#the repetition of Mike and the word run

[chirpsythismorning]

Something something baseball and dad's making their sons feel obligated to do 'normal' things. Something something Will having an older brother to look up to who encouraged him to be his true self, regardless of what his dad/bullies said. Something something Mike not having that…

[dragcnbreak]

hiii can u maybe do a drabble with little!mike, like he wakes up tiny after a nightmare and cg!reader (masc if thats okay :)) has to comfort him? i love ur mike drabbles and headcanons btw theyre so RASKJHFLD /pos /nf obviously :)

HI FRIEND <3 I literally have like 7 requests to get to but I decided to write this because little!mike and I love the idea <3 ive kinda avoided using daddy because of how sexualized the term is but I use it here! I hope you don’t mind; I can always change it!!! I hope you enjoy <33

◞♡࿐ (post movie, so contains spoilers)

You were asleep when Mike woke up, sweating and crying. He had just woken up from a nightmare featuring the yellow rabbit, the man who had hurt his little brother and almost his little sister too. He had a bad day before and was ultimately exhausted so his nightmare made him age regress.

“Daddy,” he cried out for you, softly shaking your shoulder, “please wake up.” In his dream, the yellow rabbit had hurt you too and he couldn’t bare it if his dream had become reality. You were too important to him. When you didn’t wake up, Mike began sobbing even more and shaking you even harder. “Please, don’t tell me the bad man hurt you too.”

Fortunately, you had woken up and caught the last half of Mike’s sentence. “Hey hey hey bear, I’m okay. Daddy’s okay.” You reassured him, mumbling with sleep still evident in your voice. You slowly sat up on your elbows and gathered your boy into a hug, running your hands along his back in a repetitive manner to soothe him.

“Do you want to tell me what happened? What bad man?” You asked even if you likely already knew. You had barely known Mike when he worked at Freddy’s but you had heard plenty about the events surrounding William Afton from him, Vanessa, and even Abby.

Mike sniffled, “the yellow rabbit. The one who took Garrett and almost hurt Abby. He had hurt you this time and I couldn’t save you and he laughed and laughed and laughed. And then he came to hurt me and that’s when I woke up.” He started to sob more because of his rambling, this time in your arms.

You lifted a hand up and ran your fingers through his soft hair. “Oh, I’m so sorry, baby boy. That must have been so scary. But I’m okay and so is Abby. She’s right down the hall and I’m right here with you in my arms, safe and sound.” Mike nodded but kept crying, clearly still upset with his dream.

You began to think of ways to further calm him that didn’t involve staying up too much longer. He might not want to sleep again but you know he should, as he’s always tired. “Hey, how about we go warm you up some milk? And then I can borrow a book from Abby and read you a bedtime story? Does that sound okay?” Mike blanched at the thought of sleeping again but nodded anyway.

“That’s my good boy.” You pressed a kiss to his forehead and detached yourself from him, quickly getting up and rushing over to his side of the bed. You helped him up and held his hand as you walked to the kitchen together. You knew he was regressed to his usual age of about 10 but the fact that he didn’t reject your hand holding meant he was still pretty scared.

You arrived at the kitchen with your boy in tow, grabbing a pot and the gallon of milk in the fridge. You poured out some milk into the pot and turned the stove on before putting the milk back in its place. You grabbed a plastic spoon to stir and began to hum softly, squeezing Mike’s hand as you did.

Soon enough, the milk was warm enough (as per your taste tester’s word) and you still held hands on the way back to his room. He sipped his milk and sat on the bed. You ran your fingers through his hair once again and then made your way to Abby’s room. You were plenty quiet as you grabbed a book you knew Mike liked.

Back in his room, Mike had laid back down and put his glass on the bedside table, his eyes already starting to close. But he fought it, wanting to hear you telling him a bedtime story. And so you began telling it, making sure to do all the voices you know he loved to hear. He giggled at the appropriate times, still sniffling a bit as he drank some more milk.

Within a few minutes, you had finished the story and looked up to see the glass empty and your boy soundly asleep. You smiled fondly and shut the book softly. Putting it next to the glass, you got back into bed with Mike. You moved him slightly so you could spoon him, hoping to protect him from any more nightmares. And with that, you fell back asleep as well.

[callipraxia]

The Interview: A Running 'Live' Commentary

Well, you asked, kinda, @the-orion-scribe...

Disclaimer: One of my…things is that where there is a transcript, I'm gonna read the transcript first and then may or may not tackle the audio version later. As such, I'm inevitably going to get some of the subtler bits indicated by gesture and tone of voice wrong. I hope it won't be anything that significantly changes the meaning, but we shall see. I'm doing this live, (redact) it! And partially on my work breaks at that, so apologies if anything gets repetitive or disjointed as a result of different bits being read several hours apart. Full transcript is available here from, I believe, @fordtato, who seems like awesome cool folks.

That all said, let's begin.

[On the SAG-AFTRA strikes]

Alex's grandmother was an actress? Interesting. Also, generally approve of the sentiments stated there, very good, no actual notes.

[On the pilot and the 'Next On' reel]

When I was a much, much younger Callipraxia, I also had an interest in TV work - we had this class at my middle school call Careers, and we had to do a research project on, well, a career every year, and one year I did mine on being a soap opera writer (early nineties soap operas were my first literary influences, and I suspect it still shows). I therefore find this glimpse into the industry fascinating, even though I don't have much to say about it beyond giggling at the image of executives having such reptilian, limited-intelligence brains that they could be tricked into thinking something already exists and therefore just approving it so they don't have to think about why they're being asked to approve something that already exists because it would make their heads hurt.

"I was working...on a cartoon called 'Flapjack.'"

I'm 99% sure I've never seen a single frame of this show, but also 99% sure I've heard of it somehow. Not sure why. No idea what 'Fish Hooks' is, though.

"Then, when we did the Cipher Hunt, I was running out of rewards and treasures to give the audience because I'd already bled Gravity Falls dry of every drop of content that was inside it..."

See, this is what I find fascinating about Proper Creators, and this one in particular. Their creations can seem so much fuller to us than they do to them. This baffles me, because even when I don't do things on purpose, I generally do realize that I did them sometime, you know? (Edit: ha, Hirsch actually talks a bit about this at the end)

"I remember asking him, 'Hey, Mike, you read the bible, right? What do you think about this Jesús character? Do you think it's working? Do you think people will get it?'"

Even though I clearly read the words 'series bible' right above this, my first thought was that Alex was asking Mike if he'd read The Bible - y'know, the religious one. And I was so confused. And then I stopped being confused and I facepalmed in real life.

"Instead of embracing that this is part of lore that fans love...in his mind, he, as a serious videogame programmer, made a mistake, and is ashamed of the mistake, and doesn't want to acknowledge it, doesn't want to encourage other people to corrupt their own game, and so he said 'there's no such thing as MissingNo.'"

This is another "I just don't get Proper Creators" moment. I'd have embraced it so thoroughly I'd have written a sequel just about it and only revealed that it was actually serendipitous (not 'a mistake' - word choice, people!) years later!

Sometimes no answer is better than a boring answer.

This is why I love that thing Robert Jordan used to say - "read and find out!" and the fandom shortened it to "RAFO," and now that's a one-word response to questions you don't want to answer, at least if everyone in the room is familiar with The Wheel of Time books and fandom history...so many times I've wanted to just reply "RAFO!" in a review, but then realized the odds were excellent that the other person would have no clue what I was talking about.

"I know that we did cut like 12 pages from the journal, just due to length."

I've been told that I can make people feel cussed out without ever uttering a single swearword, when I'm annoyed enough with them. I would like to try to do that to whoever it was who decided on this length restriction. Give me lore! All the lore! More! More lore!

[On the walls of genre cards and character beat cards and how this led to rejected episode ideas]

I'm gonna try this writing method out, it sounds interesting. Thanks, Alex! And also thanks to everyone involved who's mentioned any of these rejected ideas over the years, as this allows us to play with them instead! (one day, y'all will know the tale of Wendy as a weather witch. I've got a whole arc planned for her with that one).

"When [Rob Renzetti] and I are together, we're very much like Grunkle Stan and Ford, and he is Ford and I am Stan."

I wish so much that someone had asked if there were ever any RL fistfights during the production of the book. It's barely even funny and would have wasted time, but I wish they had anyway.

"I still recall when Ford had a long beard and was a hippie."

...No.

"We were thinking it'd be kind of more like a zen kind of guy"

I mean, technically I suppose he still is. Apparently quite big on meditation back in the day, and the Journal strongly implies he's a firm believer in divination now. He could have been a sort of hippie lite, had he gone for drugs other than brain demons and/or Truck Stop Coffee I Initially Assumed Was A Euphemism For Significantly Stronger Stimulants.

"I remember talking about, maybe, J.K. Simmons and then thinking, 'Gosh, you know, he's got a very familiar voice, is he gonna feel too overexposed.'"

Ford was actually the first character I ever heard Simmons voice, because I have acquired what passes for my pop culture literacy mostly completely backward. My mother was watching reruns of whatever that cop drama he was on was (was it The Closer?) one day, though, and I did a double take at the TV because why is Ford here on one of Mama’s shows? Did he get arrested again or something? Why are they acting like he's one of the...ohhhh.

Which yes, means I found my way to Portal 2 via Gravity Falls instead of the other way around. That isn't so surprising, though, because video games are another of my...things. I absolutely love a lot of the stories and will happily read about them and watch cutscenes and video essays about them and player-keeps-quiet playthroughs all day, but I've never actually played video games because I have poor hand-eye coordination and rather low frustration tolerance when it comes to entertainment. The puzzles would drive me mad. I adore complex things, but I hate having to figure them out before I can move on with the story if I don't want to stop. Let me figure stuff out at my own pace, dangit -

Er, that got off-topic, sorry. The point was, I've watched a ton of clips of Portal 2 now, and it's kind of fascinating to me that it possibly wasn't a conscious influence, because Cave Johnson is...not really that dissimilar to a thing that Ford could have become, in a lot of ways. Or what he and/or Fiddleford might have actually become in the "Better World," for all we know. He's probably closer to what Fiddleford did become in canon, though, at least for a while/in my possibly somewhat weird interpretation of Fiddleford.

"So we're putting this character together, we're putting blocks together, we're moving blocks and putting them up, and it's only at the last second that a Ford is revealed that we're like 'I guess we did it?'"

This is how I construct plots basically, more than characters, but - oh, gosh, I wanna do a lore dump so bad but this isn't the time or place. Never mind, I'll ramble about character development another time.

Also, I am amused by the visual of, like, Stan or someone performing a dramatic flourish and being like "Behold: A Ford!"

"What to you comes across as 'oh, Rob understands Ford's ridiculous recklessness' to me comes across as 'Rob IS Ford and Ford does rationalize.' That's what he does. One of Ford's greatest powers is rationalizing. So you're seeing Rob as Ford rationalizing Ford's bad decisions. In that moment, I think what's being revealed is less Ford's recklessness, and more Ford's ability to justify anything."

Why not both? But yeah, fair, I've observed this about the character myself. He censors himself when he doubts. It's a defensive mechanism I think - it keeps him alive and functional to a degree, because, well...we've seen what happens when Ford admits he was wrong, twice. In the Journal, he nearly lost his mind, and in the finale, he basically went from thinking of himself as He Who Shall Save The World to He Who Is About To, However Reluctantly, Become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds in an alarmingly short period of time. Extreme black and white thinking with him a lot of the time. Not a psychologist, just a nerd, but the longer I think about the character, the more probable a personality disorder seems. Which is one reason I worry about him and Stan both after the series ends. They're both going to be confused as all get-out when it dawns on them that "...wait, we're not suddenly better after all? We're both still really, really screwed up?"

"When you do a clone story, the point of a clone story, in my mind, is a character seeing themselves in a different light, right?"

Depends on which side you're looking at it from, really ;)

"They're all wonderful, wonderful dumbasses, all of them."

Accurate.

"They know that I am a detail-oriented bastard."

...Less accurate, in a way. I've spun whole worlds out of details that the writers have admitted were unintentional or screwups, not to mention the later discourse on Alex as the "emotional" story one while Rob was the "make it a story" guy, or the specific detail that was actually under discussion here. As for that one....

"When you're editing, when you're writing, and then you reread your writing and you edit it, and then you reread your writing and you edit it, there's a very subconscious process of streamlining, literally making paragraphs look nice - it's entirely possible that me or Rob made that change out of one in a million changes specifically because we knew that psychologically Ford is not traveling this path alone, he's traveling it with his muse who he has a very complex and fucked-up relationship with, and even in Ford's private thoughts, he would not say 'I'm alone,' he would say, 'Oh, I have a very important relationship in my life with Bill, but I don't have a friend, that is a difference!'"

...except he canonically referred to Bill as his friend, too, so, uh...yeah, there's that.*

Interesting to hear someone else's perspective on rewriting and editing; I'm pretty sure that there's very little sub-conscious going on with me when I'm editing. If anything, I'm double and triple checking to excise anything that even hints of subconsciousness out of the manuscript, and I am very, very conscious of times when I go out of my way to make paragraphs physically neat and pretty, because I always feel really stupid about doing it. So I suppose I'm glad to hear other people do that, too.

I also found it interesting to see the description of the relationship with Bill as "very complex and fucked-up." Ford, at least, wrote and spoke as though he was under the impression that his relationship with Bill was very straightforward pre-betrayal, but here's the Guy, on the record saying it was in fact "very complex." This doesn't confirm that Ford was on some level aware of this, but it does make me feel more confident about my theory that Ford invited Fiddleford up not so much because he really needed the technical expertise as because his subconscious was throwing up enough red flags to cover every square inch of land in the U.S.S.R. and he just couldn't admit it to himself consciously because admitting that he is not in control of a situation tends to render him non-functional.

*Full disclosure since nobody's read this far anyway, but hi if you have, have a full disclosure: I would not say I ship it, because in context - Fiddleford married, Ford on the brink of sanity, Ford as Fiddleford's employer, Fiddleford mind-wiping both himself and Ford behind Ford's back after a certain point, and that's all before we consider that on occasion, it's entirely possible Fiddleford was interacting with someone who mostly looked like Ford but, uh, wasn't - it would be incredibly dark and messed up and suitable for nothing but a full-blown adult psychological horror story, but I do consider "Ford was in love with Fiddleford, regardless of whether it was reciprocated or not" as a perfectly valid reading of the Journal. I also consider it perfectly valid to read it as Ford just being prone to really intense attachments, regardless of what kind they are - he either adores you or he hates you, whether you're his brother, his muse, his friend, his romantic or sexual interest, or what-have-you, which is kind of what I was saying earlier about the potential for personality disorders there. Ford writes in a style more like he's from the mid-nineteenth century than from the mid-twentieth, or at least like he's trying to imitate that style, so that could make things sound gay that aren't gay, but by the same token, much of Ford's rhetorical style seems to exist to allow him to not-quite-lie to himself while using his superpower of Justify Anything, so ultimately that means nothing, too. I went through the Journal line by line once and determined that you could make roughly equally strong cases for Ford being some form of straight, some form of gay, some form of bi, and some form of ace, and that it also wouldn't be unreasonable to come away with the view that he's not into humans so much but might very well be into one or more types of alien. I don't know and so will potentially read any variant of these things, as long as it's a decent story.

"You know the thing about working with a big company, it's like working with a friend who swaps their head with a different head every couple of years."

Huh, Alex has met Olm, has he?

[Hana] "By the way, I know there's a lot of fake blood on this page, that's for one of my YouTube videos, ignore that."

Why is this the moment I laughed out loud?

"That's the trouble of a puzzle box, is it's like, there's two flavors of it, there's a question with a satisfying answer, and then there's a question that is sort of an open-ended invitation to a kind of, uh, you know, group improvisational session. We've created a prompt for fans to 'yes and' their own story out of it, and the sense that there might be something in there creates a sense of excitement along with it."

Pretty sure this is sums up my general thoughts on the Interview/is the part of it I regard as Important so far. Also, I wish I could write something like that. If I leave a loose end hanging, it's very blatantly a loose end. I can improvise a 10,000-word essay about Ford's anger issues on the fly, doing that out of someone else's work is incredibly easy and natural for me, but I can't do the same in my own work. It's a frustrating thing.

"The Mystery Shack is a bucket full of misshapen, lost, odd oddities, and these character are a bucket of full of misshapen lost odd oddities, and like the idea of them all having a place where they fit in, and - and loving each other as a family, was very important to me."

...Ok, this is another Important bit, but for completely different reasons. Basically sums up why I'm here, really.

"That means that Dipper and Mabel's parents may have had children at a concerningly young age, and is this show's intent to say that it's okay for those relationships to exist?"

Here's a thing that I think is just...me not quite getting how a lot of people work, I guess? To me, there's a world of difference between "that could be what happened" and "and that means I approve of it." The Pineses are a really screwed up family. They should have called that pawn shop Dysfunction Junction, that’s how messed up they are. Apparently it was Filbrick who knocked someone up at a drive-in movie once (one of my 4.5 Shermies is actually a much older half-brother who only gets to know Stan at all after they meet at Filbrick's funeral, though I never decided if his mom was the shotgun wedding or if that was with Caryn. Either way, though, he was vaguely aware that "yeah, Dad and his second wife had those twins" but he'd had very limited contact with them and bought that he'd mixed up which one was supposed to be weird and have six fingers without too much trouble), and Mabel's level of proto-sexual aggressiveness is...occasionally disconcerting, to me at least. One or more generations of teenage parenthood seems perfectly in character for them to me, without it meaning anyone approves or disapproves of that. It's fairly realistic, however depressing, that a much younger son in a family as dysfunctional as theirs might well have started acting out, resulting in Indiscretions - my second fic was based on the premise that the "you gotta raise a kid, your life falls apart..." was Stan talking about Shermie's lot in life rather than his own, as I hadn't yet heard the remark about it being a Filbrick quote (the whole events of that story were constructed with the idea of keeping Stan's line about how he lied to everyone, including "my family" and "your parents", literally true, so every event was created to explain how Stan got away with it for a little longer without anyone noticing, basically). Mabel also seems impractical enough, even post-character development, to get waaaaaay too into a high school relationship with unfortunate results. That's not approval of such relationships, that's just...reality? Goodness, people don't think I morally approve of everything (or even very much at all) in my stories, do they? That's an unsettling thought.

"I think we say 'damn.' I think we say 'hell' maybe, um, yeah."

Ford specifically says "I'll be damned" in the Journal (though, in context, it seems less like swearing than like he possibly means it some form of literally; there's several hints in the Journal that suggest Ford believes in...Something, though he's almost certainly not a member of any organized religion and almost definitely not a member of any organized religion we'd recognize). Stan, for his part, says "hell" in "Lost Legends," referring to a part of the carnival that he thinks would be a good hiding place.

Since Disney allowed people to refer to going to literal, capital-H Hell in at least two properties long preceding Gravity Falls, though (specifically, David Xanatos infamously says "pay a man enough and he'll walk barefoot into Hell" in the pilot of the animated show Gargoyles, and Claude Frollo sings a whole song where he repeatedly yells the words "Hell" and "Hellfire" without a care in the world in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), I am still more shocked that they let Ford say the word "suicide" on the show proper, on Disney channel. And...okay, Frollo is significantly less child-friendly than Bill, even given the torture scene. Frollo does things that are just as violent as that scene, plus Frollo is quite blatantly driven by a perverse sexual obsession with a woman, so that he attempts to coerce her into sex with everything but the word 'sex' on screen before setting her on fire. There's distinctly perverse undertones in Bill's every interaction with Ford in the Weirdmageddon Trilogy, but Bill's been an energy being without physical form since before the birth of the Milky Way, which takes the edge off...a bit, anyway. Bill in the Journal flings down and dances upon the line between "this is a metaphor" and "...okay, so, the way this is being written about is so on the nose that I'm not sure this counts as a metaphor for any practical purposes anymore," but Bill having "extract information" as a motive in the most blatantly unsettling scenes of the show proper means he's still less overt about it on screen than Frollo.

...What was I talking about, again? Oh, right. Disney Channel: A lot less squeaky-clean in general than it wants you to think, Parents! They've been letting animated people say "Hell" occasionally since I was four!

"We talked about 'is there a way for this government agent who knows about Trembley to be connected to the government agents who picked up this disturbance?' We weren't really able to find a way to make them connect in a satisfying way, so, I wish we had done more with it."

Welp, there's another one for the "Projects to Eventually Do" List. Y'know, I'd never even thought of associating Powers and Co with the guy in "National Treasure"? It's one of those episodes I kinda mostly forget about tbh, the S1 filler episodes - I remember facts from it because they're useful when constructing my "Nathaniel Northwest was a warlock who made deals with Bill and here's how that could play out" theories, but I never think about the plot. Kind of like how I forget that Dipper's infatuation with Wendy is why the Paper Twins exist, even though they're now major characters in a lot of what I've written and are even bigger players in the vast majority of what I plan to write in future....I can tell you way, way too much about "Double Dipper," but I'm always slightly surprised that "oh, the Wendy obsession is why all this other stuff even happened!"

[On a very long section of text about McGucket and the memory gun]

OMG OMG OMG I WAS RIGHT! I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE ALCOHOLISM METAPHOR, IT'S CANON, I FEEL SO SMART RIGHT NOW, WHEEE!

Ahem...sorry about that. Got a bit carried away there. So, Alex also compared McGucket's relationship with the memory gun to alcoholism. And to taking anxiety pills, but...well, there is a reason you don't mix those, I suppose. I want to dig into this so much more, and I'm probably gonna end up printing this section and tacking it to the wall next to my writing table, but right now I have gotta do my mother's taxes, she refused to admit they hadn't been done yet until a few hours ago, arrgh, I don't have time - yeah, that bit's probably gonna get its own analysis post eventually.

"It's like he has to always have a mission in front of him, because if he doesn't have a mission in front of him, he's thinking 'how have I treated the people in my life?'"

Hey, I think I said that...like...three times in this insanely long post, and I know I've said it before. My character interpretations are being validated. It makes me faintly grumpy that I'm as pleased by this as I am. I have a...complicated relationship with validation, let's leave it at that.

"The same way you know a black hole is there by the light warped around it, it's like, you know the damage someone's family has done to them by all of their weird tics and behaviors. So who is the character who would result in Stan being this hurt and needy and mad and also longing?"

I'd argue that it was the whole family dynamic, really - Stan clearly had a ton of daddy issues on the boil even before he got disowned, and while Caryn seems to have been more openly affectionate toward him, I can't imagine it did his psychology any good to grow up with a mother he calls a "pathological liar" without missing a beat. There'd always be that uncertainty (much like there later is with Stan himself) about what was real and what was a lie, what was a performance, because Caryn, like Stan, was an entertainer - it's the thing they were good at. Meanwhile, Filbrick is a fifties and sixties father of the most rigid sort, someone who is clearly uncomfortable expressing any positive emotion of any kind, or really anything except anger. He's either indifferent or he's shouting, and he apparently calls his sons by the same name to the point that they can say "he means you" when he's bellowing for "Stan Pines," because Stan's unimportance in life has been so thoroughly underlined for him by his parents, long before Ford personally was in any position to inflict much childhood trauma, that he struggles to have any form of identity separate from "Ford's twin" by a very young age, and never really grows past this until maybe the final moments of the show - I really wish we'd had a moment of Stan claiming his own name properly, but at least it made the news. Until that point, he'd literally failed at everything he ever did as Stanley, as himself, because he had no direction without Ford - even the Mystery Shack, as built around his specific talents as it is, was created because the mission in front of him had Ford as a focus point. That's a crucial thing, too, about his bond with Dipper and Mabel, and Soos, and even kinda Wendy - he's built a life for himself outside of just being Ford's brother. It's implied none of them even knew he was a twin, that the Other had ever existed. He still defines himself in relation to other people to a large extent, but that's still less restrictive than defining himself (and being defined by others) solely in terms of one other person. Fairer to Ford, too. But I digress.

"And it's like 'oh! I think he's also aloof and distant from himself.' I think he is, uh, deeply, deeply hiding from his real feelings about things, because at some point early on, he decided that he could run from hurt by achievement and by creation, and has dug that hole so deep that he has no relationships."

Accurate, at least at times.

"The shows I was watching growing up were, like, Doug and Rugrats, and there were no holy wars about whether Chucky Finster, uh, should be interpreted this way or that way. We had no idea the world that was coming into consciousness as we were making this thing."

I found this kinda interesting, because I remember those shows, too - but by the time I was old enough to be aware of very much, Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer had already created the core of modern fandom culture as we know it, so I at the same time have the concepts of "there is no Rugrats fandom" and "that did not make fandom a surprise to me, because it was falling into place right about the point where my memory starts/I became dimly aware of the world outside of [Microscopically small town I'm from]." I don't know if this is something where he maybe remembers early childhood more than I do, since I have very, very few distinct memories from before I was 10-11 - a few, but they're like isolated snapshots with limited context, except what I know happened because people have told me it happened. I know Hirsch is older than me, but also not *that* much older than me, so I wonder if it's down to those few years (like he said about how gay marriage had just been legalized as the show was wrapping, and it's disconcerting now to think how different so many things were back then) or if it's a difference in personalities or what.

Well! That was more enjoyable than I expected! Thanks for prodding me to finally read this thing, @the-orion-scribe. It's eaten much of my day and seems set to eat a fair bit of it tomorrow, too, since I had to cut myself short at a couple of interesting points, but it was fun.

[aloneinthehellfire]

Chapter 14: Part 2: The Battle Of Starcourt

Season One | Season Two | Season Three

[Raining Hellfire Season Three]

Word Count: 2291 words

Warnings: swearing, attacks, use of knife, mentions of blood, death, powers, sad confessions, fire, guilt, mentions of possession

[A/N: It just got a whole lot more interesting. And depressing. Mostly interesting. Can't believe there's just one more chapter until the end of this season]

The Battle Of Starcourt

You ran into the Starcourt Mall just in time to see an epic display of fireworks.

The others had come back, bringing unexpected ammo with them as they blasted the streams of light towards the giant monster, it screeching out in pain. But they would have to run out eventually.

In front of the Mind Flayer, you see a struggle and immediately stagger towards it. Your eyes widen when you see Billy pinning El down, smashing her against the floor.

“NO!” You scream and you dive at Billy, hooking your arm around his body and pulling him down to the floor with you.

El coughs for air, scrambling away from Billy and the Mind Flayer while looking to you with a panicked expression.

Billy writhed in pain as Robin threw a firework bomb at the monster, their connection allowing the others to hit two birds with one stone.

But Billy was determined. He pounced at you, grabbing you by the throat and lifting you with strength no human should have.

“Y/N!” You heard Robin and Steve yell. They had no more ammo left to rid the monsters of their strength.

“Billy…” You struggled to speak, clawing at his hands around your neck as you aimlessly kick your legs. His dark eyes stared into yours, any soul they had gone forever.

You reach down into your pocket, feeling the familiar glint of metal brush against your fingers and you grasp the handle tightly. With one swift swing of the scalpel, you cut across Billy’s arm, causing him to hiss and drop you to the floor in pain and surprise.

You choke for air, crawling away.

“Let us finish this, Y/n” Billy stalked closer to you, a deep voice striking every nerve, “Once and for all”

You turn onto your back just as Billy reached down and brought up the scalpel again. But he was prepared this time. He grabbed your wrist and twisted it, hard, causing you to drop the small knife onto the floor.

He took the opportunity and straddled you, pinning you down, as he wrapped his hands around your head and smashed it against the floor. You cry out in pain as your skull made contact with the hard surface, eyes blinded by white spots in your vision.

“Y/N!” Max’s voice rang out as she and Mike ran into the mall.

You simply hold your hand out, stopping her from getting any closer. You bring your eyes to meet Billy’s as he lifts your head once again. Before he can repeat his past action, you delicately place your hand on his cheek and his movements still.

“Billy… it’s me. It’s me.” You whisper repetitively, eyes never leaving his.

His eyes seem to regain emotion, eyelids flickering slightly as he fought against himself.

“I’m the girl you saved at the beach, remember?” You try, breathing heavily, “I swam too far into the waves and you came out and saved me.”

Billy’s face flashes with memories, his gaze set on yours.

“You were with your mom. She wore a hat. With a blue ribbon.”

His eyes start to pool with tears, his breathing becoming shallower.

“You… you brought me to her.” You nod, tears slipping down your cheeks, “You didn’t even know me but you told her I was your new best friend.”

“I wanted to teach you how to surf.” He whispers and your heart breaks. Billy was still in there.

“Remember how happy we were?”

Billy squeezes his eyes shut, nodding slowly as the rush of tears finally streamed down his face.

“I’m so so sorry, Billy.”

You cried, staring at the boy you shared so many memories with. The boy that had come into your life when you both needed someone. The boy you shared your first kiss with. The boy you could never not love. The boy you had cursed.

The Mind Flayer lets out a terrifying screech, quickly recovering from the blasts.

“Kill her”

Billy’s eyes widen as he hears the same echo, glancing up at the creature above you. Something flashes across his eyes before he looks back to you, lips quivering into a hint of a sad smile.

Suddenly, the Mind Flayer roars, opening it’s mouth and revealing rows of sharp teeth. A tentacle shoots out, opening up and aiming straight for you.

It never reached you.

Billy caught the tentacle with both hands, straining against its force as he stood above you. Protecting you.

You struggle to stand, trying to prop yourself up on your elbow before falling back down. Another tentacle shoots out. Billy shifts his body and it bites into his left side.

You watch in horror and regret as your childhood friend sacrifices his life for yours. The Mind Flayer has no choice but to eliminate him now. Another tentacle, another bite. And again, and again, and again…

Billy drops to his knees, the tentacle from the monster’s mouth retreats as he screams out in pain.

Billy shifts his gaze to you and you lock eyes. You stay paralysed, shaking your head. He was going to die. And he knew it.

He smiles, reassuring you just before the Mind Flayer shoots its tentacle straight through Billy’s chest.

“BILLY!” Max screams as you sob on the floor, watching the Mind Flayer take his life.

After a moment, the tentacles release him and he drops to the floor. Max immediately runs over, eyes set with panic as she stares down at her brother.

You slowly stand, head throbbing as you make your way over to them both. As you do, you feel something shift behind you and your arms trail with goosebumps.

“LOOK OUT!” Mike yells and you spin around just as the Mind Flayer shoots out more tentacles.

You didn’t know how it happened. In fact, it all happened so fast that you didn’t think anything through.

Your hands raised in front of you, reaching out as you felt a powerful rage build up inside of you. The corners of your vision darkened as you focused your anger on the rows of teeth in front of you. You screamed.

The tentacles suddenly froze in the air, barely inches away from your face as you stood in front of the kids. They squirmed and struggled with such force that they should have moved. It shouldn’t have been possible, not since El had lost her powers. But it wasn’t El doing this.

It was you.

You felt a darkness creeping through your spine and into your arms, faint black lines covering the skin. With a yell, you push your arms out and the tentacles stabbed straight into the Mind Flayer so quickly you almost missed it.

You stand your ground. The Mind Flayer struggled against itself, slowly pulling away each tentacle before roaring at you.

But its action caused it to start bleeding out from every wound you had caused. And that wasn’t the end.

A chill crept up your spine before your mind suddenly flooded with a high pitched scream. You wince, collapsing to the floor as the Mind Flayer screeches out in pain. It becomes unsteady on its legs; rocking back and forth as it struggles to stand. Stumbling, it crashes into a column.

You feel its life draining before it finally collapses to the floor and lays there, motionless. You breathe out as the static in your mind calms, air leaving your lips shakily.

They had done it. They had closed the gate.

Everyone stares at the dead creature from where they stand, relief coursing through them. And then they look to you... and you couldn't even begin to imagine what they were thinking.

“Billy?”

Max’s voice snapped you out of your trance and you turn your head to see her kneeling down beside him. Behind her, Mike held El as she cried.

“Billy.” Max continues, shaking her head as he struggles to breathe. “Billy. Get up, please. Billy, get up, please, please.”

You pull your body across the floor towards them, reaching him just in time for Billy whisper into the air.

“I’m sorry.”

You reach out to grab his hand and his eyes find yours, a tear rolling down.

He takes his final breath.

“Billy!” Max sobs, shaking his shoulders, “Billy, wake up. Please.”

You watch as your sister breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably. El takes her into her arms, rocking her back and forth.

“It’s okay.” She whispers and tears your heart apart, “It’s okay.”

The next hour felt like torture.

Military helicopters had shown up in the parking lot, a man in a lab coat leading them into the mall.

“I’m Dr. Owens.” He had said to you as the soldiers cleared out the mall. The way he looked at you was curious, like he had seen you before.

Outside, fire trucks and ambulances lined the Starcourt Mall. There wasn’t originally a fire in the building but now it was covered in flames. Just another cover up in Hawkins.

They even covered your father’s death with the flames.

You sat in the back of an ambulance, watching as your friends reunite with their families, crying and holding eachother. It was a numb feeling for you to be seeing that.

Susan and Neil had even appeared, pulling Max into a hug as Susan stared at the flames with a horrified expression. Neil didn’t even seem like he cared his own son had died.

El never reunited with Hopper. She had lost him just like you lost Jack. But she had Joyce, a woman who always saw the girl as her daughter ever since the night they met. She had a family, even with him gone.

And the last time you saw either Jack or Hopper was in the mall that was burning to the ground.

“Hey.”

Steve sits down next to you, wrapped in a blanket similar to your own. You smile at him before frowning, looking out into the crowds of people.

“Where are your parents?”

He let out a cold laugh, shaking his head. “Out of town. Probably won’t find out about any of this until they’re back. Not like they ever answer their damn phones.”

“I’m sorry.” You whisper, offering a smile.

Steve looks at you as your eyes are drawn back to the parking lot. Lucas’ mother was smothering him and Erica in kisses whilst their father held on to them.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks and you tear your eyes away from the Sinclairs. His eyes widen. “Shit, sorry. That’s a stupid question. I’m sorry.”

“I just-” You start, taking a breath. “I just wish I could go back in time. Do things differently. Maybe… maybe they’d still be alive.”

“None of us could have seen that coming.” Steve tries and you laugh bitterly.

“I should have. I mean, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that they died after I was told that everyone I loved would be taken away from me, you know? And what did I do? I dragged them into it anyway.”

“How can you blame yourself?” Steve furrows his brows, “You couldn’t have done anything.”

“But I did.” You say quietly, thinking back, “I stopped it. I- I don’t know how but I stopped it from attacking. I had that the whole time and I didn’t use it until it was too late.”

“I should have let it take me.” You add with the quietest whisper. Steve raised his eyebrow, clearly not hearing your last statement.

“How could you have known?” He offered. “You looked just as shocked as the rest of us.”

“I know.” You slowly nod, trying to convince yourself. “You’re right. I just… a lot happened.”

He reaches between the blankets and grabs your hand, squeezing it. “We’ll get through it. All of us.”

You look down at your hands with a gentle smile. You frown, remembering. “About-”

“It’s okay.” He whispers, planting a kiss on your temple. “I know what you’re gonna say.”

You squeeze your eyes shut at his touch, wanting nothing more than to give in.

“I don’t think either of us are ready.” You look up at him. “I was told once that… that time doesn’t heal by itself. I know you and Nancy didn’t work out but you loved her. And… and I know first hand that those feelings just don’t disappear in a couple of months.”

He nods along, glancing over at the Wheeler family reuniting.

“I know.” He smiles down at you, a laugh escaping him. “Why are we like this?”

“Hopeless?” You laugh, resting your head on his shoulder. “I have no idea.”

Another kiss to your forehead and you close your eyes.

Just for now, in this moment, you wanted to pretend. Pretend like nothing ever happened.

The Russians didn’t try to open another gate. It didn’t lead to an investigation that got you and your friends kidnapped and tortured, not knowing if you’d make it out alive.

Billy was never possessed. It didn’t lead to him sacrificing himself for you. You were going to attend work tomorrow and roll your eyes at Billy’s dramatic entrance from the pool house. And Heather would be there too, fussing over colour-coded whistles.

Hopper didn’t go down into the Russian base. It didn’t lead him to getting caught in the blast as they shut the gate. He would come home, grumbling about Mike and El, making you laugh with his poor attempts at dad jokes.

Jack never came looking for you. He was going to be there waiting for you, in the house you shared as a family.

The black dust never possessed you on the eve of your 14th birthday.

You weren’t cursed.

You just wished you weren’t destined to live out your greatest fear...

Being alone.

Chapter 15: This Is Just The Beginning ->

taglist: @gnnnne / @beepisbeep / @paintballkid711/ @eddiesbirdie/ @livasaurasrex/ @darktimelegends / @jackierose902109 / @mvrylee / @chervbs/ @eternallyvenus / @nervouscatsuit / @f1nn-wolfhard / @hereiamhereigo / @ladybug0095 / @fangirling-4-ever / @astrolockley

[dreamingon-forever]

Levihan Short Story Promps and Ideas

From the last poll I posted, most of you wanted another multiple chaptered story after I finish Black Tea is Fine. And I will 100% do that! I already have an idea of what I want it to be, so don't worry I will get to it. (Here's a link to the preview I've posted before). But since it will be about two or three more chapters before the finale of the series, I still want to upload other written works. Here I have added a few story ideas and I want to know which one you guys want me to publish into a full written short story first. Feel free to private message me or leave a comment under to let me know!

High school students Hange and Levi are best friends, and always have been as they grew up next to each other. One day Hange overhears Levi and Kenny talking about her, where she hears her best friend badmouthing her and wishing she would leave him alone. Taking it to heart, Hange distances herself from him, hurt from his words that seem contradictory to how he interacts with her. When in reality Levi only said those words because he couldn't properly word his true feelings to his friend, and ended up saying the opposite of what he felt so his uncle would leave him alone. Levi unaware of Hange hearing it all is confused as to why she no longer visits him, talks to him, or even hangs out with him anymore. Then he witnesses the one thing that he never wanted to see- Hange sharing her first kiss with someone else.

Levi is the vise president of tea company and Hange a botanist hired by him to help figure out a way to increase tea leaf production. He's a stingy man who doesn't know or care much about his staff, but Hange humbles him real quick, forcing him onto "company field trips" and getting him to work alongside her and his farmers. He absolutely hates her and her overly bubbly/optimistic ways, but eventually starts developing respect towards her and possibly deeper meanings that go beyond work partners.

Librarian Levi and writer Hange who is a regular at their branch. Levi honestly thinks she's only there to bother him as she's there at his every shift without miss, constantly chatting him up despite the customers coming by his desk for check out. She constantly blabbers on about books she reads, most doing with history but occasionally the fictional chapter books she's completely engrossed by. Hange eventually ends up no longer showing up to the library anymore, leaving Levi to always eagerly look up from his desk whenever someone comes through the door, secretly hoping it's a certain bespectacled brunette.

Exes. Levi was a poor farmer while Hange was the daughter of their lands. The two were madly in love with each other and Hange made it well known to everyone and her family that she only wanted to be with him, much to her family's horror and disapproval. Rumours started spreading that Hange is secretly seeing someone else behind Levi's back, and of course, Levi doesn't believe it. Until he runs into them in the man's house while on one of his deliveries. He breaks up with Hange later that day when she comes to visit, without allowing her to give her side of the story. "Do me a last favour and throw it away when you get home." Hange tells him before leaving, confusing as to what she could mean. But when he finally returns home, finds a wrapped gift on his table. But it's too late and Hange doesn't want to see him anymore.

Prince Levi and princess Hange from enemy nations. He was meant to kill her on their first encounter, but failed repetitively. Eventually he falls in love with her and is unable to even think of hurting her. Hange ends up finding out his initial intents and banishes him from her lands.

Nanaba and Mike set up Levi and Hange together as part of a TV program they have in production. While Hange joined because she's the newest member of their company, and therefore asked to enroll as a last minute substitute for the original cast member, Levi is put in because Mike forced him as his friend. The two don't get along at all during their first recording. But as time went on, and the closer they got to the ending of the show, where they both had to declare whether they fell in love or not, both of them eventually realize they have caught feelings for the other.

High school teachers where they are obviously in love with each other, but too dense to realize it themselves. So their students take it upon themselves to set them up so they can finally get them together. Other teachers get a whiff of what they're up to and instead of calling them out for it, secretly aid them behind the scenes.

Hange is a princess and Levi is one of the knights. Due to hate towards the kingdom and the king for what happened to his family, he infiltrates the castle as a knight, wanting to work his way up until he's the king's personal guard to assassinate him. The quickest way he can think of getting there being to earn the princess' favour and getting her to fall in love with him. She does eventually fall for him, but what he didn't foresee is himself falling for her as well. Conflicted at seeing how he didn't want to lose her trust, he starts questioning his plan. But the princess finds out eventually about it. At this point Levi no longer cares about the assassination, but Hange no longer trusts him, and pays him off to leave the castle.

[factorialsotherfandoms]

XCOM2 au again. This is... honestly I should write the other piece of this first - hopefully tomorrow - but I've a long day today and this one is faster. This preceeds the bits I've been writing recently by a few months, being the bit between Mike being kidnapped and Pac getting to safety (tomorrow's is the actual kidnapping, if I can convince myself to write it).

It's also Felps PoV and I adore him but I also struggle because I've only ever caught 5 minutes here and there of his stuff, so he's the Brazilian I have the worst grasp on. Apologies.

Open ending, but if you read the other bits later than this you know its fine in the end.

It's a quiet night, but then they often are. Felps has command of the ship, Forever and Cellbit having bedded down for the night. The one call they were expecting has been and gone. Someone still has to remain at the comms, just in case, but he can sit at the desk and play cards with the night-duty engineers and not feel too bad about it.

He's won three bottles of lemonade and an old wristwatch, and lost his third favourite pen when the comms light up.

Not expecting anything, Felps takes a moment to even recognise the beep. A quick glance at the screen - it's in the band they reserve for emergencies, long-range. Redirected via... A quick glance shows him that while the computer can unscramble the message, it's been redirected too many times to pin the origin.

He can worry about that later.

The game is abandoned, Felps answers the call.

At first, all he can hear is sobbing - heavily distorted. It takes him a moment, then another, then...

"Pac?"

Pac and Mike are supposed to be radio silent for another three, maybe four, days. They're supposed to be using one of the camp radios even if they do.

Felps heart drops to his feet as Pac continues to sob.

"Pac?" He tries again, gesturing for one of the engineers to run and wake Forever. "Pac, what's wrong?"

He still doesn't get an answer.

Behind him something moves. Felps snaps around, sees it's just his fellow cards players. One is running off to the commander's quarters, the other two are hovering at their desks, ready to input whatever commands are needed.

Felps takes a breath, then another, then realises... It's not just sobbing.

It's hard to make out, it's so hard to make out, but between the sobs he can make out numbers.

Coordinates.

"Pac?" he tries again, doing his best to hide his own fear and knowing he can't. "Pac, can you start from the top again?"

Pac doesn't, seemingly unable to hear him, but after a couple more digits Felps hears 'latitude'.

He grabs a notepad, and begins scribbling down what he hears. It takes a few goes through to be absolutely certain he got the whole string, and then hands them off to one of the waiting engineers.

"Pac, it's Felps, I'm here," and Felps wishes he was, not half a world away, the ship having been used to make some deliveries yesterday. "It'll all be okay, right? I'm here, after all!"

It's not a promise he can make; one of the engineers has pulled up the coordinates, and it's at least a four hour flight. Felps bites his lip.

It's also... Something about the satellite photos looks wrong.

It looks...

"Pac, shit, calm down!" he tries desperately. "Are those your coordinates? Or the mission ones?"

There's a brief break in the sobbing, a short breath and, "it's- it's where /it/ lives. I can't- I- It's here, Felps, it's here! I can't-"

The sobbing picks back up. Felps own heart-rate picks up.

4 hours. Shit, shit shit - they're four hours out, and that isn't even his location!

"Shit, shit, shit," Felps chants the word, three repetitions to ever sob of Pac's, tries to think, tries to drone both things into music in his mind and focus through it. "Pac, is Mike there?"

The sobs grow heavier, "they got him, they got Mike."

Felps can taste his own blood - Pac will always mean the universe to him, but that doesn't mean he doesn't care for the rest, and doesn't mean losing anyone wouldn't ruin him too. Got as in killed or got as in kidnapped? It doesn't really matter, does it?

"Shit, fuck," who is even awake to help? It's the graveyard shift. "Where are you, Pac?"

Any response he does get is incoherent; Felps barely even notices himself pulling open a second comms channel - local this time.

He doesn't realise he managed it until he's answered with, "Tubbo here, whatcha need?"

Tubbo's voice is distorted too; Felps isn't sure if it's his own panic, or the fact Tubbo's got him on speaker.

"I'm on another call - channel, er, emergency channel. Can you track it?"

"The computer can't?"

"No."

Tubbo says something - Felps is momentarily distracted by Pac going deathly silent on the other line. He doesn't even breathe until he hears the sobbing pick back up - quieter, but Pac is at least safe enough to cry, and near enough the radio to be picked up.

"Say again?"

"Said maybe, I'll give it a go," there's the sound of clattering machinery, and then Tubbo's voice is clearer. "How urgent?"

Felps can't answer that question - on his other line Pac shrieks, and he immediately switches over.

"Pac!" he calls. "Pac, are you okay?!"

A few rounds of gunfire.

"Pac!!!"

Heavy breathing, and then Pac's shaking voice, "just... just a guard. Just a guard."

Just a guard isn't anything Felps likes.

"Pac, you need to run," Felps does his best to be serious, to talk his panicking friend through it long enough to survive. "Please, Pac?"

"But-"

"For me?"

"Felps?" the voice isn't from either comms line, but behind him. "What's going on?"

Felps turns, fingers on his pistol as he jumps - just Forever, just Forever, more than half asleep and wearing nothing but lounge pants.

"Pac," is all Felps can quite manage to say in reply. "Pac, um, he-"

Forever's eyes skim over Felps' face, and the monitor, and Felps can see the life and the hope drain from his body all at once.

And there's nothing Felps can say to make it better.

He turns back to the screen, trying to find anything - anything - that might save his light. His fingers tremble as he searches every bit of the map around the point he was given, but he also has no idea how long ago Pac and Mike were there. Maybe...

Tubbo's voice cuts back in, "got it! Sending it up. You... I might have listened a bit... Tell Pac to get home safe, okay? I'm getting the rest of the shift up. I'll let them know."

That line goes dead before Felps can reply, but at least Tubbo is on the ship. He clings to the other one instead, where he can only hear Pac's unsteady breathing.

With the distortion he can't tell if it's panic or injury, and Felps' heart - he can't take it, he can't take it okay, he's only Felps!

The coordinates from Tubbo flash up on screen - and bless the kid, he must be terrified, but they're shifting as Pac's radio is moved. Full tracking.

But, if they can track Pac...

If they can track him...

They should tell him to turn off the radio, to hide and stay safe, but if they do that they loose him, they loose him and they'll never know what happens if they get there and he's gone.

"Pac, don't leave me," he begs, and maybe it should be the other way around but what can he do? "I need you."

Pac needs to be needed in a way Felps doesn't, or at least in a different way to how Felps does. They'd all kill themselves for each other, but it's Pac who can't find point in living if he's not dying for someone else. Felps knows this, they all know this, they just won't say it.

He should hang up, he should hang up and let Pac hide, but they're still three and a half hours out and anything could happen in that time.

Forever's arms wrap around Felps, gripping him tight as his friend leans down and presses his chin into his hair.

"Calm, calm," Forever whispers, just audible over the crackling sobs of Pac. "We need to stay calm."

Trembling fingers tight in Felps' shirt say he's anything but.

"We're three and a half hours from you," Felps tells Pac, not speaking his words but reciting the script he was taught long ago, back in the military, back in a world before this one. "What's your status?"

Felps doesn't get an answer, just stifled sobs and feet on concrete.

Forever trembles behind him, and Felps thinks their commander might be crying into his hair.

Felps is crying onto the keyboard, he knows that for sure.

"Pac?"

Nothing again.

He glances at the map, tracking their progress.

Still three and a half hours. Three and a half hours.

And Felps... Felps doesn't know if Pac can hold out that long.

[will80sbyers]

I've gone through the entire ST4 score about 5 times, and im not sure this is the right track for when mike and el talk before argyle comes in with the pineapple pizza, but the track name really stands out so I though I'd share my theory and ask about your opinion. imo its probably the closest sounding track but I'm also running on 30 hours of no sleep and I'll admit, it feels like a bit of a stretch.

anyways, i'll get into it. there is a few parts but I think its a good one or at least thought provoking.

-so, the closest track imo, and also the only one with a name that references the pizza place is "Surf that Tasty Pie". if you're familiar with "The First I love You" and others, you'll know capitalisation is ~interesting~. there's a few track names that only capitalise the first word, so the choice of capitalising "Tasty Pie" means it must be significant. - also, if you apply grammar rules, its means "Tasty Pie" is a place, person or acronym. doesn't seem like a place, and its certainly not an acronym, so it must be a person.

-after this track plays, argyle comes in and breaks up the moment mike and el are having (conversation about their fight and neither look happy to be talking about this) the track is stopped by argyle throwing a pineapple pizza onto the table. mike is offended immediately. he is also very adamant that fruit on a pizza is *blasphemous*.. interesting choice of words. fruit, and being called fruity, has been a common slang term for gay people, and blasphemy has connections to doing things that are disrespectful to God.. you know what would have been considered very *blasphemous* in the 1980's? being gay. argyle's phrase of "try before you deny" on the phone call following the mention of the pineapple they have in store earlier in the season and el's repetition of argyle's statement and determination to make mike see that fruit on pizza is okay, not blasphemous, may not be as pointless as we once first though.

now the part that seems the easiest to explain

-pizza = pie. the "Pie" or pizza that arrives in shot when the track is stopped is a fruity pizza. two out of three of the people at this table agree that this pizza is tasty. what else do we know is fruity? will ! (also his coded conversation with Jonathan happens less than 3 minutes of the pizza coming out)

probably the most convoluted was of showing that mike is being encouraged to "Surf that Tasty Pie", or in not so cryptic messaging - go for will. essentially, its okay to be fruity and go for fruity things. this works oddly well with the idea that mike has internalised homophobia, as it's his friends helping him realise that being queer is okay, unlike his parents where, presumably, he gets the blasphemy sentiments - I know anyone can be homophobic but the wheelers did canonically (iirc) have a Reagan sign for the 1984 election sooo..

some of this feels like a joke, but there's some that is really interesting how it falls into place - also !! im not claiming the pizza = fruity theory, I've seen it floating around but not sure where the credit is due, unfortunately. the fact that theres a track with this name did add to my belief that maybe this scene had more to it than face value. anyways, thank you for reading, and if you made it this far, I'm so sorry for what I put you through haha

I'm running to listen to this and see if it fits! I think the song that plays is a mix of some of the scores but this theory is very interesting!! If it's true that they really pay this much attention to details this could be an inside joke between them!! Thank you!!! 👏👏

edit: after listening again I'm convinced it's a mix of surf that tasty pie and unambiguous true love for the base maybe

second edit: bullshit, I don't know I'm listening again and it doesn't fit enough with unambiguous true love.... it could fit some parts of Letter to Willy!!! someone who studied music needs to help us with this

[evil-ontheinside]

Free Day byler fic recs!

(which I use to rec some fics I forgot or wasn't sure how to categorize)

No one should ever have to look at themselves. by Stanningeverything

Mike discovers his asexuality, catastrophizes, thinks his relationship is doomed by learning the fact and despite everything his family still weighs on his mind. He deals with all of this (badly)

Just the ordeal of figuring yourself out, dealing with your family issues, all while thinking you are the worst person on earth. Hopefully he has a great support system with his friends and boyfriend.

i turned around and nothing was here by ethqreal

Mike didn’t care. Maybe because he always managed, he made his own choices regardless of what his parents chose to preach and if he really was cursed with ice running through his veins, it didn’t matter because he would always love the boy across town until his very last breath and he had frozen from the inside-out.

or a cursed boy, his boyfriend, an idle town and them against the world.

The End of the World by eagle_ace

Post season 4, vaguely pre-season 5. Things fall apart, to say the least. After everything, the party's not really a party anymore. Mike wants to fix it, but he doesn't know how.

Mike's POV, lots of emotions, I tried writing in the present tense which I don't normally do. There's byler, there's an el-initiated milkvan breakup, there's the party (sans max unfortunately) being friends. Hypothetically this could take place between seasons, but I'm certain there'll be something in season 5 that makes that impossible.

Left to Rot by Cate_Olivyn

“Oh.” Mike snapped his fingers, huffing out a laugh. “Oh, this is like that- that black and white movie my mom likes to put on at Christmas. The Jimmy Stewart one.” He stood a little taller, a wild look in his eyes. “Alright! I’ve learned my lesson! I can go home now, and appreciate my life, yada yada.”

Nothing happened. Mike snapped his fingers again, more urgently, before raising his voice in a yell.

“Lesson learned! I wanna go home!”

The world stayed as it was, broken and decayed, and Mike screamed into the cold, stale air.

Or: After a bad fight with his friends, Mike wakes up in an alternate reality that seems to be plunged into an apocalyptic nightmare.

an ode to hope (and other funny things) by @pyschologicalrocketgirl

“Everything's going to be fine, please don't freak out.” Nancy starts to say, which causes Will’s eyes to widen.

“That’s…not really reassuring, you know that right?”

Nancy huffs a laugh, “Yeah, it isn’t, sorry.” He hears shifting through the receiver, and he thinks maybe that's all she's planned to say.

“Mike’s in the hospital.”

Will sucks in an involuntary breath, letting the air back out, shaky. He nods repetitively, a little numb as he tries to process, before realizing Nancy can’t see him.

“Okay.” He aims for level but his voice cracks mid-way. He’s almost whispering, “Is- he okay?”

Mike's in the hospital, which kickstarts a drive to Boston and a worried Will as he thinks about Mike, the past, and love, all while conveniently held up by New York traffic.

the loneliest blackout by @drop-of-infinity

Will knew the stages of Mike’s breakdowns. First came the silence, then the welling tears. They would stay there, perched on the edge of his eyelids until he began to talk, and then they would make their enviable path down Mike’s face. The tears would increase as his words trickled off, and eventually he would break into gasping sobs, unable to speak, unable to do anything but cry.

Or, Will tries to rip the bandaid off. Mike breaks down. They figure it out in the end.

@bylerficrecweek thank you guys so much for organizing this! the whole week was so much fun and I really enjoyed going through my bookmarks and discovering new fics loved by others <3

[kaylans-imagines]

tulip hoppers driving school

synopsis: in which y/n 'tulip' hopper teaches her kids to drive and gets roped into a competition with steve.

disclaimer: this can be read as a standalone, but the character 'tulip' is part of the mini series i may or may not be writing :) there will be other parts to this (they arent connected but yk)

warnings: cursing. a hissyfit from both dustin and steve. lowkey kinda repetitive :) not proofread

word count: 3026

~*~

It was common knowledge that Steve and Y/N were the group’s drivers. If it wasn’t Steve, it was Y/N, and vice versa. Sometimes they would even split up. Y/N would take the girls while Steve dealt with the boys. That had been the way they functioned until the kids got their Learner’s Permits. Max had been the first one, then Lucas got his, followed by Mike, Will, and finally Dustin. When they had presented their id’s to her and Steve, she couldn’t help but reel in shock, wondering where the time had gone. It seemed as if it were only yesterday she was running around with them, fighting off a band of evil interdimensional dogs. Now her kids were sixteen and eager to get their licenses. 

Max had been the one to approach her first, blue eyes blinking at her as she asked her if she would be willing to teach her to drive. Her heart swelled at her query, nodding excitedly at her question and pulling her into a tight hug. Hopper had tasked himself with teaching El while Mike and Will had obviously been given lessons by their families. The thought of Max asking her to teach her the basics of driving solidified the importance Y/N had on the younger girl's life. Her asking Y/N basically implied that Max saw her as a sister. 

She had told Steve about it that same night, excitement and appreciation coursing through her. It left a bittersweet taste in her mouth. While she loved Max and saw her as nothing short of a sister, she couldn’t help but think about Billy. He was an ass, but she was sure, given the time, he would’ve been Max’s first choice. In his own Billy way, he cared about Max. The sound of Max’s cries was a sound she would never forget; it played on repeat in her mind as she slept sometimes. Haunting her. 

“Maxine, Lucas,” she called their attention to her as they stood in the middle of an abandoned parking lot, “you two ready?” 

“Wait!” Steve’s voice called behind them, causing them to turn their heads and look at Steve and Dustin, who was trailing after him. When they finally reached them, hands on their knees to catch their breath, Steve wheezed out, “We wanted to join.” 

“Dustin, you don’t wanna learn?” Y/N asked, looking at the boy hanging behind her boyfriend.  

“Steve already said he would show me,” Dustin shrugged. Y/N pouted her lips. 

“Well, I mean, my car’s here and I’m already teaching Max and Lucas. I don’t mind teaching you too.” 

“Wait, wait, wait. Hold on,” Steve interrupted, “are you poaching my kid?” 

“Your kid?” she asked, arms crossing against her chest. 

“Yeah,” he answered seriously. “My kid. You know what, Max. Lucas, I can teach you guys. Since, you know, I’m the better teacher.” 

“Excuse me.” Y/N spit out, “you are not taking my Maxine or my Lucas. They’re better off with me as their instructor than with you, Harrington.” 

“You think so, Hopper?” he asked, stepping closer to her. 

“I know so.” She said unwaveringly, keeping her eyes locked on his. “I mean, you’re the one with tickets to your name.” 

“You don’t have any tickets cause of your dad!” He exclaimed in his defense, Y/N just shrugged. “You know what, how about you put your money where your mouth is?” he proposed, stepping away, “let’s make a bet.” 

“A bet?” Y/N asked incredulously. Of all the things Steve could come up with, a bet was the last thing she thought about. 

“Yeah,” he confirmed, hands going to his hips, “the kids have their driving tests on the same day; if your kid or kids pass with less markings than mine, we’ll go to the concert of your choosing, but if mine passes with less markings than yours, we get to go to a concert of my choice.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she deadpanned. Steve nodded his head in agreement. 

“So?” he asked, “unless you’re too scared.” 

Y/N turned to look at Lucas and Max and then at Dustin, but received shrugs in return. After all, this bet had nothing to do with them. She scoffed, “as if. You’re on, Harrington.” 

He extended his hand out to hers, meeting in the middle to shake. As smoothly as possible, he gripped her hand just as she was about to pull away and pulled her into a hasty kiss. The kids groaned, disgusted at their affections. They separated with a laugh before turning serious at the thought of their bet. A sense of determination passed through her. She needed to win. Not even because of what she would get out of it, but because she wanted to make Steve eat his words. 

“Okay, but I’m keeping Max and Lucas,” she said quickly. 

Steve’s face fell, “what? No. I wanted one of them. I can’t be stuck with just Dustin!” 

“Dude!” Dustin cried in offense. The two disregarded him. 

“My Maxine. My Lucas.” she spat out, stepping back to them and pulling them into her by the shoulders. “Your Dustin.” 

“Ugh, fine.” He agreed petulantly. She shared a laugh with the two after Dustin reached up and smacked Steve in the back of the head, offended by his outright rejection. 

“Okay, kids,” she smiled, finger holding the keys to her beloved car, “who’s ready to learn?”

A week into what the kids dubbed ‘Tulip Hopper’s driving school’, Dustin was calling for a meeting. They all met up in the same parking lot, both adults leaning against their cars as they listened to the younger kid. 

“I want to switch,” he declared, glaring at Steve. Steve flinched back in shock, hands crossing over his chest, “I cannot stand being in the car with Steve. He doesn’t let me touch the steering wheel or the gears, he just rambles on about driving safety. And he’s always listening to shitty music. I can’t stand it. Tulip, please, I beg. Let me trade with one of them.” 

Y/N bit back a laugh and licked her lip in amusement, “I can’t decide for them, Dustin. You can ask Lucas or Max to trade places with you, but I can’t force them.” 

The curly haired boy turned to look at his friends in exasperation, his face falling at the sight of them rapidly shaking their heads. 

“No. Not a chance. Tulip’s cool,” Lucas said, remaining beside her. 

“Don’t even think about asking me, dork,” Max shut down, “my Tulip.”

“Tulip,” Dustin begged, disgruntled at their refusal, “please. Save me from your boyfriend.”

“Okay, dude,” Steve murmured, “ouch.” 

“Sorry, buddy,” Tulip said unapologetically. Dustin’s exasperation had her confident in her ability to win their competition, “you’re stuck with Steve and his shit music taste.” 

Motioning the kids back into the car, she stepped off the hood and walked toward her boyfriend. He was still leaning against the burgundy of his car, mugging at his younger friend who pouted at him. Upon noticing her in front of him, he let his eyes soften. “Hi, Amaryllis.” 

“Hi, Steven,” she greeted, drawing into his charm, “I’d ask you how the teaching’s going, but…”

“Yeah,” he agreed with a laugh, “that little shit.”

She wrapped her arms around him, “you know, you can still back out. No point in facing extreme humiliation when Max and Lucas pass with flying colors.” 

“Not a chance,” he retorted, “I have full faith in Dustin. Things are slow right now, but he’s gonna blow them away with his superior driving.”

“If you say so,” she said disbelievingly, opening her mouth to say something else before the horn of her car interrupted. She dropped her head with a shake, humor in her eyes. She pulled away from him, planting a kiss on his lips which he happily returned. Before he could get lost in the softness of her kiss or she could paint it in her memory, another honk startled them. This time from the red BMW they were leaning on. 

“Let’s go!” Three voices demanded, each from their respective cars. Chuckling, they met in the middle, foreheads pressed together. 

“I’ll see you at home?” He asked, looking at the flowers in her eyes. If he looked closely, he could see a beautiful field of sunflowers. 

“Yeah,” she confirmed, looking into his eyes. A honey pot with specs of emerald was all she saw. “Italian for dinner?” 

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll bring it home.” He confirmed, being the first to pull away, “I’ll see you then.” 

“Bye,” she waved, walking to her car and slipping into the drivers seat. 

“You know, for two people who are meant to be competing, you guys suck,” Lucas snarked from the back seat. Y/N rolled her eyes and pulled out of the parking space. 

“He’s still my boyfriend, you know,” 

“Well, until we take our driver’s test,” Max cut in, fiddling with her stereo, “he’s the enemy. There will be no loving on the enemy.”

“You guys are ridiculous,” she laughed, turning up the volume. The DMV had been gracious enough to grant them a month and a half to learn how to drive. Y/N prided herself on her kids. Max was a natural behind the wheel; confident in her skills–despite how minimal they may have been–and unwavering when the assholes who thought they owned the road became, well, assholes. It was a comical sight–watching a sixteen-year-old Max flick off a thirty-something-year-old man. And Lucas. You wouldn’t have known he was petrified of being behind the wheel his first time. He was suave in the driver’s seat, a level of coolness with an air of calm seemed to seep out of him. 

She hadn’t heard anything about Dustin from Steve, though. Y/N didn’t know if she should have perceived that as a good thing or a bad thing. Secretly, she wanted all her kids to succeed. The feeling of getting your driver’s license was a freeing one. It opened the door to an independence one would have never known existed. She thought about the first time she drove. It was as stressful as one could imagine with Hopper as their driving instructor. Screams of fright and brusque directions were hurled into her ear, leaving her a tense mess in her father’s car. She had sworn that day to never get behind the wheel of another car again. Until it was her mom teaching her. Her approach was a lot nicer and gentler. 

The 20 year old thought about the first time she drove without anyone with her. She drove for miles upon miles, getting lost in the landscape New York had to offer. The bright green trees of Upstate New York and the bright yellow of the taxi cabs in Lower Manhattan all kept her company in the driver’s seat of her moms sedan. She had felt a freedom she didn’t know she was missing that day, and she wanted nothing more than for Dustin, Lucas, and Max to all feel it too. Even if they were technically on opposing sides. 

She found herself sitting beside her boyfriend in the hard chairs of the DMV, legs shaking in nerves. From her seat, she could see Max’s fiery red hair, Dustin’s curls, and Lucas’ neatly styled flat top. They had all dressed to the nines that morning, eager to get their own IDs. Max had even asked Y/N to help her with the littlest bit of makeup she had. Steve had driven them to the government building, motioning them off with a thumbs up and an excited ‘good luck’ as he passed the keys to the worker. The three of them were the first in their group to attempt to get their licenses, so everyone was riding on one of them to come out successful to drive them around and stop relying on their friends or parents. 

“Relax,” Steve whispered in her ear, grabbing the hand she had resting on her knee and stopping tapping, “they’re gonna do great.” 

“You think so?” she asked, nerves still wracking her. She turned to where they’d been waiting. Lucas and Dustin had remained. Max was taken to the road. One down, two more to go. 

“Yes,” he assured, “Dustin has to pass. I will not miss the opportunity to take you to the U2 concert coming up.” 

Y/N blinked, giving him a blank look and prying her hand out of his, “I swear to God, Harrington, if you win and we go see that godforsaken band, I’ll leave you.” 

Steve laughed, taking her hand in his and squeezing it. “Then, Aster, you better hope you were a decent teacher. Otherwise, we’re going.” 

“I can’t wait to wipe that smug look on your face,” she muttered, turning away from him and keeping her eyes locked on the entrance, waiting to catch sight of her ginger friend. She bit her lip in anticipation, cursing Max for her stoic expression, wishing she would give something to ease her worry. The two watched as the girl walked to the counter behind her instructor, turning her body purposefully to block their view. 

Y/N muttered expletives under her breath, slumping against her seat and impatiently waiting for Max to join them. Only when the younger girl was sitting down did she smile at her pseudo older sister, proudly displaying her temporary paper license and the test paper the instructor had used. No red slashes covered her paper, in fact, the instructor had drawn a smiley face on the corner of the paper. 

“You passed!” Y/N exclaimed happily, stretching her body over the arm of the chair and pulling her in, “I’m so proud of you.” 

“I had a pretty damn good teacher,” Max complimented. She straightened her back, giving Lucas a look of encouragement after he’d been selected. The next thirty minutes that went between them dragged on. Suspense looming over them as they waited for his return. When he walked through the doors, it was obvious that he’d passed. He was practically skipping behind the employee, offering his fist to bump. Once he had signed the necessary paperwork, he grinned at them, displaying them to them. 

“I’m two for two, Harrington,” Y/N gloated, nudging him with her shoulder and shoving the paper into his line of sight. He moved it away from him, shaking his head. 

“Just wait, Hopper,” he replied, “Henderson’s gonna get a star, not some measly smiley face.”

“Sure,” sarcasm laced her voice as she responded. She hoped Dustin would pass, but she wasn’t going to admit that. But she also didn’t want to go to that godforsaken U2 concert with Steve or listen to his pompousness. When their curly haired friend walked through the doors, downtrodden and slightly bitter, they knew. The air around them had turned icy, matching Dustin’s feelings towards Steve. They frowned as Dustin walked back to them.

“I’ll kill you, Harrington,” he announced, standing before his older friend and shoving the paper into his hands. Red coated the paper, and in the corner was a sad face. Dustin Henderson had failed his driving exam, and Steve was the one to blame. As upset as she was for the boy she had come to know as a brother, she couldn’t help but silently rejoice in the fact that she wasn’t going to have to go to that stupid concert with her smug boyfriend. She had won the bet. And she was going to make Steve regret his arrogance. 

“Did you fail on purpose?” Steve had the nerve to ask after they’d taken their respective seats in his car. 

Dustin stared at him, “do you really think I would do that? Just so you could win a stupid competiton with your girlfriend? No! Now I’m stuck relying on you guys and my mom for rides until I can retake that fucking test. It’s all your fault, Harrington. If you had just let me drive like Tulip had done for Lucas and Max, I would’ve passed. But no, you had to be Momma Steve about it.” 

Steve took offense to his words, “then why did you let me teach you?”

“I didn’t!” Dustin remarked in vexation, “you practically forced yourself as my teacher.”

“Fine,” Steve said childishly, “have Tulip teach you.” 

“That was my plan from the beginning,” Dustin snapped, glaring at Steve. Steve met his gaze through the rearview. 

The ride back to Hawkins was a comical one. Dustin doing everything in his power to refrain from speaking to Steve while Steve attempted to drown out any conversation he started with his friends by turning the volume up. Y/N thought it was hilarious when Dustin refused to say bye to Steve after they had pulled up to his house. He had made it a point to only say it to Y/N, even going as far as to give her a hug. The only acknowledgement from the younger boy to Steve was in the form of a middle finger. 

“I can’t believe that little shit blamed me for his failing,” Steve rambled later as they lay on their bed. “I’m a great driver. I have never once, well no, I’ve only ever gotten two tickets. I have been driving since I was fourteen. That little shit just doesn’t listen to instructions. It is not my fault he failed. I mean Eddie trusts me enough to drive around Beth, surely that speaks for itself.” 

“Sure, Steve,” Y/N agreed offhandedly, a mischievous glint in her eyes as she skimmed through a magazine, “you still have to make good on your promise, Steven.”

“Fuck,” he cursed, rubbing a hand across his face. “Who do you wanna see?”

Y/N grinned at him, pointing a black manicured finger at the band decorating her magazine. “AC/DC, Harrington. We’re going to see AC/DC.” 

Steve groaned, grabbing a pillow from his side of the bed and pushing it on his face. If he could go back in time and smother his past self for making that stupid agreement, he would. 

~*~

taglist: @farfromharry @ajdelilah @annabqths @laneysmusings @rmeddar123 @ainandra @ilovereadingfanfics @siriusblacksso @manuosorioh @ariana05sworld @thepowerstoner @copycatrry @spillthetaesissy @amortencjja @jenoslov @brinaslittlefreak @monstrosityinside

the art of promises series

taglist form

[wallywise]

I was in class when I read this text

(Here the traduction :

Read a love letter written by an Author in his study, by a beautiful spirit who wants to shine. If he has a little fire in his head, his letter will, as they say, burn the paper; the heat will not go any further. You will be enchanted, even agitated perhaps; but of a fleeting and dry agitation, which will leave you only words for all memory. On the contrary, a letter that love really dictated; a letter from a truly passionate Lover will be loose, diffuse, all lengthy, disorderly, in repetition. They heart, full of an overflowing feeling, always repeats the same thing, and has never finished saying; like a living spring that flows ceaselessly and never runs out. Nothing salient, nothing remarkable; we retain neither words, nor turns, nor sentences; we admire nothing, we are struck by nothing. However, one feels one's soul softened; one feels moved without knowing why. If the force of feeling does not strike us, its truth touches us, and this is how the heart knows how to speak to the heart. But those who feel nothing, those who have only jargon adorned with passions, do not know these sorts of beauties, and despise them. In this last species of letters, if the thoughts are common, the style nevertheless is not familiar, and should not be. Love is only an illusion; there is, so to speak, another universe; he surrounds himself with objects which are not, or to which he alone has given being, and as he renders all these feelings in images his language is always figurative.)

And it make me think about Mike and Will and El (because I only think about them-)

And why Mike never send any letter to Will, because he want to be a writer and when he wrote for Will it’s diffuse, messy, passionate so he don’t send it because he think it’s stupid that HE a futur writer can’t write a letter for his best friends. At least it’s my explanation and I think it’s interesting to think about it, about the fact that El and Mike talked a lot in letter but I’m not sur it would be really passionate letter- just sharing news, he can’t even write « love »

I may delete this later I was just avoiding my work by thinking about them x)

[kiirotoao]

S2 rewatch highlights pt 2

Episode 3

AWW Dustin falling asleep reading about reptiles, invested immediately

“I need my paddles!” I quote this too much LOL

Oh the compilation of Hop and El cleaning up and the diorama she makes of it in s4 HJFDJFHHJFJ

Mmm Nancy can’t say, “I love you.” Ends up breaking it off with Steve. Mike can’t say, “I love you” to El until under extreme pressure. Result…?

LOL Mike’s the only one not grossed out by d’Art

Mike is such a good advocate for Will wtf my heart 😭 he just knew exactly what was going on with d’Art. Barely any questions asked.

“Things just can’t go back to the way they were” Hop and Joyce have similar conversations as Jonathan and Nancy this season :,) wow I love the endgame ships

HAHA omg Bob cutting blue and yellow wires. Heck yeah.

I wonder how in the world the video camera can capture the outline of the Mind Flayer - ooh hold on, what if they use video footage to find clues or something next season?? Maybe that can be Jonathan’s role???

Interesting how Mike just misses seeing El a second time! And a third time, twice at the school! Man they were so close to running into each other

“Because you’re annoying!” Mike says, snootily and annoyingly to Max, LMAO. I’m so glad these two got some screen time in s3.

“I’m not gonna hurt you.” DESPITE THAT BEING THE VERY THING HURTING YOU. THE WORLD NEEDS MORE COMPASSION LIKE WILL HAS WTFFFFF

Episode 4

Mike be clutching that walkie-talkie for dear life

The spinning shot of Will being taken is so hauntingly good oh my goihshkkkkd

“But it got me, mom.” THE LITTLE VOICE BREAK HAS SHATTERED ME COMPLETELY HELP GODJJK OMGJGJGLFK

“You put us in danger” awww Hopper is so protective. He’s not just mad at her. He’s mad with her. This isn’t fun for either of them 💔.

El is so relatable right now lmao isolation indeed drives a person mad. She’s so real for her anger and they way in which it manifests with her powers is such a cool use of her character

NANCY OFFERS HOLLY TOAST 🥺

Jancy has a bit of hesitancy but they’re ultimately in it together! I really enjoy the pacing that you can see they’re slowly starting to understand each other but aren’t perfect just yet

Okay quibble like idk if the American school system changed? but I did not learn physiology in 8th grade lmao

Geez just Billy is written so well. Hate him with every single encounter

The psychological repetition and sound with Jonathan and Nancy at the park really gets me ughh the discomfort. They’re so bold to go through with that

Now-memories = tunnel visions

True sight = Upside Down episodes

“Maybe we can help Will.” - Mike’s final words to Lucas and Dustin before he goes to the Byers’ 💙

I love Nancy glaring at Dr. Owens and Jonathan being just 🧍

“I have to stop the truth from spreading, too.” Ooooohhh and the different level of fire in Jonathan and Nancy’s eyes as they behold the gate is so omg I need fanart of them in that scene

Quibble number 2: there is no way in all hell that Hopper and Joyce connected those tunnel drawings in under a day let alone what looked like under an hour, I call bs

MAN the intonation and delivery of the fight between Max and Lucas is just so good. Like the anger could be acted so much differently with subtle differences but something about their back and forth was just great

“We’re family now” NOW, Billy??? Yeah as if she wasn’t your step sister for years before?? Geez and that’s not even the worst part of what he says

Okay I’m crying what the heck, UGH Millie is so good. Those sobs my HEARTTTTTT

“Let’s burn that lab to the ground.” S5 PLEASE LET NANCY COMMIT ARSON ON THE LAB. PLEASE!!!

OH NO skipping the Mews part. RIP buddy. RIP 💔

The tunnel flips upside down and THE CLOCK CHIME OH I GOT THE CHILLS

[blackwoolncrown]

”This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”

>>Copied here in case anyone gets paywalled when they click the above. The full article is...a lot.<<

WHY AM I WRITING THIS

As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it.

I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us.

One of the other reasons I’ve struggled to write this essay is that I don’t want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It’s a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think “How can I make this about me?” So, I hope you’ll take me at my word that this account isn’t meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It’s about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it’s my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice.

YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators?

No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins.

See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people “stole” that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find.

Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he’d seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, “Sarge, c’mon, she’s an old lady.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. Hook her up, that’s an order.” And… I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn’t even comfort her because I didn’t speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her.

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years.

I know what you’re going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the “legitimate” way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our dufflebags “war bags”…). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member’s jacket? No I did not.

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it.

And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shitbags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops.

This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

BASTARD 101

I could write an entire book of the awful things I’ve done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is “How did it get this way?”. While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

Once police training has - through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle - promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs”. Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

This “they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you” tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It’s what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser’s toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. “They don’t understand what you do, they don’t respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You’re only safe with us.”

I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed. After all, most people don’t steal, so anyone who does isn’t “most people,” right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.” And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back.

Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he “slept like a baby” that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

HOW TO BE A BASTARD

I have participated in some of these activities personally, others are ones I either witnessed personally or heard officers brag about openly. Very, very occasionally, I knew an officer who was disciplined or fired for one of these things.

Police officers will lie about the law, about what’s illegal, or about what they can legally do to you in order to manipulate you into doing what they want.

Police officers will lie about feeling afraid for their life to justify a use of force after the fact.

Police officers will lie and tell you they’ll file a police report just to get you off their back.

Police officers will lie that your cooperation will “look good for you” in court, or that they will “put in a good word for you with the DA.” The police will never help you look good in court.

Police officers will lie about what they see and hear to access private property to conduct unlawful searches.

Police officers will lie and say your friend already ratted you out, so you might as well rat them back out. This is almost never true.

Police officers will lie and say you’re not in trouble in order to get you to exit a location or otherwise make an arrest more convenient for them.

Police officers will lie and say that they won’t arrest you if you’ll just “be honest with them” so they know what really happened.

Police officers will lie about their ability to seize the property of friends and family members to coerce a confession.

Police officers will write obviously bullshit tickets so that they get time-and-a-half overtime fighting them in court.

Police officers will search places and containers you didn’t consent to and later claim they were open or “smelled like marijuana”.

Police officers will threaten you with a more serious crime they can’t prove in order to convince you to confess to the lesser crime they really want you for.

Police officers will employ zero tolerance on races and ethnicities they dislike and show favor and lenience to members of their own group.

Police officers will use intentionally extra-painful maneuvers and holds during an arrest to provoke “resistance” so they can further assault the suspect.

Some police officers will plant drugs and weapons on you, sometimes to teach you a lesson, sometimes if they kill you somewhere away from public view.

Some police officers will assault you to intimidate you and threaten to arrest you if you tell anyone.

A non-trivial number of police officers will steal from your house or vehicle during a search.

A non-trivial number of police officers commit intimate partner violence and use their status to get away with it.

A non-trivial number of police officers use their position to entice, coerce, or force sexual favors from vulnerable people.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops.

I just remembered something, do not talk to cops.

Checking my notes real quick, something jumped out at me:

Do

not

fucking

talk

to

cops.

Ever.

Say, “I don’t answer questions,” and ask if you’re free to leave; if so, leave. If not, tell them you want your lawyer and that, per the Supreme Court, they must terminate questioning. If they don’t, file a complaint and collect some badges for your mantle.

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people.

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.

It’s also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.

Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE A BASTARD?

So what do we do about it? Even though I’m an expert on bastardism, I am not a public policy expert nor an expert in organizing a post-police society. So, before I give some suggestions, let me tell you what probably won’t solve the problem of bastard cops:

Increased “bias” training. A quarterly or even monthly training session is not capable of covering over years of trauma-based camaraderie in police forces. I can tell you from experience, we don’t take it seriously, the proctors let us cheat on whatever “tests” there are, and we all made fun of it later over coffee.

Tougher laws. I hope you understand by now, cops do not follow the law and will not hold each other accountable to the law. Tougher laws are all the more reason to circle the wagons and protect your brothers and sisters.

More community policing programs. Yes, there is a marginal effect when a few cops get to know members of the community, but look at the protests of 2020: many of the cops pepper-spraying journalists were probably the nice school cop a month ago.

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.

No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.

Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.

Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.

Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.

One final idea: consider abolishing the police.

I know what you’re thinking, “What? We need the police! They protect us!” As someone who did it for nearly a decade, I need you to understand that by and large, police protection is marginal, incidental. It’s an illusion created by decades of copaganda designed to fool you into thinking these brave men and women are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

I alluded to this above: the vast majority of calls for service I handled were theft reports, burglary reports, domestic arguments that hadn’t escalated into violence, loud parties, (houseless) people loitering, traffic collisions, very minor drug possession, and arguments between neighbors. Mostly the mundane ups and downs of life in the community, with little inherent danger. And, like I mentioned, the vast majority of crimes I responded to (even violent ones) had already happened; my unaccountable license to kill was irrelevant.

What I mainly provided was an “objective” third party with the authority to document property damage, ask people to chill out or disperse, or counsel people not to beat each other up. A trained counselor or conflict resolution specialist would be ten times more effective than someone with a gun strapped to his hip wondering if anyone would try to kill him when he showed up. There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment’s notice to write down your name and birthday after you’ve been robbed and beaten.

You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?” And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence.

This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It’s not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government. These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as “violent offenders” are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to “protect the community” escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you’ll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?

Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What’s my solution for them, you’re no doubt asking. I’ll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, houselessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that’s done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system.

Police abolition is closely related to the idea of prison abolition and the entire concept of banishing the carceral state, meaning, creating a society focused on reconciliation and restorative justice instead of punishment, pain, and suffering — a system that sees people in crisis as humans, not monsters. People who want to abolish the police typically also want to abolish prisons, and the same questions get asked: “What about the bad guys? Where do we put them?” I bring this up because abolitionists don’t want to simply replace cops with armed social workers or prisons with casual detention centers full of puffy leather couches and Playstations. We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization.

Here’s legendary activist and thinker Angela Y. Davis putting it better than I ever could:

“An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”

(Are Prisons Obsolete, pg. 107)

I’m not telling you I have the blueprint for a beautiful new world. What I’m telling you is that the system we have right now is broken beyond repair and that it’s time to consider new ways of doing community together. Those new ways need to be negotiated by members of those communities, particularly Black, indigenous, disabled, houseless, and citizens of color historically shoved into the margins of society. Instead of letting Fox News fill your head with nightmares about Hispanic gangs, ask the Hispanic community what they need to thrive. Instead of letting racist politicians scaremonger about pro-Black demonstrators, ask the Black community what they need to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. If you truly desire safety, ask not what your most vulnerable can do for the community, ask what the community can do for the most vulnerable.

A WORLD WITH FEWER BASTARDS IS POSSIBLE

If you take only one thing away from this essay, I hope it’s this: do not talk to cops. But if you only take two things away, I hope the second one is that it’s possible to imagine a different world where unarmed black people, indigenous people, poor people, disabled people, and people of color are not routinely gunned down by unaccountable police officers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, this requires a leap of faith into community models that might feel unfamiliar, but I ask you:

When you see a man dying in the street begging for breath, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a mother or a daughter shot to death sleeping in their beds, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a twelve year old boy executed in a public park for the crime of playing with a toy, jesus fucking christ, can you really just stand there and think “This is normal”?

And to any cops who made it this far down, is this really the world you want to live in? Aren’t you tired of the trauma? Aren’t you tired of the soul sickness inherent to the badge? Aren’t you tired of looking the other way when your partners break the law? Are you really willing to kill the next George Floyd, the next Breonna Taylor, the next Tamir Rice? How confident are you that your next use of force will be something you’re proud of? I’m writing this for you too: it’s wrong what our training did to us, it’s wrong that they hardened our hearts to our communities, and it’s wrong to pretend this is normal.

Look, I wouldn’t have been able to hear any of this for much of my life. You reading this now may not be able to hear this yet either. But do me this one favor: just think about it. Just turn it over in your mind for a couple minutes. “Yes, And” me for a minute. Look around you and think about the kind of world you want to live in. Is it one where an all-powerful stranger with a gun keeps you and your neighbors in line with the fear of death, or can you picture a world where, as a community, we embrace our most vulnerable, meet their needs, heal their wounds, honor their dignity, and make them family instead of desperate outsiders?

If you take only three things away from this essay, I hope the third is this: you and your community don’t need bastards to thrive.

RESOURCES TO YES-AND WITH

Achele Mbembe — Necropolitics

Angela Y. Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete?

CriticalResistance.org — Abolition Toolkit

Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar, and Alana Yu-lan Price — Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore — COVID-19, Decarceration, Abolition [video]

[fanmoose12]

friday, i’m in love

“Before becoming an official member of our gang, though, you need to do those four things."

"Alright," Hange nods, listening intently.

"First!" Isabel raises her index finger. "You need to punch Zeke in a face, but I'm sure it's bound to happen."

Hange giggles, getting excited. "What's next?"

"Second, you need to skip a class, and you've already done it, so!" Isabel clasps her shoulder. "Congratulations on that one."

Farlan pats her knee too, and Hange shows them a proud smile.

"Third, you need to smoke at least one cigarette."

"I can't," her smile falls, as Hange briefly shakes her head. "I have asthma."

"I'll do it for you then," Farlan offers, walking to the other side of the rooftop to do just that.

"And the last thing! The most important one!" Isabel makes a dramatic pause, shifting her gaze to Levi just for a second, before looking back on Hange with a mischievous smile. She winks and lowers her voice, making sure that Levi doesn’t hear her.

"The last condition - you have to kiss one of us."

For the most kids her age, moving to a different town and changing schools is a fate worth than death. And, while Hange is a little saddened to say goodbye to the friends she made at her old school and more than a little saddened to leave her dad behind, she is also excited at the prospect of starting a new life.

Changing schools means she can meet new people, and meeting new people means she can make new friends.

And Hange, unlike most of her peers, isn't afraid of change. She welcomes it actually, preferring new experiences over dull and repetitive routine.

They move to a new town and to a small two-story house in the quiet suburbs. It’s a little different from the house they used to live before, a little quieter too, but it’s lovely. Hange likes it instantly. She’s ready to call it a new home.

The first couple of weeks are awfully busy. Hange and her mother unpack their things and buy new furniture. They meet their neighbors and her mother starts making new friends.

Hange can’t wait to meet her new friends at school too.

And so very soon, the long-awaited day comes.

***

When it finally does, Hange is brimming with excitement.

She puts on her glasses and dresses in her favorite clothes that was washed and ironed by her mother the evening before, ties her hair in a ponytail, grabs a lunch box that was waiting for her on a kitchen counter, kisses her mother's cheek, yells "love you!" right into her ear, making her wince and push laughing Hange away, hurries to hop on her bike and makes her way to the school.

She makes a new friend in a face of one Moblit Berner approximately three minutes and forty six seconds later after crossing a threshold and passing below a banner that read Sina High School.

Moblit is a nice and friendly boy, even if a bit quiet and timid, compared to her. Although, Hange also has to admit that compared to her, almost everyone seems to be quiet and timid.

Moblit is incredibly kind and he offers to show Hange around the school. He agrees to walk her to every class and even draws a small, but very detailed map for her.

During lunch, Moblit remains by her side. As they slowly eat their food, Hange points at random students who pique her interest and Moblit shares with her his opinion of them.

"That's Erwin and Mike," Moblit says, when Hange asks him about two blondes that sit in the very middle of the cafeteria. "Erwin is president of a debate club, also his father works at our school, he's a history teacher. Mike is a captain of a football team. They're nice guys, and Erwin is always ready to help, if you struggle with a class. Although, he's not that good at math..."

Hange nods, absorbing the information and committing it to memory. Her gaze lingers at Erwin and Mike for a few more seconds, before it moves on to a next target, this time two petite redheads.

"Ah, Nifa and Petra," Moblit fondly smiles. "They're both cheerleaders. Petra is also a member of a drama club, and Nifa helps me manage a biology club."

"Biology club?" Hange lights up, carelessly tossing her sandwich onto the table. She can’t believe her luck. She loves science and was the president of a chemistry club back in her old school. She didn’t dare to hope that the new school would give her an opportunity to continue pursuing her passions. "Can I join?"

"You really want to?" Moblit asks, biting his lip. Doubt is written all over his face. "We don't have a lot of members..."

"Of course, I want to!" Hange exclaims much louder than she intended to. As a result, she attracts attention of some students who turn to look at her. Some seem curious, others - annoyed. Hange pays no mind to either. She grabs Moblit by the shoulders and stares deep into his eyes. "I'm so excited already! When is your next meeting?"

"This Friday..."

"Awesome! Expect me to be here!" she clasps Moblit's back, almost making him choke, and then sweeps her gaze across the cafeteria, looking for someone interesting.

"There!" she points at the girl with long, dark hair that sits in the far corner of the room with a blonde boy by her side. "Who is that?"

"That's Pieck," Moblit answers. "She's involved in a drama club too, although she mostly just helps with painting the backgrounds for the scenes. And that's... all I know about her. She's nice, and I think she's dating Porco, or, maybe, Porco is dating Reiner, or, maybe, Reiner is dating Berthold... sorry," he rubs his neck in embarrassment. "I don't really pay attention to that kind of stuff, and their relationship is pretty complicated."

"Don't worry," Hange pats his arm. "I get confused with that kind of stuff all the time. Now! Who is that?"

Her finger points at a bespectacled guy with blonde hair.

Moblit's face twists in disgust. "That's Zeke Yeager. He's the biggest jerk and bully of our school. Try to stay away from him, and—" he nods at the redheaded boy sitting next to him. "And his pal Floch. He's even worth than Zeke."

Hange wants to ask more about them, but then she notices a boy, who sits in the furthest corner of the cafeteria.

Hange is sure that wearing leather jackets is prohibited in this school, but this boy doesn't seem to care. He is dressed in a white t-shirt and a big, black leather jacket. His hair is black too and the longer strands of it obscure his eyes. But even that can’t hide the fact that the boy is wearing a displeased, irritated expression. Hange wonders about the reason for the sour face.

"Hey!" she points her finger at him. "Who is that shorty?"

"Shh!" Moblit hurriedly lowers her hand, his eyes widening in panic. "Don't point your finger at him! And, for the love of god, don't call him shorty, Hange! Better yet, try not to talk or even look at him."

"Eh?" Hange frowns. "What do you mean? What's wrong with that guy?"

"That's Levi Ackerman," Moblit says, lowering voice to a hushed whisper. “Those two are his best friends – Isabel and Farlan,” he shows Hange a small redheaded girl and a tall guy with white hair that sit next to Levi. “And you should never mess with them."

"So they’re worse than Zeke and his friend?"

"Much worse," Moblit confirms, his eyes grim and serious. "Everyone says they’re a part of some gang. They say that Isabel is a thief, and Farlan is an arsonist. And Levi Ackerman…” Moblit purses his lips, a shadow of fear flushing across his face. “Once he broke Mike's jaw for calling him a midget, and some say that he had killed a man with his bare hands just for pouring out coffee on him. Whatever happens, try to stay away from the three of them, Hange."

"If you say so..." Hange murmurs. She takes a bite of her sandwich, continuing to stare at the dark-haired boy. Suddenly he looks up, and Hange almost chokes.

His eyes bore into hers with a surprising intensity. They are cold and grey, like the edge of a knife.

Hange lifts her lips in what she hopes is a friendly smile.

Levi Ackerman scoffs and looks away.

Hange continues watching him, waiting for their eyes to meet again. They don’t.

But as Hange leaves the cafeteria, trailing after Moblit like a little lost duckling, she can't get the look he had given her out of her mind.

Levi Ackerman... What an enigma.

  ***

It is Friday afternoon, and the sun is gently passing through the already yellowing leafs. The warm light paints the world in golden colors, making it seem more warm and welcoming.

Hange, however, has no time to enjoy the beauty around her. It is Friday afternoon, and she is running late.

She was so excited for the first biology club meeting, that’s the only thing she could think about for the whole week. She gathered all the science projects she had done at the old school and she prepared a small presentation for other club members and she even thought of a few suggestions to expand the club, which, as she understood from Moblit’s words, was quite small.

All this work, all these preparations and now she is running late, because she stayed after class to talk with Mr. Smith and forgot about the time.

And, to make matters worse, she is lost. The part of school she finds herself in is completely unfamiliar to her, and she can’t quite understand how she got here in the first place.

Cursing herself, Hange takes out a map Moblit made for her, tracing the drawing with her index finger and muttering Moblit’s instructions under her breath.

“Go to the second floor, take the first turn to the left and then walk to the end of the hallway…”

A second later it dawns at her – she is in the wrong wing and on the wrong floor.

Muttering another curse, Hange turns around and rushes to the stairs. Holding the research notes she wrote the night before to her chest with one hand, she keeps Moblit’s map in front of her eyes, checking it after each turn she takes.

She is just about to enter a hallway that leads to the biology classroom, when she collides with something. Stumbling, she falls down, her papers flying around.

She blinks a few times, trying to get a sense of her surroundings. Moblit didn’t draw anything that would prepare her for the obstacle that caused her fall.

She slowly looks up. In front of her, seemingly larger than life is a pair of steely grey eyes.

Levi Ackerman, Hange realizes immediately. He is on the floor too, right next to her. And he doesn’t seem too pleased about it.

She gulps. For the first time in her life, Hange doesn’t know what to say.

“The hell you’re wearing those glasses for?” the boy growls, getting up. “Watch where you’re going, four-eyes.”

“Ah, sorry!” Hange exclaims. His rude, throaty voice does a great job of pushing her out of stupor. “I’m just new at this school, and so I got little lost, but, thankfully, my friend Moblit drew me a map, and that’s why I didn’t look where I was—”

“Jesus,” Levi groans. “Shut the fuck up. Give me that shit.”

Before Hange can protest, he snatches the map out of her hands. His eyebrows form a line as he studies the small drawing.

And suddenly Hange remembers what Moblit had said about Levi Ackerman and his warnings to stay away from him.

Once he broke Mike's jaw.

These words ring loudly inside her mind. She had seen Mike in the hallways, he is quite a large guy. And Hange, despite being quite tall for her age, isn’t nearly as big as him. If Levi is able to break Mike’s jaw, what can he do to her?

Hange never had her jaw broken before, so by all accounts it should be a new experience for her. She likes new experiences. But she also likes her jaw and the prospect of having it broken… isn’t all that exciting.

Still sitting on a floor, Hange watches the boy warily.

“You’re looking for a biology class, right?” he asks after he finished studying the map.

“Yes,” Hange nods cautiously.

Suddenly she remembers a girl she used to play with at the playground near her old house. The girl had broken an arm once, after falling off a swing. She screamed and cried and then her mother took her to the doctor, and when she came back, she couldn’t play with little Hange anymore, because her arm was in a sling and she couldn’t move it for almost a whole month.

And that was just an arm. Hange can only imagine how much a broken jaw would hurt. She really isn’t that keen on finding out.

“Of course, you’re a nerd, how I didn’t guess it before,” Levi mutters, as he starts to walk away.

Hange stares at his back, wondering if the storm had passed.

Evidently, it hadn’t – Levi turns around. He arches his eyebrow, looking at Hange quizzically.

“Did you hit your head or something, four-eyes? Get up, I’ll lead you to the class. You’re in the wrong wing, idiot.”

Hange is still confused – wasn’t he going to beat her up? But then she remembers the reason for this whole mess.

“The meeting!” she cries out, hurriedly gathering the papers that are scattered across the floor.

As she kneels on the wooden floor, picking up the papers, Levi’s words finally register in her mind.

“Wait!” she looks up at him. “You said I’m in a wrong wing again?”

“Well, aren’t you slow,” he deadpans. “Here,” he hands her the last one of her papers. For a second, their fingers brush against each other, and Hange finds out that in contrast to his eyes, Levi’s hands are warm. But before she can decide if his skin is soft or not, Levi pulls away, turning around. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”

“You’re… going to lead me to the class?” Hange clarifies, cautiousness returning to her face.

“That’s what I said, right?” Levi starts to walk, not looking back at her. “Or is your hearing as shitty as your eyesight?”

“Not really,” Hange chuckles, following after him.

Levi Ackerman isn’t going to beat her up. She is almost certain.

  ***

“Hange, you’re here!” as soon as she enters the classroom, Moblit is beside her. “I thought you forgot about our meeting!”

“How could I?” Hange grins, easing his worry. “I was preparing the whole week for this! I just got a bit lost on my way here, sorry for being late.”

“You got lost? How did you find us then?” the petite redhead walks up to her too. 

Not the redhead – Nifa, cheerleader and Moblit’s friend, Hange remembers.  

“You used my map, right?” Moblit asks.

“Eh, no,” Hange rubs her neck, feeling a little shy. “Levi helped me get here.”

“Levi?” Nifa’s eyes widen in surprise. “As in the Levi Ackerman? The scariest guy of our school?”

“I guess?” Hange answers. “He was right there—” she opens the door to show Levi to Nifa and Moblit, he couldn’t have left far away, he had walked her to the door, after all, but unfortunately – the hallway is empty. She turns back to Moblit and Nifa with a helpless chuckle. “And he already left…”

“Are you sure that was Levi?” Moblit narrows his eyes a fraction, looking doubtful.

“I…” before she can reply, Hange remembers that she didn’t actually ask for his name. But those grey eyes… they can’t belong to anyone else. At the same time, Hange senses that no matter what she is going to say, neither Moblit nor Nifa would believe her.

And it doesn’t matter, not really. After all, they have a more pressing matter on their hands right now.

The vast and enigmatic world of molecular biology.

She clasps her hands together, attracting attention of the two boys, who stand at the other side of the classroom. They look up and Hange smiles, making a mental note to introduce herself to them later.

She unzips her bag, taking out her laptop and gathering her notes. “I’ve prepared a small report!” she announces, opening the first slide of her forty minutes long presentation.

   ***

It is a nice day. Despite the calendar showing that it is already October, the weather is warm enough to mistake it for the end of May.

The sky is clear and blue, the apple Hange is eating is juicy and sweet and her conversation with Moblit is engaging and fun.

With a bright smile on her lips, Hange lifts her face up to the sky, squinting against the blinding light. The sunbeams dance across her skin, kissing her cheeks and nose with their gentle warmth.

It is a nice day. But then a shadow obscures her view of the sun.

Hange opens her eyes, frowning at the sudden intrusion.

Next to her, Moblit falls silent. In front of her, Floch and two of his friends smirk, looking down on them.

"Get lost, Zoe," Floch tells flippantly, sparring her no more than a single glance. "Your boyfriend and I need to have a little chat."

Hange feels her chest fill with rage.

"Like hell I would!" she raises to her feet, fists clenching in anger.

In a month she spent at Sina High, she learnt a lot about Floch. She learnt that he is stupid and simpleminded, cruel and cowardly. Most of all, he is a bully.

Hange hates bullies with all the fierceness of her heart.

She had her fair share of taunting and mockery before. The kids made fun of her for wearing glasses, for having a large nose, for being too loud or too weird. Hange knows that the only one way to deal with endless jabs and sneers is to fight back. And over the course of her sixteen years of life she got amazingly good at it.

"Hange—" Moblit whispers, grasping her sleeve desperately. "Hange, please, do as he says."

"No!" Hange declares, glaring fiercely at Floch. "I'll stay with you, Moblit."

"Your mistake," Floch huffs, the smirk on his face growing wider. Behind his back, his friends flex their fists. "One nerd or two, what does it matter? I'll easily deal with both of you."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Hange warns, narrowing her eyes at him.

Getting into a fight isn't anything new for her. Unfortunately, having her ass kicked isn't anything new for her either. Even so, she isn't going to back down.

Hange braces herself, raising her fists and putting her left leg behind her for support. Watching Floch closely, she wonders where he would hit first. Her left or right cheek? Her nose or jaw? Or maybe, he'd go to the legs first? Hange doubts it, Floch doesn't seem to be that smart.

He raises his fist and Hange closes her eyes, preparing herself for the sharp sting of pain.

It never comes. Instead, a shadow appears in front of her again, this one much darker.

A second passes, and nothing happens. And then she hears Floch's feeble whimper.

Hange gingerly opens her eyes.

Holding Floch's fist in his hand, Levi Ackerman is standing before her, his wide back, as always, clad in black leather jacket.

"What's the matter, Floch?" he speaks in a low voice. "Got tired of picking fights with middle schoolers?"

Floch doesn't answer, his eyes turning wide, and Levi twists his arm, throwing him on the ground.

"Get the fuck out of here," he spits out, turning away as though just the sight of Floch disgusts him.

Not needing him to tell twice, Floch shoots to his feet and runs, his friends following after him.

Hange watches them with deep sense of satisfaction. She would prefer to make Floch leave with the use of her own fists, but that— that is nice too. And totally painless.

"We should go as well, Hange," Moblit mumbles, tugging insistently at her shirt.

"You go first," Hange answers, not taking her eyes off Levi. "I need to go to the bathroom."

"Hange..." Moblit's quiet voice is disapproving, and Hange turns to look at him, curving her lips in a smile. "I'll be right behind you, don't worry."

"Just be careful," he instructs at last, before grabbing his bag and walking away.

With Floch and Moblit gone, Hange is left alone with Levi.

Or... not.

As Hange looks around, she realizes that Levi had left too. By now, his dark figure is nothing more than a small dot on a horizon. Hange hurries after him.

"Hey, hey, Levi! Wait!" she desperately tries to catch up with him. Levi doesn't slow down.

"Go away, four-eyes," he mutters without even looking at her.

Like hell she would.

Hange speeds up and in a matter of seconds, she reaches Levi. Huffing and painting, she struggles to keep up with his confident stride. But she doesn’t give up.

"Hey— hey, I just—" she inhales, then swiftly exhales. "I just wanted to ask," another deep breath, this one's much shakier. "Why did you help me?"

Levi stops long enough to turn around and throw her a dark look. "I didn't."

"You did!" Hange persists. "For the second time!"

"Leave me alone," he scoffs and starts to walk again.

Naturally, Hange follows after him. Levi passes the main entrance to school and heads to the side door.

He's going to skip a class, Hange realizes.

She has never skipped a class before. How exciting!

"It makes me think," she continues talking as though she didn't hear his last words. "Maybe, you're a bit misunderstood. I don't think you're as scary as everyone thinks you are."

"I'm much scarier," Levi mutters, moving up the stairs.

He is going up on a rooftop, Hange guesses. Again, she has never been on a rooftop before. Double excitement!

"And if you don't wish me to show you how scary I can be, I advise you to leave me alone."

"Nope," Hange smiles, not moved by his threat. She almost has him figured out. Levi Ackerman, the presumable gangster and the most fearsome student of Sina High isn't quite as terrible as he appears to be. "You won't hurt me."

"And why the fuck not?" Levi grunts, pushing the door to the rooftop open. He tries to shove it in her face, but Hange is faster, and she passes the threshold before he can push the door closed.

"Because you're nice," Hange easily answers.

"I'm really not."

Pushing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, Levi walks up to edge of rooftop and plops down on the floor. Hange sits next to him. She turns her head around and watches the grand blue sky above her. At the sight of it all, breath catches in her throat.

Paying her no mind, Levi takes out a pack of cigarettes and puts a stick into his mouth.

He lifts a lighter, when Hange speaks.

"Can you smoke later?" she asks carefully. "You see, I have asthma..."

Levi curses under his breath. He sighs and puts the cigarette down. Hange beams.

"I was right after all," she bumps her shoulder against his. "You are a nice."

"I'm going to push you off the edge," he promises darkly. Hange's smile doesn't falter.

"Don't you have to be in class?" Levi questions. "Why are you bothering me?"

"You're nice," Hange repeats. "I want to be your friend."

"I don't."

Hange snickers. As if she would give him a choice.

They don't speak after that. Hange, still smiling, returns to gazing up at the sky, lazily watching the movements of clouds.

Levi seems to be slowly coming with the grips that to get rid of her he most probably would have to act on his threat and push her off the edge. With a sour expression, he braces his hands against the railing and stares at the ground below.

The silence, surprisingly, is pleasant and comfortable. It is broken by the sound of the door opening. Hange turns around, and sees Levi's friends - Farlan and Isabel - climb on a rooftop.

As they notice her, their faces brighten up.

"Levi!" Isabel runs up to him. "So you finally gathered enough courage? I'm so proud of you!"

"Izzy," Farlan takes her by the elbow, just before she can latch herself onto Levi. "I don't think he has."

"Eh?" Hange shifts her gaze from Farlan and Isabel to Levi. Something is going on, but she can't pinpoint what exactly.

"Shut up," Levi barks at his friends. "Four-eyes just decided to follow me up here, and now I can’t get rid of her."

"I just wanted to thank you," Hange grumbles, crossing hands on her chest and pursuing her lips in a pout. "For saving me from Floch and his friends."

"Oh!" Isabel's eyes lighten up. She jumps to Hange's side. "Big brother saved you?" she asks with a dreamy smile. "Levi, that's so—"

"Shut up, Isabel," he growls. "I'm not joking."

"Killjoy," Isabel whispers, throwing him a dark look.

Farlan takes a sit next to Hange, offering her his hand. "I'm Farlan," he says with a friendly smile. "And that’s," he gestures to the girl. "As you may have gathered, is our friend Isabel. Nice to finally meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," Hange answers, shaking his hand. "I'm—"

"Hange," Farlan interrupts. "Yes," he briefly glances at Levi, his eyes alight with amusement. "We know."

"We should be friends!" Isabel announces, throwing her arm around her shoulders.

"I would like to," Hange replies. "But Levi doesn't seem to agree."

"Pay him no mind," Isabel waves her hand. "He’s just naturally that grumpy. As for Farlan and me, we’re ready to accept you in our ranks. Before becoming an official member of our gang, though, you need to do those four things."

"Alright," Hange nods, listening intently.

"First!" Isabel raises her index finger. "You need to punch Zeke in a face, but I'm sure it's bound to happen."

Hange giggles, getting excited. "What's next?"

"Second, you need to skip a class, and you've already done it, so!" Isabel clasps her shoulder. "Congratulations on that one."

Farlan pats her knee too, and Hange shows them a proud smile.

"Third, you need to smoke at least one cigarette."

"I can't," her smile falls, as Hange briefly shakes her head. "I have asthma."

"I'll do it for you then," Farlan offers, walking to the other side of the rooftop to do just that. Levi, who still holds a pack in his palm, doesn't join him, not moving from his place next to Hange.

"And the last thing! The most important one!" Isabel makes a dramatic pause, shifting her gaze to Levi just for a second, before looking back on Hange with a mischievous smile. She winks and lowers her voice, making sure that Levi doesn’t hear her.

"The last condition - you have to kiss one of us."

   ***

After that first time on the roof, their friendship progresses rapidly. Hange starts hanging out in the mall with Isabel, playing basketball with Farlan, skipping classes and walking home with Levi.

And very soon she finds out the truth about her new friends. Isabel isn't actually a thief, Farlan isn't an arsonist and Levi, obviously, has never murdered anyone.

Those rumors are just that - rumors.

"But what about Mike?" Hange asks.

The four of them are sitting side by side on what Hange likes to call their place - up on a rooftop of the school. Their shoulders are pressed tightly against each other, and their feet are dangling off the edge. The light from a setting sun reflects in her glasses, making her squint. On a scale of perfect days, this one is pretty close to the top.

In response to her question, Levi groans. Isabel and Farlan start laughing.

"I'm afraid that's another rumor," Farlan explains to the confused Hange.

"Although, Mike did break a jaw once," Isabel notes with a crooked grin.

"But not by me." Levi grits through his teeth. "That giant idiot got drunk and fell down the stairs. And because he was too embarrassed to tell the truth, he blamed it on me."

"So, you just let him do it?" Hange stares at Levi with raised eyebrows. "Didn't do anything even though he lied about you?” Levi nods and Hange smiles. “I stand corrected then, you're nice."

"I'm serious, four-eyes," Levi growls, sending her one of his meanest looks. "One day, I'll push you off this roof."

Hange throws her head back and laughs. Isabel and Farlan join her.

 ***

"Well, let's start our meeting, shall we?" Hange rubs her hands in anticipation, excited to tell her fellow club members about a study she recently found.

But before she can turn on her laptop and put on a new presentation, Nifa grips her elbow.

"It's all very thrilling," she smiles.

"It really is," Moblit nods eagerly.

"But we wanted to know something else."

Hange blinks a few times, and then feels color rise to her cheek. She suddenly realizes that in the past two months she was always the one to lead the meetings. It is quite understandable that Nifa wants her turn.

"Of course, if there's something you wish to share, we all gladly listen, Nifa."

"Oh no, I don't wish to share anything. On the contrary, there is so something I want to ask you."

The bright, enthusiastic look in her eyes is intriguing. Hange wonders what is it that Nifa wants to know - is it about a thesis she made last week? Or a week before that?

"I'm all ears," Hange promises, taking Nifa's hands into hers.

"So how does it feel," Nifa begins. "To date the most dangerous boy of our school?"

It takes Hange an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize who Nifa is talking about.

"Levi?" she breathes finally. "But we aren't— we aren’t dating! We’re just friends!"

Nifa plucks her lips and looks at Hange with suspicion and disbelief.

"But you're always together," she notes, staring at Hange through narrowed eyes.

"We're really not," Hange counters easily. "We just hang out sometimes."

"You skip classes with him. And he walks you home."

"And he saved you from Floch that one time," Moblit, the goddamn traitor, adds.

"And you're the only one he talks to, beside his two best friends." Nifa concludes with a confident smirk.

Hange looks from Moblit to Nifa, feeling at a loss of words.

It's not that she has never thought about it, she did sometimes, when Levi walked her home, and their hands brushed against each other, or when they sat on the roof together, their shoulders touching. Levi is handsome, even Hange - as bad as her eyesight is - knows that. But she also knows that Levi thinks she's messy and annoying. The hell would freeze sooner than he'd look at her like that.

So despite her frequent heart palpitations and leaps in breathing levels, Hange ignores her little crush, putting it to the furthest shelf of her mind.

Being friends with Levi is good enough. She doesn't wish for more.

And that's exactly what she tells to Moblit and Nifa.

"You're reading into things," she chuckles, dismissing their claims. "And now, it's time to read into something else!" she turns on the first slight of her presentation.

Moblit smiles and takes out his notebook. Nifa groans.

***

It's one of those days, when the world is bleak and grey, and the heavy clouds reign across the sky.

Looking out of the window, Hange feels an infinite sadness that isn't entirely caused by gloomy weather. For a second, she even debates skipping school at all, her mother probably wouldn't be against it, but Hange gets rid of that thought fairly quickly. It's not who she is, and wallowing in self-pity was never the way she dealt with her problems. Besides, the classes will provide an excellent distraction for her unhappy thoughts.

So Hange gets dressed, puts her hair in the usual ponytail and leaves her room. She greets her mother, who doesn't look quite as lively as she usually does, and kisses her cheek.

"I'll be home at five," Hange says quietly and walks outside.

The wind ruffles her hair, messing it up even more. It gets in her face and Hange pushes it away with a jerky movement of her wrist. She moves past her bike, deciding to walk to the school on her feet.

There are lots of things on her mind, and a lengthy stroll presents a perfect opportunity to think all of it through.

Hange walks through the grey, foggy streets with her head cast down. She stares at the ground, but not even an occasional sight of a sleazy worm is enough to lift her mood.

She reaches the gates of a school, when someone grabs her elbow.

Startled, she looks up. Levi is standing beside her.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, his frown more prominent than usual.

“Nothing,” Hange lies, avoiding his sharp eyes.

Today they don’t remind her of the knife’s edge. Today, Hange thinks, they look just like a sky before a storm.

“What’s your first class?”

Levi stands close to her, too close. People are going to talk, Hange can’t help but think. But Levi doesn’t seem to care about it.

“English,” she answers, staring at her feet.

“Let’s go then,” moving his hand from her elbow, Levi grabs her by the sleeve of her hoodie. He starts walking, dragging Hange along. And because her eyes are still cast down, Hange doesn’t notice that they aren’t headed to a classroom until it’s a little too late.

Of course, Levi leads her to the roof.

He sits her down and looks at her expectantly. Hange shifts her gaze to a side. Under Levi's intense stare, something stirs inside her. There is worry in his eyes, Hange realizes. This revelation makes butterflies in her stomach slowly come to life.

Hange tries her best to ignore them.

"I'm fine, really," she repeats. She doesn't know who she's trying to fool - Levi or herself. She doesn’t achieve success with either of them.

The harsh wind is stronger on the roof, it blows through her hair, gets under her hoodie and sips deep in her bones. Hange suppresses a shiver.

"Idiot," Levi mutters, following it with an irritated tsk. He unzips his jacket, takes it off and drapes it around her shoulders.

Heat rises to her cheeks instantly. She feels incredibly warm and she knows that the jacket isn't the reason for it. The butterflies, despite her best efforts, happily flutter their wings.

"You'll catch a cold..." she whispers weakly. Levi is wearing a thin grey pullover and Hange can only imagine how cold he must be.

"Ackermans don't get sick," he says confidently, making Hange snicker. The corners of his lips twitch and he gently nudges her. "So what happened, four-eyes?"

Hange looks up, staring at the horizon. The skies seem even darker up there, and she briefly wonders how much time they can spend here until the rain starts and a need to hide from it forces them inside.

She wraps the jacket tighter around herself, and the sharp scent enters her nostrils. It smells like soap and cigarette smoke. It smells just like Levi.

Hange glances at him, and his stare is unwavering as he waits for her to start talking.

Hange sighs and begins.

"It's my dad," she confesses softly. "He's... getting married next week. And—" she chuckles, meaning for it to sound easy and cheerful. It comes out bitter and hollow instead. "I found out about that from his post on Facebook. He didn't invite me, didn't even tell me about this. I know— I know that he has a new family now. And I know that I probably remind him of the time when he was married to my mom, and I guess it wasn't a great experience for either of them, but still... he threw me out of his life so easily. It makes me sad, I guess."

"It's his loss," Levi says. "If he doesn't realize it, then he doesn't deserve you."

"Levi..." Hange whispers, aghast. She expected him to ignore her whining, or call her pathetic, but this… Hange doesn’t what to think. The warm feeling inside her is almost too much to bear.

"I know I'm not the best with words," Levi admits, while Hange is still busy processing his last ones and how good they made her feel. "But I can call Isabel, if you wish. Or that Berner boy," he adds with a tight-lipped expression.

Hange smiles, touched by his offer. But she talked it through already, last night with her mother. Today, she needs something else.

"Can we stay like this, please?" she asks, looking at him beneath her eyelashes.

"Sure," he agrees easily. And then— Levi does the unexpected again. He wraps his arm around her, pulling her closer. Her nose is pressed against his collarbone, and the butterflies go wild.

Hange pays them no mind. Levi is warm and he smells nice. She hides a smile into his shirt.

The sadness she felt throughout the morning disappears. With Levi's arms around her, Hange feels impossibly happy.

***

 It's almost seven in the evening, and the streets are already dark when Hange leaves the school after another biology club meeting.

The alleyway next to the school is dimly lit, so Hange almost misses a figure that sits on one of the benches. She stops as soon as she sees that dark silhouette, though. Despite the poor street lighting and her own imperfect eyesight, Hange recognizes him instantly. And wonders what is he doing there.

Levi walks her home every day, except Fridays. Fridays are club meeting days, and Hange often leaves the school late in the evening.

Levi never waits for her on Fridays.

So why is he here now?

Hange silently walks up to him, approaching him with a bit of caution. Levi sits weirdly, his shoulders seem too stiff. Her stomach churns with worry.

"Levi?" she softly calls. "Levi, what are you doing here?"

"Hange," he keeps his eyes trained on the ground, and Hange's worry increases. She doesn't like the hollowness of his voice.

Then she lowers her gaze, and the worry skyrockets. Levi's hands— they are covered in blood. She gasps and grabs his chin, turning his face to the light. A bloodied lip, a bruise on a cheek - Hange swears when she sees them.

"What happened?" she is instantly by his side, taking his hands into hers. She brings them closer to her face, looking for injuries.

"Zeke." Levi says.

"He's the one who did all of this to you?"

"Of course not," Levi throws her a sharp, offended look. "He just brought more friends than I could deal with."

"What a fucker," Hange mutters, anger warming up inside her. "Let's go to my place, I'll clean your wounds."

"And what about your mother?" Levi bites his lip. "Won't you get in trouble with her, if you bring me home, looking like this?"

"She has a night shift," Hange stands up, outstretching her hand to Levi. "And besides," she continues. "I’m sure my mom would adore you,” she winks at Levi, grinning. “Just like I do.”

***

Hange brings Levi home and tends to his wounds. She cleans his skinned knuckles and wipes the blood from his lip.  She tries to be gentle, apologizing over and over each time Levi winces. Every time he hisses or grits his teeth, the anger inside Hange grows bigger and bigger. She swears to herself that she won’t let Zeke get away with it.

When she starts wrapping bandages around his knuckles, her hands shake and tremble.

She wants to think that her inexperience is to blame, but she knows that the reason for her nervousness is Levi's warm breath on her cheek and his eyes that follow her every move.

Hange stares into them for a second. They look nothing like a knife's edge right now. They don't remind her of a sky before storm either. They're the color of a full moon. They're shining just as brightly.

"You're wrapping them too tight," Levi complains, breaking Hange out of her reverie.

"Oh, sorry!" Hange giggles, embarrassed. She hurries to rectify her mistake, but ends up making even a bigger mess, tangling up the bandages.

Levi sighs and snatches them out of her hands.

"You're shit at this," he says, bandaging his knuckles himself.

Hange snickers and watches him, committing each move to memory. She hopes she won’t need this knowledge in the future. But in case she does, next time she wants to be able to help.

“You can stay for the night,” Hange offers when his injuries are cared for. “We can put on a movie, make some popcorn…”

“Maybe, some other time,” Levi gently declines. “My mom probably worries like crazy. I should get home, before she sends Kenny after me.”

His refusal disappoints Hange a bit, but she doesn’t take it personally. She knows how much Levi cares about his mother. And she knows how much he hates causing her worry.

So she makes him promise to hang out tomorrow and walks him to the door.

"Thank you," Levi tells her, standing in the doorway.

"I didn't do anything..." she tries to protest.

"You did more than enough,” he says, the grey of his eyes softening. “Goodnight, Hange.”

“Goodnight,” she echoes, watching him go with a heavy heart.

  ***

After that Friday, Hange lets her anger brew for a whole weekend.

On Monday, she comes to school and seeks out Zeke. His friends stand around him, as she approaches, but Hange pays them no mind. She marches up to Zeke, grabs him by the collar and punches him in the face.

His loud shriek and a pathetic whimper that follows are absolutely priceless.

"That's for Levi," she glowers, before walking away, a smirk on her lips and her head held up high.

She gets sent to detention for that, but Levi calls her an idiot with a fond smile on his face, and Hange thinks it was all worth it.

He gets into a fight with Floch the very same day, and during detention they sit side by side, exchanging silly notes and making funny faces at each other.

"Just one condition left," Isabel tells her the next day, winking suggestively.

  ***

It is another Friday night, and Hange is engaged in a losing battle with her calculus homework. No matter what she does, what formula uses, nothing seems to work.

Her eyes are getting tired from glaring at her notebook, and Hange rubs at them, suppressing a yawn. It’s a little past ten, but she already feels exhausted, drained to the bone.

She thinks of just abandoning it all and going to sleep, when a small rock lands on her desk. Hange blinks a few times, utterly confused.

How did it get here?

She scratches her head, trying to make sense of it. A second later, another rock appears.

Hange looks up, turns to the window— and smile breaks on her face. She squeals in delight, jumping to her feet and coming to grip the windowsill.

Levi is sitting on a branch of a tree that grows near her house. He wears his signature jacket, and he’s looking at Hange with the expression of fond annoyance that he reserves exclusively for her.

“Took you long enough to notice me,” he grumbles. “I was thinking of aiming the next rock at your stupid head.”

Hange laughs, not taking his words to heart. She knows Levi well enough by now to see through his insults and sarcasm.

“Are you free right now?” he asks, before Hange gets her chance to question what is he doing up on a tree.

“It’s Friday night and I’m sick of doing my homework, so…” she shrugs. “I am as free as I can be.”

“Alright. And your mom? Is she at home?”

“She is, but she’s already asleep.”

“Get out then.”

“Eh? What does that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said,” Levi scoffs. The confused expression doesn’t leave her face, so he rolls his eyes and adds, “I stole the keys to Kenny’s bike. Do you want to take a ride on it or not?”

Hange feels her lips twitching. She wants to say ‘yes’ so badly, but for the sake of messing with Levi, she puts on a doubtful frown.

“Won’t you get in trouble with your uncle?”

“Only if he finds out.”

“Will he be able to find out?”

“Most certainly.”

"And you still wanna do it?" she asks, just to see the exasperated look Levi throws her.

"Of course," he answers through his teeth, his patience starting to run thin.

"Alright!" she finally agrees. She jumps and clasps her hands together, unable to contain her excitement. "Just wait a sec, I need to change my clothes!"

Levi nods, throws ‘don’t take too long’ and starts climbing off a tree.

Just as she promised, Hange gets ready in record time. She jumps out of the window, landing next to Levi with a pained huff.

"Are you alright?" he steadies her, his eyes shadowed with worry.

"Sure!" Hange assures him with a smile. "The landing was just a bit rougher than I expected."

"You could have left through the front door, like a normal person." Levi notes.

"But where is the fun in that?" Hange counters.

Levi shakes his head and curses her idiocy under his breath. Hange claps his shoulder and chuckles.

"Shall we go?" she raises her arms to tie up her hair.

"Don't." Levi blurts out suddenly.

Hange stops in her tracks, gawking at him. "Eh?"

"Leave it like that," his voice is rough and breathy as he speaks. Levi turns his face away, and Hange desperately wishes to know what it looks like right now. She bets it’s all red and flustered. "When you wear your hair down... It’s not a bad look on you."

Hange can't believe it. Did she mishear? Misunderstood something? Or did Levi really just pay her a compliment?

Now it’s her turn to be flustered. She feels her face redden. Her heart starts to hummer in her chest.

Levi doesn’t give her enough time to process, and, of course, to retaliate. 

"I parked the bike near your house," he walks away so briskly, it's hard for Hange to catch up.

When she does, Levi is already standing next to a shining black motorcycle. Hange knows next to nothing about motorcycles, but, in her opinion, the thing looks cool. She runs a hand over it, and her excitement almost makes her feel dizzy.

She has never ridden a motorcycle. But she is sure it's quite a thrilling experience.

"Put that on," Levi instructs, handing her a helmet. "And hold on to me, alright?"

"Of course!" Hange mockingly salutes.

"Don't do anything stupid, four-eyes," he glowers before putting a helmet on his own head and getting onto the bike.

Hange waits for him to sit down and then she follows his suit. She wraps her arms around Levi, fisting her hands into the lapels of his leather jacket.

"Ready?" he asks, his voice muffled by a helmet.

Hange nods, pressing her head to his shoulder.

Levi starts the motorcycle and carefully rides onto the street. He maneuvers out of the narrow path and onto the broad road. He speeds up after that and Hange can't hold in a delighted chuckle. She raises her head and looks around.

The streets they pass by are nothing more than a blur of bright lights and vivid colors, and Hange can't stop staring at it all. To make the experience even more electrifying, she's pressed so close to Levi that she can feel his heartbeat. Or, maybe, that's an echo of her own. Their proximity makes it hard to tell. She also feels incredibly warm, having her arms wrapped around him makes Hange forget about the harsh wind that seems even stronger as they ride through the night city.

Levi obviously has a final destination in mind, but Hange doesn't care, not right now, when she is filled with so much joy and elation.

She feels so free, she feels so good, so happy, she is so—

"I swear to god, Hange!" Levi shouts over the wind. "If you're thinking of dangling your arms in the air or some equally dumb shit, I'm going to throw you off this thing myself!"

Hange laughs, wild and unbridled.

She is so in love.

*** Levi brings them to the beach.

As soon as he stops the engine, Hange gets off the bike and runs to the sea, kicking away her shoes as she goes. She steps into the water and yells, instantly jumping out of it. The water is freezing, but Hange is stubborn. She wants to try again, hoping that her body would adjust. Before she can take a single step in that direction, though, she is roughly yanked back.

She turns around and meets Levi's sizzling gaze.

"Sit the fuck down," he growls. "Or you wish to get pneumonia?"

Hange can't help it - her heart swells and her stomach tingles.

Levi, despite his dark, scary eyes and scowling face, is surprisingly endearing. He's so cute Hange wants pinch his cheek. Desperately so.

And because she's still filled with adrenaline after their ride, or, maybe, the dark sea and quiet night have an effect on her, Hange does just that.

Levi slaps her hand away a second too late. She laughs, and, to placate him, finally sits down, burying her feet in the sand.

Levi takes a seat next to her. A second later, something heavy and warm falls over her shoulders. Hange touches it with her fingers - it's Levi's jacket.

"It's cold," he explains gruffly, answering the silent question in her eyes.

"Thanks," Hange smiles, and, because she still feels inexplicably bold, she puts her head on his lap.

Levi startles, his whole body goes rigid, but he doesn't push her away, doesn't even complain. After a moment, he relaxes - his hand falls on her shoulder and his fingers starts playing with her hair.

It's nice, Hange thinks. She wishes to stay in this moment forever.

She turns to look at the sea - the stars and moon are reflecting in the darkness of the water, illuminating a narrow path. She points her finger at it.

"I once believed that if you follow that path during full moon, you'll become a mermaid," she tells Levi.

Levi snorts. "You believed in something so stupid? Why am I not surprised?"

"What ridiculous thing did you believe in?"

Levi is silent for a long moment, and Hange thinks he's not going to answer. She opens her mouth to change the topic, but then—

"I believed in Santa until I was thirteen years old."

"What?!" Hange shrieks, rising up from her position to gawk at Levi. "You're serious?"

"Unfortunately," he grunts, pushing her back on his lap. "Kenny put a very convincing show. It's not until I caught my mom hiding presents under a Christmas tree that I finally realized the truth."

Hange really, really tries to keep it in, but she imagines the disappointment on Levi's face and absolutely loses it. Laughter bubbles out of her throat, and Hange curls in on herself, laughing without abandon. Her stomach starts to hurt, tears well up in the corners of her eyes, and Hange still continues to giggle, expressing her mirth until she can't breathe anymore.

"Oh god, Levi," she wipes the tears away. "This is the best thing I've heard in weeks."

"Glad you are having fun on my account," he says dryly.

Hange starts laughing again.

When she finally calms down, the silence falls over them.

It's so quiet there, the only sounds are faraway noises of the city and the loud roar of the sea that accompanies the crashing of waves against the shore.

All of it makes Hange feel at peace in a way she rarely does.

After minutes of staring at the seemingly endless sea and basking in the atmosphere of it all, she tears her gaze away from the it, shifting her eyes to Levi. And finds out - he is looking at her too.

His stare is intense, charged with something she can't quite name, something that makes it impossible to look away.

As their eyes meet, Levi swallows. His hand in her hair stills, and he starts to slowly lower his face to hers. Hange lifts her head too. The tension around them is growing, and Hange forgets how to breathe until— until it hits her.

"Of course!" she cries out, jumping up. She hits Levi's jaw with her forehead, but doesn't pause long enough to fully register it. She can't spare her attention to anything else, the math problem she tried to solve for so long— she finally found the solution.

"Levi!" she seizes his shoulders, staring at him with wide, feverish eyes. "We need to go back, quick!"

"What—"

"I realized how to solve it!" she gets to her feet, pacing around and impatiently waiting for Levi to stand up as well.

"Solve what?" Levi grimaces, looking like he has eaten a sour lemon.

Unfortunately, Hange is too preoccupied with her sudden revelation to notice his expression or even answer his question.

"Way to ruin the moment," he mutters before standing up and walking back to the bike, his face as dark as the sea. ***

It's the last Friday before St. Valentine's Day, and everyone at their school starts going crazy.

Hange is spending lunch with Nifa and Moblit, but their sandwiches lay forgotten, as the three of them curiously watch Porco's pathetic attempt to ask Pieck out. He keeps stuttering and his face is so red, Hange is worried he might pass out, but then Pieck smiles and kisses him on a cheek. Cheers and congratulations are heard from all sides of school cafeteria.

"So it's settled then?" Hange turns to Moblit. "Porco and Pieck are actually dating?"

"I guess..." Moblit tentatively agrees.

"I saw Reiner and Porco kissing the other day," Nifa interrupts.

"And I saw Reiner and Berthold hold hands on their way home," Hange mutters, taking a bite from her sandwich.

"I'm not sure," Moblit rubs his neck. "But I think I caught Pieck making out with Yelena the other day."

"So it's still complicated," Nifa mournfully concludes. "At least, their love life is more interesting than mine..."

"Speaking of love," Moblit quietly begins. Both Hange and Nifa whip their heads to stare at him. Moblit's cheeks turn pink, but he stubbornly continues to look at Hange. "I wanted to ask if..."

Whatever he wanted to ask, Hange doesn't get a chance to find out. Because in the next second, a shadow flashes past them. It appears by her side and drapes a leather jacket over her shoulders.

"It's too cold today," Levi explains, as he sits down next to her, inserting himself between Hange and Moblit.

It's not cold at all, and, besides Hange is wearing a warm pullover.

But that's not the only thing that confuses her. What is Levi doing here? Why is he sitting so close to her? And why is he glaring at Moblit?

"Why are you here, Levi?" Hange decides to start with the easiest question.

"Can't find Farlan and Isabel," he answers flippantly, not taking his eyes from Moblit.

Now that's most certainly a lie. Hange can clearly see Isabel and Farlan sitting in their usual spot, in the furthest corner of cafeteria. And even if she didn't turn around to locate them, Isabel's delighted cackling is heard even from a distance.

"It's best if I go," Moblit says, a drop of sweat rolling down his forehead.

"I'll go with you," Nifa offers, taking her trail.

"We are just friends, my ass," she angrily mutters, throwing another exasperated look at Hange and Levi.

Hange turns to Levi as soon as her friends leave, she really, really wants to know what the fuck had just happened, but she opens her mouth in the exact moment that a bell rings.

Levi wordlessly gets up and disappears in the crowd of students. He forgets to take back his jacket.

  ***

As Hange moves from class to class, everyone keeps staring at her. It’s not bad kind of attention, no one whispers insults behind her back, Erwin actually approaches, offering sincere congratulations, and when she meets Zeke’s gaze in the hallway, she sees a spark of fear there, and it fills her with a deep sense of satisfaction, but— it also makes her confused.

Why did Levi give his jacket to her? Why did he give her his jacket so many times before? Why has she never seen Isabel or Farlan wear it? What makes her special?

Hange always enjoyed solving riddles. She is determined to find a solution to this one as well.

  ***

After her last class, Hange rushes to the rooftop. Just as she expected, Levi is there. And, luckily, he’s all alone.

He’s smoking, but as soon as he notices her presence, he puts the cigarette out and waves his hand, getting rid of the smoke.

Sitting beside him, Hange shoots him a grateful smile.

“So did you know about the dance they’re organizing this weekend?” she begins, skipping the pleasentries and small talk. As she speaks, she tilts her head to the side to stare at Levi’s profile. In the light of a setting sun, he looks even more handsome. Her heart picks up its speed. She ignores it and forces words out of her throat. “Do you wish to go?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Hange wonders, not saddened by his answer at all. She was expecting nothing else, after all.  “Just imagine – me in a dress and with shitty, smeared lipstick and you in a shirt and tie… We’ll be dancing in a stuffy auditorium, drinking spiced punch and having fun with our peers…”

Levi visibly shudders at her words. “I’d rather jump off this roof.”

Hange snickers in her palm. “And if I go with Moblit?” she asks, watching Levi with a sly smile.

“I’ll throw him off this roof.”

That’s exactly the answer Hange was expecting. Even so, her heart does a flip and her breathing speeds up. Her cheeks feel hot and a wide grin is pulling on her lips. The scariest part is over, but the nerves don’t die out. There are still a few questions she needs answers to.

“And if I asked you out to the movies…”

“That’s not a bad idea…” Levi mumbles, keeping his eyes trained on his feet.

Hange gathers the last of her courage.

“And if I kissed you right now?”

Her heart stops, as she nervously waits for a reply. Millennia pass before she hears Levi’s gruff voice.

“That’s… a very good idea.”

He turns to her, staring at her and the intensity of his piercing gaze makes Hange weak in the knees. There is a moment, where nothing happens, but it lasts for no longer than a heartbeat. Then Levi cups her cheek and moves closer, his lips hovering above hers.

Hange closes her eyes and shortens the small distance that separates them.

The kiss is short, chaste and more than a little bit awkward. Even so, it’s the first kiss in her life and Hange lets her lips linger on Levi’s for a little longer, savoring that moment and committing it to her memory.

When they pull apart, Levi doesn’t let her go. If anything he brings her even closer, bumping their foreheads together.

His eyes are warm and soft, and Hange isn’t sure if she had seen anything more beautiful. But then she lets her eyes wander, slipping lower, and she sees a smile that blooms on his face. She can’t decide what she likes to stare at more – his eyes or his smile. After a second of intense debating, Hange comes to conclusion that both his eyes and his smile are equally breathtaking.

She thinks of asking for another kiss, when she remembers something just as important.

“I finally did it, Levi!” she loudly announces, throwing her hands in the air. “I fulfilled the fourth condition!”

Levi pushes her away with a groan. “Why must you always ruin the atmosphere…” he wonders with a deep scowl on his face.

To be honest, Hange liked it better when he smiled. But, luckily, now she knows a sure way to placate him.

With a gentle smile on her lips, she pulls him closer for another kiss.

[commander-hanji-zoe]

Hi~ can I request Mike and Nanaba with s/o who is stressing with college life like hw or study please? 🥺🥺🥺

Hey - of course! I imagine they'd both be very supportive and caring. In many respects I think their reactions would be very similar, so you may notice some repetition. Mostly I think they'd want you to remember your studies do not define you as a person and anything you're struggling with is not a failure and is nothing to be embarrassed of. They'd want to make sure you had plenty of water, snacks and took plenty of breaks (especially with fresh air as that's very important!) Breathing exercises, meditation, allowing you to vent to them without interruption. Tears with no shame. Lots of hugs and rewards at the end of difficult sessions. I hope you like the below and that it helps. ♡

Mike

Mike knows exactly when to leave you alone to your studying, when to leave you alone but occasionally bring snacks/drinks and when he needs to intervene and remind you to take a break. He’s someone who is very in-tune with those around him, especially those he is close to so he’s a good judge of when you’re pushing yourself too far and will step in to tell you.

At the beginning of your studies he’ll ensure to set up an area either in the space/room you share or in his room where you can study in peace. There might even be a little DIY involved. They’ll be a plant or two, plenty of stationary and paper, a stress toy and some lovely scented candles.

With his keen nose he’ll pick out candles that not only smell gorgeous but help to aid in concentration.

He’ll ensure you have a constant supply of water, occasionally bringing you tea, orange juice or whatever your favourite drink is. He’ll also bring snacks known for their ‘brain power’ like nuts and berries, but he also likes to treat you so he’ll bring cookies too.

If you need help setting up a study schedule he’s the perfect partner to assist with this and will create a

If you need someone to test your knowledge Mike will really get into the teacher role, which will likely make you giggle but it’s also a little bit hot. He’s incredibly patient with you and if you’re really struggling/there’s any gaps in your knowledge, he’ll design little note cards with the information on (and adds a little heart).

If you’re feeling super stressed with studying he’ll remove you from the situation, even if you’re panicking about time and feel you cannot leave the desk, he’ll remind you that if you’re running at 1% you’re not going to be studying effectively or retaining information. It’s better to take a break (away from the desk and the room) for half hour or possibly even the rest of the day if you’ve been studying for hours, than to burn out completely.

Mike makes sure that you get plenty of fresh air so if you have a break from studying you’re not just sat in the same place. Instead he’ll encourage you to go for a walk, he’ll come with you if you want but also understands personal space is important.

He’s very good at shoulder/back/head/neck massages (let’s be honest he’s great at massaging any part of the body). If you’re feeling tense/stressed but want to study a bit more, he’s happy to stand behind you and gently give you a massage to help release some of that tension.

There’s rewards whenever you finish studying, whether it’s a nice meal he’s prepared, a romantic evening, drinks with friends, a cake Mike has baked, a hot, romantic bath etc. Mike makes sure that your place is clean and tidy and dinner is sorted so it’s one less thing for you to worry about and you can focus your energy on studying.

He’s overall very supportive and will tell you how proud of you he is everyday. If you need a quick pick me up and you’re struggling to believe in yourself, he’ll get you to do some affirmations with him or help you write some that remain private.

Any tears when you’re studying and Mike will be there with tissues and plenty of hugs. He has a way of making you feel completely safe and secure when he wraps his arms around you. He’s happy to hold you as long as is needed.

Will remind you that you’re doing the best you can and that he thinks you’re amazing. Will also remind you that no one is perfect and that as long as you’re doing your best that’s all anyone (yourself included) can ask for.

At the end of every study session if he’s there or when he gets home he’ll press a kiss to your forehead in the same place every day. “Proud of you love.”

Any breakdowns you have or moments of extreme stress where you feel you can’t go on, Mike is there to hold your hands and let you vent. He helps you to take deep breaths and focus on a happy memory. He’ll remind you that your worth is not determined by how your studies go or your results in an exam. This does not define you and if you don’t get it this time you can try again and that is absolutely okay.

Nanaba

Having Nanaba around when you’re stressing about college is incredibly helpful, she’s a ray of sunshine who reminds you to take frequent breaks and ensures you’re looking after yourself as well as studying.

She curates the perfect study space for you that’s full of light and near a window so there’s plenty of air.

Makes sure you start the day with a healthy and brain-power inspired breakfast, she’ll say with

Kisses to the cheek and reassuring squeeze of your shoulders to let you know that she’s there for you if you need her. But Nananba is never over-bearing and certainly never treats you like a child. She appreciates that sometimes especially when you are stressed that you will need your space.

Like Mike she’ll ensure you’ve got plenty of water throughout your studies and if she’s home/around she’ll occasionally bring you snacks and ensure you take a decent break for lunch.

If the sight of paperwork and books is stressing you out and the words seem to blur into one, Nanaba will suggest going out for lunch - to sit on the grass with a picnic or buy lunch out. Something that is completely detached from the work you are doing.

Occasionally when you’re studying you’ll hear Nanaba singing or humming, half the time she doesn’t even know she’s doing it but it’s comforting and reassuring. When you point it out to her she’ll go a little red and feel bad for disturbing your study. But you explain, it actually helps you to focus, so Nanaba will sing a little every day while you’re studying. It’ll be in a different room so it’s quiet but somehow that makes you feel safe.

At the end your study sessions when Nanaba sees you she likes to know how it went, what went well and what didn’t go so well. She thinks it’s important you talk openly about it and encourages you to express any doubt rather than bottling it up. Together you come up with a plan to tackle the areas that are stressing you out the most.

If you start to cry or feel incredibly frustrated and stressed, Nanaba will guide you away from your work space to the window so you can listen to the birds, breeze, chatter of children etc. She’ll help to ground you and do some breathing exercises with you to calm your heart rate and make you feel more like you again.

She cooks the most amazing meals for you so you have a hearty dinner in the evening once you’ve finished working.

Nanaba will mostly leave you to study alone as she doesn’t want to disturb you, but she will pop her head round the corner every now and then to check you’re doing okay and see if you need anything.

Reminds you that even if you don’t do as well in the exam as you’d like, it isn’t the end - you can always try again and there’s absolutely no shame in that.

If you have difficulty sleeping due to worrying about your studies she’ll spoon you and stroke your hair, whispering soft affirmations and reassurances. She reminds you of how far you’ve come and how proud of you she is. Then she’ll paint a pretty picture with words, describing a dream day out with her so you fall asleep with this imagery instead of a busy mind.

[beepboop358]

This is so random but I ship el and Dustin so hard. They hardly interact and they’ve spoken like a handful of words to each other but their moments are always so cute! What really made me ship them was in season 3 when el saved the scoops troop from the Russians in the mall and when he realized it was her they totally gave each other THAT look. I know it’s so random and it’s more than likely never gonna happen between them but I’ve always thought they were adorable and i hope they interact more.

While I don't ship El and Dustin romantically, I do love their friendship :) I really wish we would see them interact more too! I love the moment in s1 right after El saves Mike when he jumps off the cliff and Dustin screams at the bullies, "She's our friend and she's crazy!" it's one of my favorite lines from the whole show :)) And how Dustin runs to her in s3 when all the groups reunite and he goes "You flung that thing like a hot wheel!" I really love Dustin and El's friendship xD

Going off of that, El kind of caresses the back of Dustin's head when they hug during Hopper's letter in s3, similar to how she moves Mike's forehead onto her's and touches the back of his head and his face. I think that repetition of gestures from El with Mike and Dustin, is one of the many examples that show that El is not romantically in love with Mike OR Dustin. It's simple a gesture El is using to show she cares about the other, not an 'I am romantically, seriously, in love with you' kind of gesture. The Duffer brothers do not have coincidences in their show, they wouldn't have kept that clip of El and Dustin hugging in if it contradicted with a romantic parallel they were trying to make.

thanks for the ask!

[felassan]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 3

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1 and Part 2. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1 and 2. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one.

(Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

The Battle of Ostagar cutscene is one of the first big cutscenes that got made during production. When it was shown to the team for the first time, it was one of those moments where DG felt like “Awesome, this is a game!” Context: During the development of a game it feels more like doing a series of disconnected tasks and assets rather than working on a game, so seeing stuff come together at times like this is rad. The first time it was shown, it had temporary placeholder voiceacting.

Pathfinding is always a nightmare to do, especially in games which involve a party of NPCs. As soon as other characters are involved alongside the PC, it’s exponentially more difficult and takes up a lot more resources. The PC is the most complex thing going on visually on-screen, with so many moving pieces, and in party-based games you have four [etc] of them. So, some critique that’s made of the DA games in regards to this subject which compares it to games like The Witcher doesn’t really make sense, as The Witcher has a solo PC.

‘Weird mage hats’ didn’t really become a trademark ‘DA thing’ akin to their place of random pieces of cheese around the world until later games. For DAO, someone probably asked the artists to create “mage helmets”. Mage hats actually looked better in the concept art than they did in-game. What happened was that they were already modelled and then they didn’t have time to re-do them.

DAO was made for PC first. The plan from the get-go though was that it would be an all-platform release (PC/360/PS3). Games like these are always made for the “lowest common denominator” from among the various platforms that they’re being planned to release for. Games have to be made for the most stringent/basic of the platforms because this makes for less conversion rate. At the time of DAO’s development, the PS3 was getting weak graphically and getting old, and this was quite a limitation: “Why do we have to limit [crowds?] because of this one platform?” “Well, we just gotta”. The original models were a bit too detailed. Later on, the artists started making models that had lower polycounts that they could put in a bit more of. DA was never really focused on making environments realistic in an ambient manner (making environments less “gamey” and more lived in, like having crowded places). They could have put more emphasis there but this would have led to a resources issue. Ambience basically wasn’t a high priority. As a writer DG isn’t keen on this decision and naturally he wanted the world to look more realistic, but he noted that it’s easy for him to say this when this would be work that he didn’t have to do personally.

During DAO development, they might have just had a dev sphere originally that was called “tech design”. DG thinks this was later broken up into systems design, combat design and maybe level design. Level designers are the people that are the implementers of the plot. Narrative design is a branch of the level design spoke. System designers respond to requests from lead designers. Narrative designers and writers don’t interact with system designers much unless they have to. As an example of interaction here, system designers might come to writers and say, “Alright, so we’re doing combat, what are the sorts of things a mage can do in this world?” The writers would be like “Ok, these are the sorts of spells we imagined.” The system designers might then come back with “Ok, that fulfills 2 of the 10 things we need mages to be able to do in combat. Is it possible that mages could do [this]?” Sometimes it is, and other times it would be like “No, that’s really outside of the lore”. Still, sometimes said original-lore-breaking things would be added to the game a week later due to necessity and DG would be like “Oh ok”. This kind of stuff is an insight into how some aspects of the lore came to be or changed over time during development.

The system designers on DAO got a better idea of what could be done and what could not be done according to the lore as things went on. At first, DG had to keep telling them things like “It’s not that big a deal, but in the lore mages can’t teleport. Instant teleportation isn’t possible in the world”. The system designers needed a spell where someone could get from spot A to spot B really fast on the battlefield. DG said that that’s fine in itself, “have them turn into a cloud of bees or have a light that moves between the two places. We can use magic as a transition or as a speed thing, but what is against the lore is instant teleportation, to traverse distance like that”. At first the system designers weren’t on board with it, but they got on board with it later. 

This sort of thing doesn’t just depend on the system designers. It also depends on what the tech artists are willing to do. Sometimes a certain request made of them was too hard and they said they weren’t able to do it. Other times it was a matter of DG not communicating the request properly, or the tech artists had already done the work and so throwing out all their work to re-do it just because he didn’t communicate clearly wouldn’t have been cool. So sometimes the originally planned lore got contravened, and sometimes things other parts of the team implemented in the game became the new lore.

LE made an insightful observation at this point: You can’t think of game development as a cohesive series of decisions that everyone on the team is involved in. This simple isn’t how it works at all, especially on large complex projects. There are processes at some studios for decision-making, but most of the time, a bunch of decisions get made by system designers. Others get made by level designers, still others by narrative designers. Situations then arise where someone notices a certain decision and that that decision and another one contradict each other. This is where conflict arises and a solution has to be negotiated. This is why often in games we get elements in the end product that are dissonant, because it was discovered too late or by the time it was realized, it was too difficult to change. It’s actually a miracle that on a game of DAO’s depth and scope that all these things largely hold together. [My note: With this insight and the context below on documentation, it makes sense how BW sometimes appear to ‘forget aspects of their own lore’ or end up contradicting parts of the lore in different parts of the franchise]

Sometimes such things would be noticed in time and DG would go and say, “Can we not do that or do something else instead?” and the relevant parties would be totally accommodating and do it (depending on how much time they had or how much time it would take to remedy). Sometimes this worked out and sometimes it didn’t. For the most part, everyone wants to work together. DG couldn’t be involved in every aspect of systems design “like some kind of All-Watchful eye of lore”, so he had to rely on the people who were there knowing enough from the documentation. Not everybody reads every document however. There was so much documentation even back during DAO. DG can only imagine the sheer amount of world/lore documentation that now exists now in the run-up to DA4; he said he thinks that nobody at this point on the current team has read it all, as editor/lore-wrangler Ben Gelinas isn’t with BW anymore. Lots of legacy documentation accumulated very quickly. Sometimes, the old document would still be there. Over time it became harder for people to discern which was the most recent version of a particular document. Sometimes people didn’t update the relevant documentation after changing things. Lore documentation was particularly bad for this issue. BG wrangled all the documentation and created an internal reference wiki (essentially acting as a lorekeeper). He was constantly coming in and picking DG’s brain to clarify conflicting aspects or obtain the correct, in-date information etc (“Good on him”).

DAO was the first time DG was involved in voice-recording. Prior to that he was only on the receiving end, in that the recordings would come in and he’d review them as they did so. DAO is when BW set up their own VO department and where Caroline Livingstone came on. CL wanted DG and Mike Laidlaw to be more involved in the casting process. As a result, the writers then were to write casting scripts: like, ‘For Morrigan, can you write a 1 page script that goes through 3 big emotions? [like regular talking for a bit, then here’s a bit of heightened emotion such as anger, then here’s a part where they’re being funny if they were a comedic character] These scripts had to be kept short so that the recording that was made from it wouldn’t be more than 30-40 seconds in length.

For the initial VA sessions, DG and CL flew down to Technicolor studioin LA and they had all the major castmembers there (later on, recording sessions were done a lot more remotely; this became easier as BW’s setup got more sophisticated). The idea was that they would both be present live in-person for the first 2 or 3 sessions to help each VA find their ‘voice’, and for DG at the first session to sit down with each VA and walk them through who their character was, what DA was about, and help them figure out how their character should talk. Claudia Black was the first of these sessions and he was “a wreck” going into that one. It got easier after that however. CL gave directions into the soundproof booth and DG was present to give notes on things like pronunciation or the intentions behind some lines. He says he learned everything he now knows about VO direction from CL. The things and tricks CL can do to get a performance out of an actor are amazing. Sometimes an actor would get a bit fixated or stuck on a particular way of delivering a line. CL had atrick to help them past this; “I want you to clear your mind, and I want you to give me a version of this line that’s more yellow”. The idea is that they just had to break out of where they had been stuck in that mindset, and the thing was that it doesn’t matter what “yellow” meant, but what was important was what “yellow” meant to the actor. They could then take that new varied delivery and progress from there.

Alistair’s dialogue when the PC talks to Flemeth outside her hut was the first complex conversation DG wrote for DAO. It was the first one that had a lot of branching and fiddling to it. The hardest conversations to write are the ones with a lot of exposition, and when they do have exposition still making this interesting and natural. At this point in the game, the player has no agency, just reactivity. The devs talked a lot about this subject when they wrote the origin stories. Some of the stories allow the player to initially say no and refuse to join the Wardens, but you always end up being railroaded (the devs here ended up doing a form of the trope ‘But Thou Must!’). Do you give the player the option to say no? Is it important to allow them that option? At some point, writers have to accept that the player has some level of buy-in and is game to play. They discussed a lot where they sat on this and what is agency. “Maybe don’t worry about offering the player every possible choice, but about having reactivity.”

Loghain wasn’t okay with letting Cailan die. He didn’t sit and angst about it openly where the player could see, and once the decision had been made, it being Loghain, it was Made and Had To Be Done (he felt that it was something that had to happen). But he didn’t kill the son of the woman he’d once loved dearly as a random off-handed thing.

The Solas twist was planned from the beginning, from the DAO dev days. Such big things/broad strokes have stayed the same. However, some of the details have changed or been added along the way. They didn’t know for instance that Solas was going to be a companion; that was something they came up with when they were planning DAI. Flemeth’s true identity has never changed.

Zevran says Rinna was an elf, but WoT says she was a bastard child of a noble in line for the Antivan throne (the Antivan royal family being human). When asked if this was an oversight, DG said yes she was a bastard, but she may have been really far down the line of succession, i.e. technically in line, but would probably never have been allowed to take the throne in practise had that scenario ever actually arisen.

DA was maybe inspired a bit/some by ASOIAF. This was way before it was on TV of course. DG at the time had read the first book or so. He liked the fact that it was a fantasy setting but low-magic, and was about the people in the world and their politics rather than magic, prophecy and other high fantasy stuff.

It was only by DAI that the system designers decided that it was okay to think of banter as an “activity that players engaged in”. In previous games, the devs had inadvertently managed to ‘train’ players to immediately stop when companion banter fires so that they could hear it all (because if you do something else, it gets cut off). When the level designers put together the spaces, they accounted for what players would be doing i.e. how much time between combat. They didn’t however account for like “You’re travelling down this hall and there’s a banter for half of that space. This is an activity, so it’s okay not to put anything in there”. This is how the inadvertent training happened, when originally banters were supposed to be a thing that ran as you move around the world (as opposed to stopping and standing still). 

When asked if the Blight resulted from the creation of the Veil or pre-dates it: “I think you’ll probably have to wait on the game[s] for that answer, if it ever explains it”. He was also asked whether Arlathan is the Golden City. He won’t answer such questions naturally because they are “DeepLooooooore™~~ ♫”.

DG isn’t sure that he will play DA4 when it comes out. It’s not that PW and the team won’t do a good job, they will, it’s just that when DG plays RPGs he has an analytical mindset going on and finds it difficult to slip into the game and just enjoy. For DA4, as he was previously so involved in DA, there’ll naturally probably be an extra level of that with feeling like “What would I have done [for particular parts of the game’s design]?”. Alternatively he might instead feel like “Wow, this is awesome, here’s a game I would have made but didn’t have to do any work on!” DG stressed that it’s important to him to be fair about the work of his former colleagues - he wouldn’t want to come out and be like “I wouldn’t have made [this or that] choice”. He also noted that just because something might be a call he personally wouldn’t have implemented in the game, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad call. There are people out there where if DG intimated at all that there was an aspect of DA4 that he wasn’t keen on, he’s worried that they would pounce on it and use it as ammunition against the current team (who are his friends that he really cares about and wants to do well). He walked away from DA voluntarily and is happy his game will continue on. PW popped by in chat at this point and agreed that it’s definitely hard to play something that you used to work on.

Other assorted tidbits:

DG really opposed the part at the Battle of Ostagar where mabari are set to charge the darkspawn horde - “That’s not how you would use dogs [in war]”

There was supposed to be a cutscene where Flemeth rescues the HoF and Alistair from the top of the Tower of Ishal in her dragon-form. This was cut. DG remembered being angry about this like “nobody is gonna buy that you fall unconscious and then wake up in the hut totally rescued. [...] I guess I’m not always right”

When DG went to Beamdog there was a period where they thought about making a Baldur’s Gate 3. They put together a pitch and had a long series of discussions contemplating things like “What do we need from BG3? What do we expect it to have in order to have the BG name? What is needed and not needed to connect to from the previous games?”

DG isn’t sure who designed the DAO inventory system

PW in chat recalled a game writer from another company who was really ragging on DAI on the Christmas Day after release

Narrative designer and system designer are very different positions/roles with very different responsibilities

Simon Templeton as Loghain did all his voicework stuff in one take, which was very impressive

It would have been the marketing department that chose 30 Seconds To Mars for music. DA was really good at choosing up-and-coming acts for this that weren’t huge when they used their songs, but became huge afterwards

During work on Baldur’s Gate 2 was the most DG has ever crunched. He slept in the office a few times

“As soon as you get both Alistair and Morrigan in the party, that’s when it’s like ahh yes, this is a BioWare game”

Were Flemeth and Morrigan’s interactions with each other and the PC when Morrigan is being told to leave the Wilds and go with the Hero an act, considering that Morrigan did know about the OGB plan? No. That was The Plan, but said plan wasn’t like “Ok, she’s going to leave Right Now”

The elves and the inversion of the traditional elven trope are DG’s favorite part of the world/world-building

One of the original intentions for DAO was to make it so that the player wouldn’t need a healer in the party, or that there would be different kinds of healing, or that healing itself wouldn’t be a thing, but this just didn’t work out

The Imperial Highway used to be a really important part of the lore but it kind of got forgotten a bit

It’s kinda funny that after release some players expressed that Corinne Kempa’s accent as Leliana was “sooo fake”. It’s not fake, she’s actually a Brit that moved to France when she was young, so she has the exact type of accent that Leliana would have (Leliana was born in Orlais and is culturally Orlesian, but her mother was Fereldan and she considers herself as such)

They talked some about the need for documentation and how doing this can feel beurocratic and uncreative and how like you’re not working on a game or writing. PW in chat expressed that there was a year where they spent a lot of it working in PowerPoint and Excel, “so I feel this”

When they switched art directors to Matt Goldman, his first big complaint was about all the brown. He came to DG like “Is there a lore reason for or are you particularly in favor of the brown for story reasons?” DG was like “Uhh no” and Matt was then like “Ok good”

Console codes/commands aren’t usually stripped out of a game before release, they are usually still in the built, just disabled. The system itself is not removed but how to access said system is

BW doesn’t crunch as bad as we hear some companies do, and kind of prided itself on “not being terrible at crunch”. But BW’s “not terrible at crunch” is still crunch. We obviously don’t commend abusive family members for only abusing people on certain days of the week or whatever

Kate Mulgrew is American but she at times did the same thing a lot of the British VAs did, which was that the devs had a lot of struggle with getting them to say “darkspawn” correctly, with the emphasis in the right places. They’d say “dark SPAWN” as if it was two words with an adjective, and the stress put in the wrong place

Lack of children in DAI was a resources thing. They only had time to make a certain number of models. There was a series of meetings where they had to decide what things to cut. In the last meeting it was like ‘Here’s a bunch of things you don’t want to cut, we need to cut 4 of them’

They decided to put horned qunari back in DA2 because then they had the resources to do so. They then ended up having to explain why there were hornless qunari at the same time, and make this an in-world explanation as opposed to just ‘We didn’t have the resources, that was totally intentional’

Lots of players missed out on recruiting Leliana and/or Sten on their first playthrough and didn’t even know they existed/could be recruited. “Apparently we weren’t that great at pointing players in the right direction”

Tevinter is inspired by the Byzantine Empire (which wasn’t called that at the time incidentally, this is a name given by historians after the fact), what used to be the Roman Empire after the western part fell. This is the era Tevinter today is meant to encapsulate: decadent but clearly in decline, far away from the heyday and the heights of the former empire [source]

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[Part 2]

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[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]