives, or burning them alive, is a completely defensible response to “oppression.” Most elite circles in the West—academia, Hollywood, the media, nonprofits—have been poisoned, to one degree or another, by this social justice psychosis where imaginary harms are seized upon as though they were existential concerns, and pure evil is easily shrugged off or even celebrated as a moral victory.

What Jihadists Want

The bright line, ethically, between Israel and her enemies can be seen on the question of human shields. There are people who use them, and there are people who are deterred by them, however imperfectly. Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Again, imagine the Jews of Israel doing that, and imagine how little it would matter to Hamas if they did. Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza and has even physically prevented them from leaving so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs. They are using their own people as human shields—in addition to more than 200 hostages they took for this purpose. No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does. However horrible the images coming out of Gaza, it is Hamas who should be blamed for the loss of life there. You’re calling for a ceasefire now? There was a ceasefire on October 6. Hamas broke it by deliberately murdering more than 1,400 innocent people.

Of course, Israel should hold itself to the highest ethical standards for waging war. For two reasons: One, because it should. It is right for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to do whatever it can to minimize the loss of innocent life. And, two, they should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards because the rest of the world will hold them to impossible ones.

Look at these protests we’re seeing all over the world, which began before Israel had dropped a single bomb. Now that there have been several thousand Palestinian casualties, cities across the globe are seething with rage. But Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Muslims in Syria. The Saudis have killed well over 100,000 Muslims in Yemen. Where are the protests? No one cares, least of all Muslims. They only care when non-Muslims produce these casualties—and they especially care when Jews do it. Israel is routinely condemned by the United Nations, and the U.N. could not pass a condemnation of Hamas for the atrocities it committed on October 7.

As I said, I don’t know whether a ground invasion is the right approach. But there is no question that Israel had to act; they have to destroy Hamas, and, whatever they do, noncombatants will get killed in the process. Again, this is Hamas’s fault.

But the problem is much bigger than Hamas. Civilized people everywhere—both non-Muslim and Muslim—have no choice but to combat jihadism. This has been glaringly obvious since September 11, 2001, but it should be much more obvious now. For Israel, October 7 was much worse than 9/11 was for America. There’s almost no comparison. The revealed threat to Israel really is existential. However, in the long term, I think the threat of jihadism is existential for the West too.

This demands a much longer conversation about what to do about jihadism. I happen to think that most of our response to it should be covert. I don’t know why the Israelis, the Americans, the British, or anyone else has to take credit for anything. However long it takes, members of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, al-Shebab, Boko Haram, Pakistani Taliban, and every other jihadist organization on Earth should be made to understand, every day of their lives, that the martyrdom they seek will be granted to them. Jihadism must be destroyed in every way it can be destroyed—logistically, economically, informationally, but also in the most material sense, which means killing a lot of jihadists. We can argue with their sympathizers. And we can hope to de-radicalize them. But we also have to kill committed jihadists. These are not normal antagonists with rational demands. These are not people who want what we want. This is not politics, and it will never be politics. It is a very long war.

Back in 2016, I released an episode of my podcast titled “What Do Jihadists Really Want?,” based on an issue of the magazine Dabiq, put out by the Islamic State. You can listen to that for more detail.2 You can also read the book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, to understand more of my thinking on this topic. Jihadist ideology has nothing to do with Israel, American foreign policy, colonialism, or any other rational grievance, and there is no concession that any civilized society can make to appease it.

We’ve forgotten about jihadism in recent years. But it hasn’t gone away. Whatever one thinks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was surely perceived as a victory by jihadists everywhere—and the implications of that have yet to be felt. In the West, we tend to remain blissfully unaware of Islamic terrorism (which is just another name for jihadism) unless it happens in the United States or Europe. We don’t tend to notice jihadist atrocities committed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India, much less in the dozen or so countries in Africa that suffer them more or less continuously. And we are totally unaware of foiled plots, of which there have been many.

As I said, we also tend to think in terms of “terrorism” or “violent extremism,” and while I use those words myself, we have to focus on jihadism, because that is the underlying ideological commitment.

Now, jihadists themselves are not a unified front. There is a very deep schism between Sunni and Shia—despite the fact that some groups will collaborate across it, as we see with Hamas and the Iranian regime. And there are internecine divisions even among jihadists of the same faith. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban don’t even get along at this point. And that’s a very good thing. Hopefully, we have an army of smart people with the necessary language skills, sowing hatred and confusion among jihadist groups twenty-four hours a day. But jihadists are all united in their hatred of liberal Western values, in their certainty of Paradise, and in their willingness to turn this world into an abattoir for the glory of God.

We cannot tolerate jihadists. We cannot let them immigrate into our open societies. And by we, I mean not just non-Muslims; I mean all Muslims who want to live sane lives in the twenty-first century. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the Palestinians have to rid themselves of their jihadists. And if that’s not possible, a stable peace with the Palestinians is not possible.

But this problem is so much bigger than Israel, or even global anti-Semitism. Spend some time reading about how the Islamic State treats Shiites. Look at the history of terrorism in Pakistan or India. If you want a totally painless way to do this, watch Hotel Mumbai—it’s a great film that depicts the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. If you’ve forgotten, around a dozen jihadists killed over 160 people in Mumbai, many at the Taj Hotel, and the film shows this with brutal realism. And while they killed some Jews too, at a Jewish center, this attack had nothing to do with Israel, America, race, so-called “settler colonialism,” or any of the other factors that Leftist fellow travelers have been fixated on since October 7. Really, this is the least boring piece of homework you will ever be given. Go watch Hotel Mumbai, and once the killing starts, ask yourself how anyone, East or West, Muslim or non-Muslim, can live with these people.

There is an intuition out there that to solve the problems in the Middle East, we must understand them in all their depth and complexity. And for this, the most important thing to grapple with is the so-called “historical context.” But for the purpose of really understanding this conflict and why it is so intractable, historical context is a distraction—every moment spent talking about something other than jihadism is a moment when the oxygen of moral sanity is leaving the room.

There’s no sorting this out by reference to history, because any group can arbitrarily decide where to set the dial on its time machine. In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.” The British were colonialists. Colonialists have some place to go back to. Where could the Jews go back to? There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Most of the recent immigrants—Jews from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries—were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948, in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return? There are displaced people everywhere on Earth, but only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish for their right of return.

Incidentally, if a history of land theft and oppression were sufficient to produce genocidal terrorism, where are the Native American suicide bombers? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? Do you realize how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the Chinese? Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? (I think there has been one.) The truth is ideas matter. It absolutely matters what people believe. Certainty about Paradise, and about martyrdom as a way of getting there, is one of the most potent memetic poisons the human mind has ever produced. Whatever historical, political, or economic context you want to apply to Israel and Palestine, jihadism is real; its intentions toward the Jews, infidels, and apostates are genocidal; and this is a global problem, because jihadism enjoys an appalling level of support throughout the Muslim world despite the fact that it is responsible for far more death and destruction among Muslims than Israel’s acts of self-defense have ever been.

Now, obviously, there are whole populations throughout the Muslim world that are effectively hostages to the religious fanatics who control them—and certainly a large percentage of the Palestinians fit that description, as does much of Iran. But it is very easy to underestimate how much sympathy there is for the jihadist project among Muslims who are not themselves actively waging jihad. And this is a terrible thing to contemplate. When 100,000 people show up in the center of London in support of Hamas, we have a problem. Of course, it’s an open question how many of those people really support jihad. But imagining that very few of them do is pure delusion. We have to win a war of ideas with these people. Because if the future is going to be remotely tolerable, the vast majority of Muslims have to disavow jihadism and unite with non-Muslims in fighting it. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that an open-ended future of pluralistic tolerance might be possible.

Yes, there are many other problems in the world at the moment. There’s the war in Ukraine and the looming possibility of conflict between the United States and China. Some of these problems appear much bigger than jihadism, but they all admit of some rational basis for negotiation and compromise. However bad things get with the Russians or the Chinese, they are not chanting “We love death more than the Americans and the Europeans love life.” Only jihadism has the power to turn our future into a zombie movie. Jihadists are the enemy with whom there is no rational or pragmatic compromise to make—ever.

As I’ve said many times before, the Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior. And if the Muslim world and the political Left can’t stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness fully empowers rightwing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won’t create secure borders, Christian fascists will.

There may be two sides to the past, but there really aren’t two sides to the present. There are two sides to the story of how the Palestinians and Jews came to fight over land in the Middle East. Understanding all that is important—and I think it is important to understand the cynical game the Arab world has played with the plight of the Palestinians for the past fifty years. If there is a stable political settlement to ever be reached between Israel and the Palestinians, it will entail a full untangling of the facts from all the propaganda that obscures them, while keeping the problem of jihadism in view. It will also entail that the religious lunatics on the Jewish side get sidelined. As I said, the building of settlements has been a continuous provocation. But even on the point of religious fanaticism, there really aren’t two sides worth talking about now. Whatever terrible things Israeli settlers occasionally do—and these are crimes for which they should be prosecuted—generally speaking, the world does not have a problem with Jewish religious fanatics targeting Muslims in their mosques and schools. You literally can’t open a Jewish school in Paris because no one will insure it. Yes, there are lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the past twenty years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.

There is a bright line between good and a very specific form of evil that we must keep in view. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with.

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Here’s a partial transcript of what he said:

“Hi, Dad. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” And his dad says, “May God protect you.” “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad. Open the phone, Dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran.] Put Mom on.” And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” “I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” “Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” And the brother says, “You killed ten?” “Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference.] Hold your head up, Father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp … “Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

I would submit to you that this piece of audio is more than just the worst WhatsApp commercial ever conceived. It is a window into a culture. This is not the type of call that would have been placed from Vietnam by an American who just participated in the My Lai massacre. Nor is it the parental reaction one would expect from an American family had their beloved son just called them from a killing field. As terrible as Vietnam was, can you imagine a call back to Nebraska: “Mom, I killed ten with my own hands! I killed a woman and her husband, and I’m calling from the dead woman’s phone. Mom, your son is a hero!” Do you see what a total aberration that would have been, even in extremis?

This call wasn’t a total aberration. This wasn’t Ted Bundy calling his mom. This was an ordinary member of Hamas, a group that might still win an election today, especially in the West Bank, calling an ordinary Palestinian family, and the mere existence of that call, to say nothing of its contents, reveals something about the wider culture among the Palestinians.

It’s important to point out that not only members of Hamas but also ordinary Gazans appear to have taken part in the torture and murder of innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages. How many did this? And how many ordinary Gazans were dancing in the streets and spitting on the captured women and girls who were paraded before them after having been raped and tortured? What percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, many of whom are said to hate Hamas for their corruption and incompetence and brutality, nevertheless support what they did on October 7 with a clear conscience, based on what they believe about Jews and the ethics of jihad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that the answers to these questions would be quite alarming. We’re talking about a culture that teaches Jew hatred and the love of martyrdom in its elementary schools, many of which are funded by the United Nations.

Of course, all this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance-dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight.

Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: At least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades … and from the jihadist side this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to Hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all this sadism—the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people—is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammad himself did.

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) all day long as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London, Sydney, and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them.

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine are important here is present. There are no settlers, blockades, daily humiliations at check points, or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have the same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers.

Of course, we can do our best to turn the temperature down now. And we can trust that the news cycle will get captured by another story. We can direct our attention again to Russia, China, climate change, or AI alignment, and I will do that in my work, but the problem of jihadism and the much wider problem of sympathy for it isn’t going away. And civilized people—non-Muslim and Muslim alike—have to deal with it. As I said in a previous episode of my podcast on this topic: We all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.

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dadsbongos · 2 years

Text

slender aphrodite has overcome me

Warnings: religious homophobia and internalized homophobia, reader is specifically stated to be a lesbian and catholic (but she isn't catholic by the end), robin being an eddie-hater for 99.9% of this, blink and you’ll miss it nsfw reference Summary: You and Robin were supposed to work on a chemistry project, but then she takes you to Lovers’ Lake. Also, Eddie supports lesbians. Word Count: 7.6 K AO3 Link ~~~

Eddie used to come into your father’s church every Sunday with his uncle. Buzzed head and huffy attitude and wandering eyes, he would stroll in as if he had anything better to do - but he’d always wave at you.

Eventually, you graduated from small waves to him making his uncle sit in the front pew with you and the rest of your family. Though, that turned into you two sitting in the back together while the adults sat in the front.

Because while everyone else was listening, Eddie was playing tic-tac-toe with you in the notes section of a bible he grabbed and you were challenging him to silent games of rock-paper-scissors. You two would mouth along to every hymn because neither of you knew the words and you’d giggle when your father called on him to speak before everyone for holiday services.

Eddie stopped coming to church when he was eighteen, but he’d always be right outside when service was finished. You’d bounce over to him as he smoked and pretend he didn’t reek of pot and cheap cologne. You’d put up with the stinging eyes and awful tobacco smell because you wanted to see him before he drove his uncle home.

Eddie Munson was your very first, and very closest, friend.

Robin Buckley fucking hates Eddie Munson.

He was always hanging off of you when you two stood next to each other. He would ramble on and on and on and on about music and D&D and how much he hated the faculty at school. He was annoying and he smoked and he dealt drugs and she has no idea why you defend him so hard.

“He’s honestly trying in school, he is. He just has trouble concentrating.”

“Someone has to cover the bills and his uncle’s job doesn’t pay all that well.”

“Eddie has never been anything other than kind to me.”

“He’s just passionate - who can fault him for being interested in things?”

Robin wishes she could’ve been the one sitting next to you in the back pews. She wishes she was the one ranting to you about the music she likes and the movies she watches and the absolute bullshit she has to deal with at work.

And it’s at work that she hyperfixates on this so deeply because Family Video is directly across the street from the new florist shop your mother owns (lovingly called The Garden after terrestrial paradise). And because mommy dearest owns the place, you work there and because you work there, Eddie the motherfucking freak Munson is always leaning against the front counter and talking your pretty little ear off.

And Robin has to watch it all.

Robin shakes her head and buries herself back into restocking the shelves as Steve looks through the pile of returned movies that haven’t yet been checked in. Steve suddenly gasps and snaps and she can hear his shoes squeak against the tile as he spins around to look at her.

“Hey, remember that movie we saw last month? The one about the professor at a motel?”

“Desert Hearts - what about it?” before Steve gets the chance to reply, Robin turns away from restocking and points at him, “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it, I saw you crying.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he raises his hands defensively, “I was going to say - that one girl rented it.”

Robin’s brows furrow and she shakes her head, “You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” Steve can’t help but grin at his friend, “I even kept her receipt. Just for you.”

“Creep,” Robin storms out of the shelves and ducks behind the counter beside Steve, “Show it to me.”

“Alright, alright, give me a second!”

By the vague title of ‘one girl’, Steve meant, of course, the girl that had coincidentally been Robin’s science lab partner for the entirety of her high school career.

The one who lights the bunsen burner because she knows Robin’s hands always shake when she tries. The one who brings bottled water to school just because Robin hates the fountains. The one who works directly across the street. The pastor’s daughter.

Steve holds out the receipt like a gold star sticker, “See?”

“I’m looking,” Robin can hardly believe it.

It’s your name. And right under your name is ‘DESERT HEARTS’ in big, bold letters that Robin wishes she could implant in the tissue of her brain.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Robin quirks a brow at Steve, and he tosses the scrap of paper at her as he whisper-yells, “She likes boobies!”

“Ew,” Robin swats his arm but grabs the receipt like it’ll decay the moment it touches the ground, “don’t say ‘boobies’. And don’t be so loud about it.”

She shoves Steve towards the cart of movies that need restocked and stares out the glass doors. Right where you work for your mother as a florist. The Garden.

Then, her eye catches the clock - 4:30 in the afternoon.

“Don’t forget, I’m clocking out early today,” Robin calls to Steve.

“Oh, shit,” Steve pokes his head out of aisles to look at her, “when?”

“Mmm,” she hums, watching you and Eddie exit The Garden and wave goodbye to your mother, “like right now.”

“What?! Since when?”

“Since I asked Keith to go home early for a school emergency,” Robin stamps her time card and then walks over to Steve to mutter, “Which is having the pastor’s daughter in my bedroom for our honors chemistry project.”

“Ooh,” Steve raises his eyebrows, “update me on that.”

“Will do,” Robin darts out and across the street to where you’re loading your bag into the back of Eddie’s van, “Hey!”

You turn at the sound of her voice and she’s in love with the way your face brightens at the sight of her, “Hey, Robin! I was just about to have Eddie give me a ride to your place.”

“Yeah,” Robin decides to apologize to Steve later, “so, Steve decided he didn’t wanna give me a ride home anymore,” a complete and utter lie, but neither of you need to know that, “if it isn’t any trouble, could I ride with you two?”

“Uh,” you look at Eddie immediately and while Robin can’t see him in the driver’s seat, she knows her hate grows when you giggle at him before returning to her, “Yeah, of course, you can. I’ll sit in the back, so you aren’t lonely.”

“Wow, so I’m just the chauffeur,” Eddie turns to look at you as you climb into the backseats and Robin follows.

“Sure looks like it,” you shrug, moving your bag to rest in your lap and addressing Robin, “He’s just messing around, don’t buy his teasing, ‘kay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Robin clenches her bag in her own lap and gets a view of Eddie’s side profile as she gives him her address.

But he just smiles and gestures to you, “I’m painfully aware. Everytime someone wants to see you, I’m stuck being her driver.”

His good-naturedness is almost heartwarming.

But unfortunately, it reminds her how much he sickens her - because she knows that if it weren’t for his reputation, people would flock to him for his looks. You don’t fall into the fear mongering about his reputation, so she can’t help but wonder what you think about him beneath a friendship.

She wants to pick your brain and end the investigation of how you feel. Did you rent Desert Hearts because you’re accepting and it’s cute? Or because you like women? Or, worst of all, to make fun of it with your family?

She can’t just ask because she doesn’t want to scare you off. She’s sure it took enough courage to actually rent the damn thing, you don’t need to be cornered because she’s restless.

“Oh, uhm,” you snap as you speak, “I told my parents I was going to Nancy Wheeler’s house for the night,” you rub the back of your neck nervously, “They’re crazy - don’t even let me go out with friends they don’t know…”

“Ah, no problem,” Robin chuckles, “I used to do the same thing, and then I stopped going out. It’s done wonders for my lying problem.”

You giggle at her jest and she’s convinced that if God’s real, It takes form in your sweet peels of laughter, “I just wanted to let you know.”

“What if they call her, though? Like, to check on you.”

The air turns sour and your smile is tight-lipped, “They won’t.”

She can read between the lines and let the response pass, “You can stay at my house for the night, if you want?”

“Oh, are you sure?” you jab your foot into the back of the driver’s seat, “I was just gonna stay with Eddie.”

“Yes!” she’s so eager and it burns her throat, “I mean, yeah, you can stay at my house. My parents shouldn’t care too much.”

The image of you staying the night with Eddie makes her physically ill.

“Hey,” he suddenly snaps and for a split second Robin’s worried she’d said that aloud, but no - his eyes, of course, are fixated on you in the rearview mirror, “don’t kick the driver. I’ll crash!”

“On purpose?” you quirk a brow and shake your head. Eddie doesn’t verbally respond, but he takes another glance at you in the mirror and shrugs as if to say - duh. As though to calm her nonexistent anxieties, you wave him off to Robin, “He isn’t gonna crash, he loves his van too much.”

“Steve’s the same way,” she rolls her eyes just thinking about the man, she leans down to whisper to you, “You know, for people that hate each other so much - they’re not too different sometimes.”

And that pulls another heavenly bell laugh out of you.

You’ve been to Robin’s house before. For many things. Study nights, projects, sleepovers, simple hours together. You’d lied to your parents for each and every one, but you’d do it again in a heartbeat if it meant uninterrupted hours with Robin Buckley.

Your nails dig into your thigh at that thought. It’s an intrusive one - one that isn’t your fault.

You spot your father’s church in the distance as the car passes through town and tap Eddie’s shoulder, “Hey, hey, pull over real quick.”

Robin sees the tight set of his jaw and from that she can get a sense for why he decided to leave the church. She can also see it in the way you nervously stare at the church and wring your hands.

“I won’t be long,” you quietly promise as Eddie parks in the lot and hop out.

Eddie watches you march up the steps and shakes his head, “Catholic guilt, am I right?”

“Huh?” Robin leans forward, pressing her face against the back of the passenger seat against her better judgment.

“Every time she sees this place, she has to stop and repent for something. Something that probably isn’t even as bad as what half those people do in their offtime,” he scoffs and Robin is put off by how quickly she falls in line with his words.

But she still doesn’t like him.

…

Your breathing is offset as you step into the church and you spot your father up at the altar, he sighs and makes his way down the aisle to you.

“I thought you were going to the Wheeler’s,” he murmurs.

“We were passing by,” the defense is weak but it’s all you can conjure.

He shakes his head and returns to the altar. You go to the holy water font and carefully dip the tips of your fingers into it, kneeling at the back of the pews and making a cross over yourself as you get to your knees.

You whisper against your hands - clasped so hard they’re shaking against your lips - “Oh, Heavenly Father, please forgive me for I have sinned. I continue to be sickened with the thoughts of women in the way a man should be,” it’s silent in the church and you feel like there’s a gun barrel pressing to the back of your skull, “I promise to you, once I gain the courage to approach my father I will ask him for help, but please, guide me to Your good light and help me get through this,” if possible, your fingers feel like they wind tighter around themselves, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

You rise and press another cross over yourself. Without a goodbye to your father, you rush out of the church and back to Eddie’s van.

It wasn’t as though your father would press you for that sort of familial affection anyway. You haven’t so much as whispered your rotten thoughts to him, but it still feels as though he knows.

“Sorry, sorry,” you wave off Robin’s concern as you return to the backseat of Eddie’s van, “Thanks so much, Eds.”

You don’t quite catch the way Robin cringes at the sound of his nickname on your tongue, but if you did then you think that’d be a better distraction than whether or not your father can somehow read your mind.

“Yeah, she’s insane.”

“I am not- “ before you can even finish, though, Robin’s voice cuts in dangerously quick.

“She’s not insane!”

“Hey,” Eddie shrugs in his defense, “whatever you two wanna think.”

Something about the way Robin defends you, in that strong voice with those determined eyes - it makes you wanna confess all over again. You turn and press your forehead to the glass of the window, hoping that perhaps the coolness will ease your sickness.

…

In Robin’s room is a Flashdance poster. Jennifer Beals in the center in an oversized sweater with her arms hanging between two parted legs. Beside that is a Jessica Lange poster from a scene you recognize from King Kong - Lange in her pearls and gold bikini. You turn to Robin as she shuts her bedroom door.

She catches your eye and then finally seems to spot the two posters, she scratches at her cheek, lowering her bag to the ground, “I just really respect them as actresses.”

“Mhm,” you hum and hop onto her bed.

You lay back into the plush of Robin’s mattress as she picks out clothes from her dresser. You like Robin’s bed more than you do your own - it feels more like home.

“Uh, I’m gonna go change,” she holds up a set of clothes and you nod, waving to her as she leaves.

Robin’s certain that many people would kill and die just for you to be laying in their bed - of course, they would, how could they not? - and she considers herself lucky for you to do so on your own accord.

You dig out the list of ideas you and Robin had constructed in class for your joint chemistry project. It’s empty - you knew that, but maybe if you stared hard enough the words would come onto the paper of their own accord.

Then, like magic - the words weasel their way from your brain, “Nitrogen triiodide.”

“Huh?” Robin tosses her work uniform into the laundry basket and hops onto her bed beside you.

“Nitrogen triiodide!” when she isn’t as excited as you, you continue, “Crystals of iodine will react with concentrated ammonia to precipitate nitrogen triiodide. Then it's filtered out. When it’s dry, the compound is so unstable that the tiniest contact causes it to decompose into nitrogen gas and iodine vapor,” you elaborate further when all Robin does is blink at you, “It’ll explode and let out a purple iodine vapor.”

“Oh, shit!” Robin gets up on her knees, raising her hands above her head, “That’s so cool!” then she extends her arms out, “You’re so smart!”

If this were a movie, Robin would’ve taken you into her arms and kissed you.

And you think you would’ve let her.

You cough awkwardly and nod, “We’d need solid iodine and ammonia concentrate, but it’ll be pretty easy.”

“That was way less time than I thought it’d be,” Robin flopped down onto her back.

“Same,” you shove the paper back into your bag.

Robin’s room reminds you of a sunset. With white walls that bathe in the orange glow of her lamps and a pink bedspread with accents of white. It felt comfortable. More so than the plain black and white theme that your parents absolutely refused to let you change in your own room.

“It’s not too late, yet,” Robin checked her watch - 5:30 in the afternoon, “We could eat and then take a field trip.”

Robin liked going on ‘field trips’ when you came over. It was just her showing you her new favorite spot, but you always just liked to spend time with her.

“That sounds nice,” you rise from her bed, “What’s for dinner?”

“No clue,” she leads you down the stairs and into the kitchen, “Don’t even know if these people went shopping.”

“Then we may have to fend for ourselves,” you sigh in exaggeration.

In all the times you’d been to Robin’s house, you’d only met her parents a few times. It was easy to forget they even existed, to be completely honest. Almost made you imagine what living with Robin would be like.

And that didn’t sound too bad.

Waking up next to her pretty bedhead every day and getting to have that gentle rasp be the first thing you heard in the morning - it sounded simply divine.

…

There was a lonely pier at Lovers’ Lake. You’d actually never been there before, but Robin knew the way like a piece for band. It took over thirty minutes just to walk there, but the night was cool and Robin even slid her hand into yours.

“It’ll keep you from getting lost,” she swung your joined hands as she said it.

“I’ll trust you then,” you hurried to be closer at her side.

The path was hardly dark enough to get lost on.

“I brought a flashlight, if we need it,” you raise the little light that you’d stuffed into your pockets just in case.

“No, I like adventuring like this,” she squeezes your hand as the shimmering lake grows closer into sight, “Like I’m a big brave knight,” she turns to you and you can see the way her red lipstick perfectly accentuates her lip shape, “and you’re the sweet princess that I get to save.”

“What if I want to be the knight?” you suggest.

“Then I’ll walk behind you and you go ahead.”

“Maybe on the walk back home.”

Robin stops you before you can sit down on the dock, she kneels down and gently brushes her hands over the wood, swiping any debris into the lake before gesturing for you to sit with a, “M’lady.”

“Why, thank you,” you take the hand she offers and seat yourself at the edge of the dock so your legs hang over the edge. Your shoes just barely toe at the water, and for the sake of not having wet socks for the walk home, you decide to keep them on.

Robin sits down, so close that her shoulder just barely brushes against yours. She checks her watch and you lean over her shoulder to get a peek as well - 9:23 at night.

“Worst pet name - go.”

It takes you a moment to register her statement, but even when you do, all you can do is dumbly ask, “What?”

“I’m bored and this is easy conversation,” Robin shrugs and looks at you, “What’s the worst pet name? Like in a relationship.”

“Oh, uhh,” instantly, one comes to mind and makes you shiver - in a bad way, “I used to date a guy who would call me ‘honeysuckle’,” Robin lets out one of her adorable laughs that tatter off into open-mouthed silence as she cranes her neck back in amusement, “I know it was meant to be sweet, but looking back on it I’m a little weirded out.”

“Well, I haven’t been in a relationship yet, but if they called me ‘princess’, I’d puke,” you quirk a brow at her as you laugh and that prompts her explanation, “My dad used to call me that when I was younger, so if the person I was dating ever did it - then I’d just think of my dad.”

“Oh, gross. I’d hate to think of my dad when my boyfriend spoke,” you shake your head.

Robin’s smile tapers down a little, and your heart shutters at the sad sight, “Yeah, I think everyone would.”

“Oh, I have a question for you - “ you bump your shoulder with Robin’s, “what made you want to befriend Steve Harrington?”

You’d be lying if you said Steve Harrington’s closeness to Robin didn’t bother you. He’d already graduated, anyway - why was he still clinging onto her? Steve never had good intentions - everyone in Hawkins knew that - and you didn’t trust him around Robin.

“Ugh,” she gags at the sound of his name, “honestly, I have no clue. He was just so… pathetic with only kids as his friends, I felt - like - a moral obligation.”

She shrugs off the question and while you do laugh alongside her, there’s a burning that settles into your heart. And not the good kind.

“How - uh - are you and Munson still friends?” she’s tapping at the wood of the dock with her nails as she asks.

You like the way the moonlight bounces off her skin, it distracts you, “Hm?”

“Well, a lot of people think he’s, like, a Satanist, or something. I’d think your parents would go nuts about that.”

“They don’t like him anymore, but it’s the one they’ve agreed to let me have. We’ve known each other for too long for them to justify cutting him out of my life.”

“I see,” Robin hums quietly before launching into another question, “Biggest difference between you and Munson?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she shakes her head and smiles at you, “Fun.”

“Uhm,” you narrow your eyes up at the moon as you ponder, “Okay, I got one. Eddie likes metal,” you point to yourself, “I like rock.”

“Oh, wow, such a huge detail,” Robin chuckles, “How could I have missed it?”

“I know, I know. Not a lot of people can see past it, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, when the Hellfire kids found out, they almost went insane.”

“I bet. It sounds insane that you two are even friends.”

You swing your legs off the edge of the dock and look at Robin, “What’s the biggest difference between you and Steve?”

“Uhm,” Robin’s mouth hangs open in shock as her mind blanks, “oh my God, we’re way too similar, actually.”

“Ew,” you gag and Robin gasps, turning to you with a broad smile, though she’s trying to stifle it with faux betrayal.

“What do you mean ‘ew’?!” she takes the hand you’re using to hide your growing giggles and shakes it around, “‘Ew’?!”

“I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” you gently bat her arm, “I’d hate for that to be me, though.”

“Oh my God,” for a moment, Robin panics, thinking she may have offended you, but you’re still laughing. Having a good time.

She decides to simply revel in it. You’re a far cry from the panicked stopping of Eddie just to confess for a sin she’s sure wasn’t all that bad. And she hopes that just maybe she had a part to play in that.

Then, suddenly, she can’t keep an opinion to herself, “You have dated some of the ugliest guys in Hawkins, you know that?”

Well, it’s a fact, rather. Everyone who knows your dating history - knows that.

“Oh my gosh,” you shake your head, “c’mon, they aren’t that bad!”

“They so are! You can’t tell me that Christopher Marks was a decision made of sound mind.”

You pop a light smack to Robin’s arm but don’t tell her off, “Yeah, fine, my exes aren’t lookers. But they were nice, right?” you turn to look at her this time, “Maybe I don’t date for looks.”

“You can date for personality and still have attractive partners,” Robin gives you a side eye, “Or, attractive to you, at least.”

“So maybe I wasn’t that attracted to them,” and like a prayer, you repeat, “but they were nice, right? My parents liked them a lot.”

“They were nice,” Robin nodded, “Pretty bland, though.”

“Robin, what are you trying to say?” your giggles have died into something serious. Your smile makes Robin nervous just looking at it and your eyes have widened a little. Like you’ve been caught with your hand in the cookie jar, “I know I don’t date the coolest, hottest guys - but they were nice to me and my parents really liked them. Not everyone can have Steve Harrington wrapped around their finger.”

Robin‘s brows furrow and she shakes her head, “Steve and I aren’t a thing.”

“Then you must be blind,” you stand up from the splintered wood dock and throw your arms out at your sides in exasperation, “because there’s something between you and Steve that a lot of people don’t have.”

“Yeah, well, I could say the same thing about you and Eddie fucking Munson,” Robin shoots up from the pier, brows drawn tight and shoulders tensed, “You two are weirdly close for a pastor’s daughter and the outcast Satanist.”

“He is not a Satanist - how could you even suggest that about us?” you feel sick to your stomach and while you know exactly why it matters that Robin doesn’t get too close, you aren’t sure why she’s so wrapped up in your friendship with Eddie Munson, “He’s ni- “

“Oh, is he nice?” Robin tilts her head, “Would your parents like him?”

“Shut up,” your throat is rubbing raw and you think there’s tears welling in your eyes.

“Well?” she laughs and it feels like a blade twisting into your gut, “Isn’t that the criteria? Your parents want a nice guy that everybody but you likes and you’re so willing to play the sweet pastor’s daughter role that you don’t even break up with them!”

“What do you want me to do, Robin?!” you know you should be walking away. You shouldn’t be arguing with her out here. You should be at home. Or better, at church.

Robin quiets down and simply stares at you. Her eyes look so sweet in the moonlight, though. You’ve always liked her eyes.

You shake your head. You should be praying and away from Robin.

“Why do you care about me hanging out with Steve?” her voice gets more raspy the quieter she speaks and you like that, too. You like the way your name sounds from her pink lips when she calls to you. But now, when she calls to you, it feels like acid in your ears.

Your hands shake and you dodge her stare, you can feel the swell of your throat and the sweat breaking out along your forehead. You can feel your knees buckling and your legs wobbling.

“I should go,” you turn and Robin grabs your wrist in her soft hand.

“Why do you care about me hanging out with Steve?” you can’t bring yourself to look at her, “Do you like him?”

“No!” you whip around and look Robin in those sapphire eyes and it makes you wanna puke just how much you’d sacrifice right now to stare into those eyes until the world collapsed into burning brimstone like in Sodom and Gomorrah, “I do not like Steve Harrington, I just- I- “

“You what?” Robin’s nearly whispering now, her voice is gentle and she carefully brings up a hand to cup your cheek, “Nobody’s out here - you can tell me anything you want.”

“I- “ you’re calmer when Robin’s holding you than when you’re sitting in the church pews and feel the crawling gaze of your elders. When they’re wondering when you’ll actually get a man to stay. When everyone is asking why you don’t hurry and pick a man and everyone is saying that it’d be so easy - you’re the pastor’s daughter.

You’re sweet. You don’t care where they go. You don’t get jealous. You aren’t selective about looks. You could have any man you wanted.

And that’s the problem.

“I don’t like men, Robin,” you whisper it so quietly you’re almost hoping that she didn’t even hear you, “I don’t know what to do, but I just don’t like them. They aren’t cute and none of them appeal to me. Not one of them.”

Robin nods, “You wanna know a secret?”

“What?”

“I don’t like men, either,” she’s louder than you when she says it and for a moment, you hope that that could be you someday.

But until then, you’re shell shocked at her admission, “What? I- I thought I was… sick.”

“You’re not sick,” Robin smiles, “We’re not sick. So, wanna tell me why you’re so jealous of Steve Harrington?”

Robin thinks that your laughter is the true sound of angels, “I am not jealous of Steve Harrington. He peaked in high school and follows a group of kids around.”

“Wow,” she muses, “church girl has a mean streak.”

“That wasn’t mean,” you reach up and press your hand against the one she holds your face with, “I’m not jealous of him.”

“Sure,” Robin teases.

Just then, you think you hear a branch snap behind you two.

You break apart from Robin and search the clearing with wild eyes for the source of the sound.

A dog is sat staring at you before getting bored and strolling off. It slams on you like a ton of bricks - the things you just risked.

Your reputation.

Your father’s position.

Your parents’ respect.

Robin’s reputation.

Being with Robin is dangerous, it makes you act out in ways your father would lash you for. So now you retract into yourself.

What would your friends think if they saw you now? What would your teachers say about you if they knew?

You shake your head and turn away from Robin, “I have to go.”

“Wait, don’t- “ you can hear her chase after you but you’re too quick to run away.

You duck into a gas station and hide among the shelves until you’re certain Robin’s given up following you. You meander over to the counter and fiddle with your fingers as you sheepishly ask, “Can I please borrow your phone?”

The boy behind the counter recognizes you and nods, though he seems shaken to see you. He points over to the phone at the corner of the counter and asks, “Is everything okay, sister?”

“Yes, brother” you try to smile while returning the Catholic sentiment despite not remembering who this boy is, “everything is perfectly fine. I got lost on one of my walks.”

You hope he doesn’t bring this up in church on Sunday. As far as your parents are concerned, you’re at Nancy Wheeler’s house - though they don’t know that you and Nancy have grown apart since freshman year.

Your voice keeps quiet in case the boy is as prone to snooping as the rest of your church is, “Eddie? I need you to pick me up.”

…

Eddie truly is a sweetheart when you go by the book and don’t cast the first stone, though most of your father’s believers don’t follow that themselves.

Eddie doesn’t waste much time coming to your aid and he doesn’t complain about the hour - but judging by the darkening skin patching under his eye, he certainly is in need of sleep.

“So, care to explain why I’m driving you to my trailer?”

You stare at your best friend’s side profile, then the trees just outside, then back to him - then back to the trees. For a moment, you imagine running away into those trees and away from each law dictated by the little book your parents hang over you.

You turn back to your friend, “Eddie?”

He glances at you and hums.

You know he isn’t religious, but even so - you don’t have to be religious to hate something. What if he thinks it’s weird?

What if he’s disgusted?

What if he’s only okay with it so long as he can leer?

No, you know Eddie. He may not be the smartest person you’ve ever known, but he’s much wiser and so much kinder than anybody else in Hawkins.

“I- “ your eyes clench and you bury your fidgeting hands into your stomach in hopes it would kill the nerves. Anything to kill the nerves, just for a moment.

“I - I’m… gay…”

You aren’t sure what you were expecting when you blurted that out to Eddie, but his sarcasm certainly wasn’t on the list.

“Wow? Really?” his voice is flat and when you look at him, he’s shaking his head. He turns to you and grins, “You made me watch Desert Hearts with you. Twice!”

“It’s a love story! Everyone loves a love story!”

“Yeah, but not usually a lesbian love story,” Eddie turns into the trailer park and sighs as the van is shut off, “I’m sorry - “ he faces you completely, “do you want me to do that again? More surprised this time?”

“Stop,” you swat his arm and he rubs the area as though it actually hurt, “This is serious. I don’t know what to do.”

Eddie holds up a hand and puts up three fingers, “I can tell you one of three things. What you wanna hear, what your parents would say, or what I actually wanna tell you. Which do you want?”

You know what you want to hear. Keep the status quo and don’t reach out. If you hear that, then you’re afraid you’ll actually do it, and deep down, you think you’re more afraid of living a life of lies and internalized hatred than you are about anything this town could do to you.

You respect your parents. And you respect Eddie. But between them, you think Eddie’s had your best interest in mind more than they have. He makes a show of begrudgingly watching Desert Hearts (though you did see him tearing up by the end), sure, but if you’d even suggested it to your parents - you would probably be homeless, at best. Eddie knows you - the real you - and he cares about you.

“What do you actually want to tell me?”

“I think you should be safe, but be yourself,” he reaches out and takes one of your hands in his, “I don’t think you should tell your parents, but I do think that you should go back to her.”

The her that always grabs the chemicals in chemistry because you hate getting out of your seat. The her that offers to carry your books during school. The her that doesn’t ask why you two never meet at your house. The her that’s a lovingly geeky member of the school band. The her that works right across the street from you.

“It isn’t safe right now, but I just know that one day it’ll be better. For now, you have to be careful about who you’re yourself to, but you shouldn’t hide completely.”

“I have a crush on Robin Buckley,” you murmur.

“You make me drive you to all the football games just so you can see her perform at halftime - and she doesn’t even have a solo. I figured you might fancy her.”

“How will I be able to ask forgiveness when I know I’m sinning?”

There’s a sigh before Eddie puts up both hands, folding them at the palm and pushing them together as if to kiss, “If this a man and a woman, is it a sin if they kiss?” you shake your head, “Alright, and are they going to heaven just because they’re a man and a woman who kiss?” once again, you shake your head, “And didn’t God make them that way?” you nod this time, “Okay - now pretend this is you and Robin. Didn’t God make you two this way?” you nod, “And if straight people aren’t going to heaven just for being straight, why does it make sense for gay people to go to hell just for being gay?”

“Father says- “

“‘Father’ reads from a book that’s been translated a million times over a million years. Some shit’s bound to be fucked up,” Eddie pats your head, “Okay, precious?”

“Knock it off,” you huff and brush his hand off of you. Your fingers twist into the material of your shirt as the images of her, lonely, at the pier flash into your mind, “I blew her off. What should I do?”

“Apologizing tomorrow, I think, is your best course of action,” he starts to unbuckle but you latch onto his forearm before he can.

“No, what would be romantic?” you let go of him as he turns to look at you again, “I want to do something to show her I’m sorry, not just say it.”

“I- I don’t know,” he sighs, “Do something stupid like in that movie.”

You look out the windshield and Eddie can only watch the gears in your head turn. The way your brows furrow and how your fingers tap at the dashboard of his van.

“Hey,” Eddie taps the side of your head, “I have an early deal tomorrow, so if you’re gonna need me to drive you around, make your mind up quick.”

“I do need you to drive me around,” you nod quickly, “The Garden, take me there - and Family Video,” the van thrums back to life as Eddie turns the keys, “and then to Robin’s house.”

“Yet again, I’m playing chauffeur,” Eddie mumbles under his breath, but he doesn’t put up a fight as he drives out of the park.

…

You wrangle the keys to the store from your pocket and wave Eddie inside as you unlock the doors. Eddie bonelessly falls into step with your plan despite his initial whining, you take him by the shoulders and squeeze, “You know what violets are, right?”

“I’m not totally stupid.”

“Okay, I’m trusting you to arrange a small bouquet of violets while I get a movie from Family Video, if you mess up - I won’t tutor you anymore.”

Eddie wasn’t afraid of failing because you stopped tutoring him, but he didn’t want to vocally tear through your thin threat - so he nods and takes the keys you held out. You cheer, racing out of the shop and down the street to Family Video.

Family Video managed to keep ahead of its one competitor in town by one factor. It wasn’t that they had the best selection or the broadest shelves, it was that they stayed open one extra hour.

They closed at eleven.

And right now it was 10:54 at night and Steve Harrington was glaring at you through the glass store windows.

“Desert Hearts,” you rush to the romance section before Steve can even greet you, “Desert Hearts, Desert Hearts.”

“Hasn’t been checked in, yet,” Steve pauses your frantic searching and digs through the pile of returned tapes at his side, he holds up the tape as you come to the counter, “Can’t rent it to you.”

“Steve, please,” you’re certain you look absolutely deranged with the way you’re gripping onto his wrists with wide, pleading eyes, “It’s an emergency.”

“How dire?”

“If I don’t have that movie, I think I’ll die,” your eyes flicker away from him and then back, “Do you know Robin?”

Robin promised to update him about your shared evening and the store hasn’t gotten a single call. Yet here you are, high-strung and skittish.

“How do you know Robin?” his eyes narrow at you.

“Steve,” you want to snatch that tape from his hand and it’s taking every inch of good faith within you to not do so, “please, I need this movie.”

“Fine, but I’m hearing all of the context tomorrow.”

“Of course,” you grin when he finally hands over the tape, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Steve!”

Before the glass doors slam shut, you can hear Steve shout after you, “If she comes to me in tears, you’re dead!”

Eddie’s locking up The Garden as you’re running up to him, you catch the keys he tosses you and once you’re both back inside his van, he gingerly hands you the bouquet he threw together. It’s not bad for someone who has only ever watched you put flowers together.

…

If the cops in Hawkins actually patrolled at night then you’re sure Eddie would’ve been pulled over enough times for every resident in town. You have to hold the handle above the door as he speeds to the Buckley home.

He slams the breaks right at the curb to Robin’s house and you’re nearly sent through the windshield. You throw the door open and hop out with the flowers and movie in hand, but before you can shut the door, Eddie calls to you.

“Good luck,” he pounds his fists against the steering wheel, “but if things don’t go well, call me and I’ll pick you up.”

You give him a thumbs up and wave him off as he drives away - at a much more mellow pace than earlier, might you add.

You’ve seen the Buckley home many times. Countless days spent here meant to be study sessions that turned into nights of doing each other’s nails and hair and testing new chapstick flavors and throwing fashions shows that you’d wished would end in both your clothes in piles on the floor.

But it’s so much more daunting this time.

The lights are off - except for one. The one at the very top room to the right, the resting place of your heart: Robin Buckley’s room.

You make your way underneath that window like a moping puppy in the rain. You take up a rock and toss it at Robin’s window.

Then another.

And another.

And just as it’s looking like you’ve lost your chance, Robin peeks through her peachy curtains and her eyes widen.

You can see faint black tear tracks drawn over her cheeks and it feels like hellfire ignites in your chest knowing you did that. You hold up the hand fastened around a tape and a hastily made bouquet of violets.

Robin quietly opens her window and leans out of it to whisper-yell at you, “What are you doing here?!”

You whisper-yell right back, “I’m sorry! I talked with a friend and I- “ you chuckle but nothing’s funny, “Everything’s different! Can you let me up, please?”

She ducks back into her room and then returns to point at a shed to your left, through the hazy dark you can barely make out a ladder leaning into the shed’s wall.

With only one hand, you climb the ladder and you’d do it infinitely more times if it meant you could land at Robin’s side in the end. You hold out the violets and Robin takes them. Heat rushes your skin as she inspects the flowers, your nerves light up and you wish you could sit down, but you’re too afraid to break the momentary serenity.

“Why’d you come back?” she thumbs one of the soft petals, almost like she’s making a point to avoid your eyes.

“I spoke with a good friend,” you take a step forward, both hands latched tightly to the tape in fear that the entire room would fade away if you let go, “I’m scared, but I can’t lose you, Robin Buckley,” you want nothing more than to softly kiss away the pout on her lips, “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Doesn’t the church think God should be before all other things?”

“I think so,” you nod and take another step closer, this time Robin looks at you and you feel like you’re finally seeing the heaven that your father reads about. Her freckles and her lips and her cheeks and the way her hair falls, you want it all and you hope that the day you lose her is the day the world falls apart, “but I don’t really give a damn.”

“Wow,” she grins, placing a hand over her heart, “The sweet pastor’s daughter? Swearing? And for sacrilege no less?”

“Yeah, well,” you chuckle, feeling her gaze spark electricity in your veins, “the sweet pastor’s daughter is a lesbian.”

Robin wipes at the remnants of her mascara tears and holds out her hand for the movie you’re holding, “I saw this, you know?”

“I didn’t, but - I figured it would be something you’d like. It’s sweet.”

“I like the ending.”

“With the train?” you suggest, clasping your hands together. There’s only one ending, but Robin graces you with mercy.

“Yeah,” she nods, “with the train.”

Robin comes forward and takes your cheek in her hand just like she had at the pier, and this time you’re determined to stay planted right where she wants you. You reach up and card your fingers through her messy hair as she brings you forward.

“You know,” Robin whispers against your lips, “I really hated Eddie for always hanging off you.”

You giggle and tenderly press your forehead to hers, “I hated Steve for following you around all the time.”

“Yeah, I did, too,�� she jests before finally taking the leap you wish had happened years ago - when she walked into freshman year integrated science and sat next to and complimented your shoes.

She closes the gap between you two and you’re finally having a kiss that means something. Like little fireworks bursting beneath your skin - kind of finally meaning something. Robin tastes like bubblegum and cherry chapstick and you wish that every kiss you have can taste like this.

You wish that every kiss you have can be with Robin Buckley - in her sunset bedroom with a bouquet of violets.

#robin buckley x reader #robin buckley x you #stranger things x you #stranger things x reader #robin buckley oneshot #happy pride gays

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