#the same way millions of people across the globe have had to just live with the boot of this fucking rotten empire on its neck

[laundryandtaxes]

Oh, unlike the sanctions and isolation regime and literal proxy wars that the US has been engaging in while doing things like outright assasinating this country's most prominent general on the basis that he allegedly armed terrorists just like the US has done for my entire lifetime, some other sort of thing

[kitasgloves]

"Lover"

tracklist

— ♬ "Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close forever and ever?"

— ♬ Oikawa x Reader, timeskip, SFW, tooth-rotting fluff, gen reader, established relationship, please Oikawa is so lover-coded ugh

You'd say that you met Oikawa Tooru late in your life. It was unfortunate that you didn't experience the opportunities back then if you and him met earlier. But it was a blessing that you ended up falling for him out of all people, how lucky you felt when he fell for you just the same. Leaving the Christmas lights up 'til January, after all, this is your place with him, and you and he make the rules. There's a dazzling haze, a mysterious way about Oikawa. Sometimes you wonder if you've known him for twenty seconds or twenty years.

Being away from your lover wasn't easy, though you managed. You're not the type to beg him to stay knowing he can find happiness and success elsewhere, you didn't want to hinder Oikawa's improvement or ruin his happiness. You wanted to share that joy with him and be the one who enables him to be true happiness. However, even after a million video calls and text messages sent to him across the globe, you can't fight off the longing. The desire to feel him beside you, to have him within your reach, and the urge to never let go. You wished you could go where he goes and always be this close, forever and ever.

But when Oikawa returns to the country he is sure to take you out and take you home. After all, he's your lover. It resembles the myth of Persephone, how he spent six months in Argentina and six months in your arms. Yet there were no complaints, and he's the man of his word. June was the month he always returned home, the perfect time to also celebrate his birthday in July. Parties were often wild and heartwarming, friends and family were invited and drinks and music filled the atmosphere.

Everybody adored Oikawa, it reflected in the constant crowd that surrounded him, either fans or friends. You understood it, after all, you fell for his charm. But only you succeeded in seeing who he was. You had the privilege of seeing Oikawa unveiled. When the cameras weren't on, and when nobody was looking. Oikawa was a passionate, earnest, and kindhearted man who happened to be a volleyball nerd. How could you not possibly gain feelings?

"Honey, can Iwa-chan and the rest crash in the living room? They're absolutely wasted"

Oikawa chuckled as your eyes panned to his three friends stumbling over each other towards the living room. You roll your eyes playfully and snicker. You nod, this was his and your place and you make the call. As the party ended, everyone was asleep. But you're wide awake, gazing at Oikawa's lovely face. His luscious eyelashes and perfect chocolate locks make you sigh dreamily, how you managed to bag a guy like him still feels like a mystery. Your hand reaches to caress his soft cheek.

You're highly suspicious that everyone who sees him wants him. How could they not? Oikawa was the perfect package, from personality to looks. Maybe it was this stupid fear of being replaced by someone better, but you couldn't bear the thought of him being taken away. Because you've loved him three summers now, but you want them all.

Oikawa stirs in his sleep, one eye opens and sees your wobbling lip. He doesn't overreact, instead, he takes your hand from his cheek and pulls you in his embrace. He soothes your fears with a gentle kiss on your forehead and reassures you with an arm over your figure. 'I'm not going anywhere, love' it tells you and you melt. Oikawa falls back to sleep with a smile after seeing you snore softly in his arms.

"We're wearing red!"

"No! Blue!"

"No! We did Blue last time!"

"Fine! Turquoise then!"

You huff at him with your hands on your hips when he pouts at you. Tomorrow was going to be the yearly Official Volleyball Gala that you've attended with him a thousand times already. You and Oikawa were famous for having matching outfits that the Paparazzi looked forward to. Playing along, you two decided to feed the media what they wanted. This was the root of petty arguments over what outfit should be worn this year. You proposed to go with red since you both haven't worn that color in a while but Oikawa insisted on going blue even if you both already did previously.

You load your shopping cart with red clothing and Oikawa lets out a dramatic gasp. He plucks the clothes out of the cart and replaces them with Turguioise-colored dress shirts. You scowl at him as you both go neck to neck with each other in the shopping mall. 

"I'm tired, Tooru! Just give up and choose red!"

"How about this, we go with pink!"

You raise a brow when he enthusiastically shows you a light pink tuxedo. You placed a hand under your chin and hummed, it's a not bad idea. You go to look for the same colored outfit to match the tuxedo and your boyfriend's eyes sparkle.

"Fine, only because we haven't worn that color in a while"

Oikawa cheers as he picks you up in his arms, spins you around, and litters your faces with obnoxious kisses. You both exited the mall satisfied with an agreement. The preparation for the gala was chaotic, it was filled with traded dirty jokes, compliments, and flirting. On arrival at the gala, all heads turn to the both of you. Cameras aimed at you two as the flashes blinded you, of course, they're more interested in your boyfriend so it takes the pressure off of you. After security stopped the paparazzi at the entrance, you and Oikawa went to chat with every athlete you were friends with including friendly associates.

"Oikawa-san! [Name]-san!"

"Shoyo!"

You and Oikawa said in unison as you both went to hug the orange-haired athlete, Hinata Shoyo. He goes to compliment you and Oikawa's matching outfit as he often did, catching up with the two of you. You and your boyfriend parted ways to briefly linger with other guests at the gala. Oikawa had a hilarious exchange with Kageyama Tobio and Ushijima Wakatoshi while you gossiped with Yaku Morisuke and Kuroo Tetsuro. When you two reunited, both of you had an unexpected encounter with Atsumu Miya and Sakusa Kiyoomi.

"Well if it isn't the one I defeated on 'The most handsome setter of the year' poll"

"I will fuckin' skin ya alive"

"Nice to see you again, Sakusa-san!"

"Likewise"

The gala goes on as it always does. Quick speeches and athletes sharing their gratitude. Music and food, and overall a relatively good time. But there was a sudden surprise when all the athletes' significant others were invited on stage to give a speech for their athlete lovers. You were caught off guard when Kuroo pulled you in line. You witnessed Akaashi Keiji's heartfelt speech for Bokuto Koutaro, the crowd was sniffing. A funny woman went on stage to make fun of Suna Rintaro's posture, nonetheless giving him a romantic message. When you are up next, your stomach drops.

You were thrusted up on stage with a microphone, and you gulped. Public speaking wasn't your forte, it was more of an Oikawa thing. To see thousands of eyes on you made you quiver like a freezing kitten. But Oikawa was there to save you and all he did was send you a smile and a heart sign in the crowd. Suddenly, you feel like giving a ten-hour speech.

"Hi, I'm [Name] [Surname]. Me and Oikawa have been together for ages, most of the time I feel like I have a toddler for a boyfriend"

There were chuckles in the crowd, you don't need to see but you know your boyfriend is somewhere pouting and crossing his arms. But you continue.

"All's well that ends well to end up with him. I swear to be overdramatic and true to my lover. He'll save all the dirtiest jokes for me and at every table, I'll save him a seat"

A collective sound of 'Aww's flooded the room. Your eyes meet with your lover, Oikawa, who gazes back in a way as if he's on the verge of crying.

"To you, my lover, I love you"

You ended your brief speech as everyone responded with applause louder than you anticipated. You ran backstage to sprint towards Oikawa who had his arms open. He engulfs you in a tight embrace, burying his face in the crook of your neck, holding you impossibly close. You hold on to him without the intention of letting go, drowning yourself in his affection.

"God, you're such a sap, [Name]"

"Shut up, I saw you almost bursting into tears!"

You both pulled away. Seconds after, Oikawa leans over to kiss you. It was tender and romantic and it made your knees weak for all the right reasons. When you two part, he was grinning at you like he won the lottery and you're sure you're smiling back at him like an idiot.

"Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close forever and ever?"

"Of course, my darling"

Your smile went wider and he did the unexpected instead. Oikawa pulls out a tiny white box from his pocket and bends on one knee. Air gets violently knocked out of your chest when you gasp, your eyes immediately turn glassy when he reveals to you a glimmering silver ring.

"Tooru, you did fucking not-"

"Marry me, [Name]. I'll take you everywhere with me, back to Argentina and here in Japan. Then we can always be this close, forever and ever"

Who would've anticipated Oikawa Tooru proposing to you backstage when not a soul was able to witness it? You couldn't hold back a sob, so you only answered with a nod and a choked-out 'Yes' before the setter pounced at you with a hug and a long kiss on your lips. You can see the tears in the corner of his eyes as he slips the ring on your finger. And you couldn't be more happier, to be finally engaged with your lover.

©kitasgloves (do not steal or copy)

[peachdues]

BETWEEN MAN & STAR — REUNION TEASER

Giyuu x Reader • Modern Reincarnation AU • NSFW

Ngl, after Netherwood, this fic has been rotting my brain the most.

Synopsis: almost one thousand years ago, when the Demon Slayers had been on the brink of extinction, Giyuu Tomioka made a desperate plea to save the woman he loved — the woman who’d held the knowledge of how to defeat demons before Muzan Kibutsuji tore her apart. The stars granted Giyuu’s wish, giving them ten chances — ten lives — to defeat Muzan once and for all. But that wish came at a cost: for Giyuu, and the other Hashira have been doomed to endless life, wandering the ages and waiting for Y/N to be reborn so that they might try again.

Nine hundred years later, nine lives have been wasted, and the Demon Slayer Corp is on its last chance. As demon activity begins to explode across Tokyo and Muzan Kibutsuji gets wind that Y/N is alive once more, Giyuu and the other Hashira must do everything in their power to help Y/N regain her memories — and unlock the key to defeating the demons once and for all.

READ THE PROLOGUE HERE.

tagging @homo-homini-lupus-est-1701 and @ghost-1-y because I’ve been in their DMs constantly over this fic and annoying tf out of them lol

CHRISTMAS EVE, 2018

The snow drifted down over the streets of Tokyo like filler in a snow globe.

Giyuu had always liked the snow — he liked the quiet it brought, the way it seemed to illuminate even the darkest corners with its soft glow.

Christmas Eve had come fast that year, though he probably shouldn’t have been surprised. With the uptick in demon activity, and the knowledge that the time drew nearer to bring her back into the equation, to begin training her, had made the days slide together and trickle by rather quickly.

The last time he’d laid eyes on her, she’d barely been a year old. It wasn’t that Giyuu didn’t want to see her — he did. But time and time again, his arrival in her life had spelled out her doom, and he’d been desperate to postpone her suffering for as long as they could afford it. But he knew, deep in his heart, that the time to let her live and exist peacefully was quickly coming to an end, and that he would have to become a stain on her life once more.

A mixture of anxious excitement tugged at his gut. What did she look like, in this final life? She’d always been beautiful — no matter how she looked in any of her past lives, Giyuu always thought she was the greatest beauty ever to Grace the era. He was sure this time would be no different.

More importantly, what would she think of him? She hadn’t been particularly fond of him in her last life — she’d had the same general attitude towards him as Muichiro: utter indifference.

Sanemi and Obanai had picked at him ruthlessly over it.

Giyuu frowned as he strolled along the crowded sidewalks of downtown Tokyo, hands jammed in his pockets as he stepped around pedestrians with arms full of shopping bags, hurrying home to be with loved ones.

He came upon the street just before his apartment building, ready to hunker down in his bed and spend the holiday alone, again, when he glanced up, and could not look away.

Across the street, a door to a small restaurant dinged open, and a group of friends spilled out onto the sidewalk, cheeks flushed and smiles warm from laughing as they talked animatedly with one another. The girl up front turned her head around to face the street, her eyes sweeping the pavement to ensure the group wasn’t about to barrel into any unsuspecting pedestrians, when she landed on him.

Giyuu’s breath lodged in his throat as his eyes blew wide.

Somehow, in a city with millions of people, she’d managed to find him, even if she did not know there was anyone to find.

And Giyuu, despite having not seen her face once in the twenty three years she’d spent in this era, he knew it was her the moment his eyes snagged upon her face.

Because one look at her, and suddenly it was 1121 and not 2018.

Nine life times had seen nine different faces of Y/N. She’d been different races, different body types, different everything, no two variations the same.

Except for this one. For Y/N looked exactly the same as she had, all those centuries ago.

She was training next to him, wielding that sharp pole sword of hers with precision and grace, an ancient warrior goddess given human form. Her eyes were bright; determined as she rotated through battle forms. She turned and smiled at him and it made him feel like he’d found a home.

Memories that had not plagued his psyche in centuries exploded across his conscience, playing like an old vignette.

She was in his arms, the night after they’d professed their love for one another and promised to marry, the flames of candlelight making her skin glow as she writhed under him, his name the only thing on her lips as they moved as one.

That face — so devastatingly beautiful, made Giyuu’s long-beating heart skip violently in his chest. He remained there on the sidewalk, frozen, unable to move or do anything more than stare at the visage of his one true love, as it looked briefly to him and smiled as strangers do, before looking away again.

There she was, under the sakura tree by the river where they’d lived, smiling and laughing as pink petals drifted down from above like flowered snow, sticking in her hair and tickling her face.

He hadn’t noticed the tear that slipped down his cheek until the bitter winter air iced it over, making the skin beneath it sting.

[readingsquotes]

"I’ll never be able to forget my own experience pushing my college to divest......I’ll never forget the look I got from one administrator as I entered their building. We had been camped outside for two weeks at that point, and even though the woman who saw me had no idea who I was, she knew exactly who I was. She knew my presence, our presence, meant disruption. And few things are more sacred to the neoliberal institution than avoiding disruption, even when the status quo is harmful investment in fossil fuel corporations, or genocide. And so my presence scared this administrator, and the cops were there within minutes. The feeling of being a student and having the university resort to violence rather than speak with you is immensely hard to forget.

But so too are the broader lessons I learned in student organizing. The feelings are indelible, and yet the bigger picture, the structural knowledge you receive when you go up against a large and powerful institution, stuck with me too. .... I had learned that universities didn’t quite work the way I had imagined. Growing up they had seemed to me, from a distance, to be centers of knowledge and places where life looks a little more like it’s supposed to; people pursue learning and community and aren’t as constrained by work and stress. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that, but behind the facade is a power structure that cares infinitely more about investments and real estate than the student body. That truth has become more and more real over time, and has been violently laid bare by the boards and administrations themselves in recent weeks. ...

The impact of protest right now matters immensely. It’s impossible to quantify how important it would be if the movement for a Free Palestine in the West built enough power to force our countries to stop funding ethnic cleansing, to stop arming genocide, to stop supporting apartheid. The lives that have been lost are irreplaceable, and the lives that could be saved are invaluable. And, at the same time, we’re seeing millions of people, young and old and everything in between, change in profound ways. In that fact lies the reality that Gaza and Palestinians and this movement we’re seeing all around us are altering the future just as they work to alter the present.

One of the many driving forces changing how people across the globe think, not only about Zionism but about imperialism and society at large, is the simple fact that we cannot unsee what we have seen. ...Decades of propaganda began to fracture in recent years, and shattered in recent months. But it’s more than that – for millions of people across the world there’s also no unseeing U.S. complicity. There’s no unseeing how Israel and the U.S. are virtually alone at the UN, on the world stage, working to protect a genocidal state and enable a genocide again and again. Even as Israel kills yet another UN worker, bringing the total to 190 slain employees of the United Nations, the enabling and participation in Israel’s genocide continues. 

People cannot simply forget these actions, these choices that the U.S. and Israel make day after day. I say that as a hope more than as a fact. ...And while students are not facing repression that can be compared to what the Black Panthers and others have faced, they are repeatedly facing mass violence from the state as well as vigilantes. They have also seen how little their schools care about them, how little their government cares about them, and how deeply invested our entire system is in war and imperialism.

..Students who have been attacked, and people everywhere who have seen horrors in Gaza beyond our comprehension, cannot simply forget. We’ve seen how violence abroad is connected to fascism at home. We’ve seen how Israel’s genocide in Gaza is connected to the war machine here in the United States. We’ve seen how it all comes together in a society structured to deprive the many so the few can hoard wealth and resources. Whatever comes next, there’s no turning back. We will struggle towards a better system, both because we want to see it come into existence and because we don’t have the option to return to a healthy status quo. We can’t turn back to the society we might be nostalgic for. That world doesn’t exist anymore; a new one must be built."

[ksfreckles]

Sometimes my life seems divided in so many small pieces I find it hard to believe that either of those people were really me. How did such a distinct variety of starts and ends fit into this carapace, how did I have so much strenght and so much weakeness concealed into my soul? 32 years isn't that long. I feel like I've lived the lives of a thousand people, like I've walked paths I was never meant to cross.

The internet is, of course, a big part of it, with its fast happenings and its hundreds of people and so much color and sounds and light, and I have friends all across the globe!

It's intoxicating, really. Sideways realities, fears I don't remember fearing, conversations I don't remember having and it's all here, a big smudge of lines and lifes and lies and I'm all of them and none at all.

An e-mail telling a friend about us moving into this city tells me something "amazing" was about to happen! December 3rd was the date. December 6th mom was gone. I haven't talked to this same friend in the past two or three years., it's just life and it happens I guess.

Some old messages on another app, encouraging words, helpful thoughts. I'll be always here, the message reads. Of course "always" isn't immune to cancer, always couldn't make her stay. She never saw Kristen's nomination.

The pictures on my phone show month-old dogs in an empty house, and those same dogs have lived in four different houses now, their seven-year-old tails wiggling side to side, their cat-brother wrapped up watching them from afar. Those little lifes, the endless energy and the mischiefs are all coming to an end, and where did this time go? Where does the time ever go?

My sister has a boyfriend. Her own house, a different address, a life I don't know everything about. I have a wife. My own house, a different address, a life she doesn't know everything about. And it's ok, and we're all good, but at some point in space-time the two of us are sitting on a balcony telling each other we'll die together, we'll grow old together, we'll travel the world together.

At some point in space-time I'm flooded with such love nothing ever could compare. And this love makes me come out of imaginary closets and daydream during harsh days and this love keeps me full of fire and bravery and it's something that keeps me going. At some point in space-time, for a nanossecond, for a split moment, I'm loved back by this distant stranger all the way in France, and my stomach is full of butterflies, and I'm happy, and I'm worthy, and I am me.

I found such love years later. And it was different and more mature, and the me today looks back at the me who loved like that before and shakes her head cause that wasn't right love, that wasn't good love, that love hurt me and hurt her and it quite possibly destroyed the pure beautiful friendship we once had. And I'm married to someone new today, and it's a different love, a calm love, a strong love, the kind of love I know will last.

And all of these are me. The scared little girl, the dog mom, the cat mom, my sister's mom, my sister's sister, the one in love with Julia, the one in love with Bruna, Claudia's daughter, Maria Augusta's daughter, Selene's friend, Fotini's friend, Yoav's friend, a million different pieces, a never ending puzzle. And I'm as big as a grain on sand in this scary world, and how - oh, how - can I possibly expect to predict tomorrow if I could never imagine I would be all of this? How can one single person fit all of this?

And I'm exhausted, and intoxicaded, and deeply happy, and wonderfully clean. For a moment, somewhere in space-time, I am finally free.

[belliesandburps]

Rest in Peace, Kevin Conroy (My Batman Forever)

So, by now, a lot of you have probably heard the news that the definitive voice of Batman, Kevin Conroy, has passed away today at the age of 66. 

And while celebrity deaths are always somber, despite us never knowing them, this one hurt a lot.

Growing up, I didn’t watch many cartoons, if any.  One of the few I ever got to watch was Batman TAS, and rewatching episodes to this day, it’s amazing how none of it felt like a cartoon, but rather, an actual, animated drama that could be appreciated by anyone.  And a huge part of what made that show such a masterpiece was Kevin Conroy’s unforgettable voice.  He was intimidating, distinct, yet had a subtle hint of humor and humanity to him that I don’t think has ever been replicated.  He wasn’t just brooding and angry, or playing everything suave.  Conroy had that middle ground which always made him THE voice of Batman in my head, no matter what.

Beyond the series, even as he became a middle aged man, getting older and older, he still played the part to perfection in the Arkham series as well.  Arkham’s Batman, you could definitely hear how much older he was, especially around Knight when Conroy was nearly 60. 

Even still, you just heard Batman.

Conroy encapsulated the pure essence of Batman.  When he spoke, you paid attention because he just naturally had that kind of authority.  With Arkham, he was definitely a lot sterner, much more Batman on a mission, much less Bruce Wayne, and I think that worked to Conroy’s older age, since we often associate our elders with authority, even if Batman himself was only around his mid-late thirties by Arkham Knight. 

With the Injustice games, he carried that same authority, but brought back some of that dry humor for a lot of the character interactions.  You can hear a funny exasperation while also still retaining that intimidation factor which continued to play well the older Conroy got, since by then, he was in his mid sixties.

More than just being an absolute badass voice actor, Kevin Conroy was a huge inspiration to millions.  He was an openly gay man who wrote a book about his journey to coming out of the closet and trying to reach out to young gay men everywhere in the hopes that they could all be comfortable and proud of who they are.  And in today’s climate, voices like that are just that much more powerful, we truly need more people like Conroy to remind us of just how far you can go when you aren’t scared to be your truest self.

And beyond his legacy as one of the great LGBTQ+ actors of our generation, Conroy was also a deeply kind soul who was adored by fans across the globe, who always went out of his way for sick kids, and was always eager and happy to dawn that cowl, be it for a role, a cameo like his Live-Action Batman appearance in “The Flash,” or just for fan interactions.

Voice actors don’t often get the respect that they deserve, but one of the few universally beloved exceptions to the rule will now and always be Kevin Conroy.

And I, for one, sincerely thank The Dark Knight, not just for embodying a beloved icon in a way no one else will ever top, but for being a genuine source of light in an often dark world.

Rest in Peace, Kevin Conroy, and thanks for being one of the greats.

[paarke]

Giants always seem to find a way to get what they want, and occasionally the gods that rule our tiny planet get together and find ways to make demands or make our lives even more difficult than they already do. This time, they had their sights set on the fashion industry. They were sick or never having anything to wear. Of course, they didn’t need clothes, but some of them had noticed the way some of the tinies wore things that enhanced their bodies when they were out dominating the world, and some of them remembered when they’d had to live a pathetic normal life and actually had to wear them. They just wanted to look good, to feel sexy, catch the eye of other giants when they’re roaming around the planet, hooking up for sex, or maybe even trying to find someone to annihilate mankind with. Then you had the guys that had fetishes, maybe they were into sportswear, or just wanted to feel what it was like to be wearing a jock again, but there was nothing. Why should all those tiny ants get to look good and feel good when they were going without? Teaming up, they decided to make a stand and on the same day the fashion capitals of the world were wiped out. Paris, London and Milan were all smoking ruins. Josh, the first former pro bodybuilder to pass 3000ft swam across the Pacific and fulfilled a life long dream of doing the whole Godzilla thing in Tokyo. It soon became clear that the world would have to cave to their demands if their was any hope of survival, and with a global effort the first clothing line for giants was launched. It wasn’t easy, the sheer size of the factories needed was mind blowing. Almost cities in themselves with thousands of people slaving away just to make one garment. It had a massive knock on effect to supply chains and shipping routes around the globe. When Josh, still tormenting Japan finally got the posing trunks he wanted they turned up on three aircraft carriers lashed together, only just about staying afloat under the massive weight. Evan, pictured here on his photoshoot in Italy, is modelling the most popular trunks, and this pair could be yours for just under $250 million. Not that it’s an issue for the giants because they won’t be picking up the bill. A bigger problem has been resources. Just 8 pairs of these had been made, 4 the same size as Evans but 4 in different colours went to a giant that’s been remodelling the Himalayas and in total used enough cloth to cover most of Northern Europe. Rapidly the world completely ran out of cotton. The UN are taking drastic measures to increase production. The Amazon has been completely deforested to free up more land and many food crops have been limited. They just hope that the giants, still making orders, will be patient until production can restart. Something they’re not known to be good at.

[mariacallous]

Last autumn, I started to learn Ukrainian. After a reporting trip to the country, I felt that on my return, I really should try to be less than totally linguistically helpless. The Ukrainian Institute in London offers group and individual lessons remotely with highly qualified teachers but, perversely perhaps, I decide I would like to learn from an instructor based in the country itself. I am recommended a friend of a friend, an internal refugee from the capital now living in Ivano-Frankivsk, western Ukraine.

Olya Makar, who manages to make her Zoom lessons fun and exacting, is carrying on her work despite many setbacks. Owing to Russian missile strikes on the country’s energy infrastructure, she has electricity only for three two-hour blocks a day – supposedly according to a schedule, but one that can shift unexpectedly – and a patchy internet connection. We reluctantly have to cancel a couple of sessions.

Like most Ukrainians I have met, she greets such problems with bracing realism; things could easily get more difficult, she says. “After each attack it’s getting worse and worse,” she says. “But we will find new ways to adapt.” I also tune into the Ukrainian Lessons podcast, in which a cheerful and charming voice belonging to teacher Anna Ohoiko guides me through the early steps of learning a language: saying hello, describing family, and eating out. The first seasons of the podcast were made in 2016, and there’s a bittersweet feeling in them of time-travelling to a different Ukraine, with Ohoiko describing carefree trips to the market and her favourite park in Kyiv – which was hit by Russian cruise missile attacks when I was in the city this October.

Then there is the language app, Duolingo, which, to my surprise, has a Ukrainian course. I imagined Duolingo Ukrainian may be something of a minority sport – but last month, the app’s data crunchers reported that it was Duolingo’s fastest-growing language of the year in the UK, with users rising by 1,254% – and that it had grown by a remarkable 2,229% in the Republic of Ireland. In the UK, there was a spike for Ukrainian learning in February and March, and then another in May, when the system finally spluttered into gear and Ukrainians began to arrive in substantial numbers, the curve in the graph a reflection of the inefficiency of Britain’s refugee scheme.

The overall trend is similar in other countries receiving refugees – Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic all saw spikes in Ukrainian learning this year. But there have been sharp rises in Japan, Vietnam and Latin America too, and “in just about every country on Earth” that uses the app, according to Cindy Blanco, one of Duolingo’s learning scientists, many of them receiving few or no refugees. Around the world, 1.3 million people started learning the language on Duolingo in 2022, she says.

In short: people across the globe have been learning Ukrainian to express their solidarity with the victims of Vladimir Putin’s aggression. At the same time, the growth of Russian has slowed, which, in relation to the rate of uplift in app users overall, amounts to a decline. In a delicious irony, Vladimir Putin himself is behind this extraordinary own goal in soft diplomacy terms, since he is indirectly responsible for the very presence of the Ukrainian language on the app: in 2014, in the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea, the US’s Peace Corps withdrew its volunteers from the country, freeing up some of the staff to pursue individual projects. It was one of them, Iryna Krupska, who worked with Duolingo to develop a Ukrainian course, as well as an English course for Ukrainian speakers.

There are many reasons to learn a language: school, university, work, relationships, ancestry, the prospect of holidays and travel. Sometimes, though, the reason is political, since language and politics walk in lock step. Ukrainian was audible in TV footage of the invasion; it was heard when President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s daily addresses were broadcast round the world. It became swiftly clear for those following the war that the language itself was at stake in the conflict. Putin’s obsession with Ukraine hangs on his false conviction that the country exists only as an appendage of Russia and has no identity of its own; many Ukrainians have been dropping Russian in favour of speaking Ukrainian as a symbol of resistance.

Ohoiko tells me she’s seen numbers for her podcast surge – by 600% on Spotify, for instance, while her Ukrainian Lessons’ Facebook group has grown from having a couple of thousand active users before February’s invasion to 10,000 now. When I confess to her that a small part of me feels Russian would be a more “useful” language to learn, more adaptable to many countries in the former Soviet Union, she tells me that one of the main reasons she set up her podcast was her certainty that Russian would enter a long-term decline, in her country and others.

“I’ve always felt that it has been a generational question,” she says. “I always hoped that when I was old and retired, and Ukraine was developing towards democratic values and European integration, that Russian wouldn’t be as strong as it used to be in Ukraine. Since independence there has been a slow move towards Ukrainian, but now it’s become much faster.”

Ukrainian is not straightforward for those who do not already speak a Slavic tongue. I myself am under no illusions: if I can say a few words and order my dinner in Ukrainian, I’ll be doing just fine. But in my case too, studying the language goes way beyond the practical. It makes me feel a connection with friends in Ukraine, and draws me towards a cultural landscape I’ve been reporting on. I feel closer to the country when I practise the language, whether it’s because of my teacher’s struggles to keep going with her work, or Ukrainian Lessons’ social media posts highlighting vocabulary that, says Anna Ohoiko, “we are hearing every day on the news and matter a lot to us now – words for air raids and missiles, different types of weapon, ways of describing the energy crisis”.

I feel small shots of triumph, too – when, for instance, I read my first poem in Ukrainian, Vasyl Symonenko’s glorious You know that you are human? (and I feel a chill when I learn he died in 1963 aged 28, after being beaten up by police). One day, though, I want to be one of those who learn in order to increase their pleasure in holidaying in a perfectly normal country – when I can raise a glass of Ukrainian red wine, червоне вино, on the peaceful shores of the Black Sea.

[azureoctahedron]

Nostalgia's Warning

At first it was a love for anything retro. Anything old-fashioned. Everyone said it was just a trend of the decade. Except it made billions at the box office, for gaming studios, for fashion moguls.

Years went by with people obsessing over old movies. Old fashion trends were made new. The yearning for the Good Old Days permeated everything - even into politics where people fearing the future tried to seed their constituents with that fear to move them into office.

We were furiously trying to rewind the clock any way we could.

We thought it'd just go away. We thought people would start thinking about the future again, but as the years wore on, even the future felt like a battered Jetsons lunchbox, its promises of technology and hope something kids dwelled on.

We would've sailed on into cold hard cynicism as the cruelty and banality of evil wore on in its trickle-down from corrupt governments and corporations if not for what happened.

People started having memories they didn't recall getting. Things they did. People they met. Sometimes it was just a nostalgic dream. Sometimes it just flashed when the sunlight catches their eye That Way like they saw in a room on a lazy Saturday when they were children. Sometimes it was things that never happened.

At first it was just water cooler conversations. Then inventors and writers and innovators began recalling things they'd built before, and improving on them with their current designs. Technology advanced faster and faster, the memories feeding into everything.

Sudden medical, technological, and even social advances were all made by people remembering things - either in trying to repeat them, or avoid them.

Memories were then correlated across entire continents - of disasters all with unusual patterns. Storms leading to volcanoes. Meteor impacts followed by electromagnetic pulses that knocked out vast areas beyond the disaster zone.

The entire world had deja vu. People felt their steps retreading the same track of years over the span of an entire decade. Questions spread. What was going on? Was someone doing this? Perhaps God has some Plan for us?

Then, during a brutal hurricane which everyone anticipated and evacuated in advance of, another wave of memories spread across the globe in dreams, flashbacks, instants between moments. Everyone said that the main trigger had been thunder and lightning, or in the case of those who saw lightning strikes, explosions.

Memories of the entire world ending in fire from sweeping clouds which weren't clouds. Barely-visible beams of incredible power. Holes in space-time where entire towns fell to never be seen again. Lives snuffed out in seconds.

We all saw the end of the world together, before it would happen.

We knew who was doing this to us now. They weren't of this world. That much was blindingly obvious in the way they destroyed our defenses in seconds.

We didn't see their faces. We only saw their supremely advanced technology, and their utterly alien nature. We only saw them rush to consume entire forests, whole mountains, and billions of lives with waves of writhing blackness. But it wasn't just blackness. It was something you couldn't see. Something not entirely of this dimension, rippling through shapes in an instant.

Millions fought. They adapted in their neverending parade of shapes and forms. Agents who looked and acted like us but were this dark ooze. We saw war rage on for years, consuming entire continents.

Their victory was far from total. Entire cities, ravaged by particle beams and interdimensional weapons, still stood defiant with leftover weapons and cobbled-together countermeasures. We fought then because we remembered them, just as we remember their invasion now.

But there was one shred of hope we had as we rushed towards our inevitable past future.

Our entire planet was repeating a cycle through the last two decades, over and over. We'd boiled like frogs, and yet we still learned what happened. We weren't completely blind, for our technology and knowledge was better for having gone through each loop.

Even if we die again over the coming battles, we will have our chance again, twenty years ago, and twenty years from now.

The end of the world was a cycle - and if there's one thing we've learned it's that cycles can be broken. Those events that didn't happen. Those lives that weren't gone now because we acted on instinct and memory.

We will try again. We will try again through every loop we go through. We will try again and again, until our enemy - powerful as they are - finally loses this war, and we are free to finally claim our future.

With nostalgia and memory as our signposts, we will find the way to victory.

--

Note: This came out of an idea I had years ago, I think from having watched Groundhog Day and had Independence Day on the brain. Something about an alien invasion that uses a timeloop to figure out how to beat the humans. Don't get total victory? Run the loop. Except like in that one Groundhog Day episode of Star Trek TNG, it's not a perfect loop. Each one is unique, and leaves an echo.

Except, just 2 days ago, I had this idea again from the Eva brainrot. The premise of the Neon Genesis Evangelion Rebuilds involved time loops, the pieces of which, moved into the next loop.

And then I realized I had the perfect hook to make this work: our current worldwide obsession with retro, especially in movies and games.

It's almost like we know something about the past our conscious minds hasn't grasped.

[sublimeobservationarcade]

The Doctrine Of Discovery

In 1493, God’s official head honcho on Earth, released a Papal decree, which was called The Doctrine of Discovery. This was the green light from the Pope that stealing, killing, and enslaving non-Christians was okey dokey. That explorers and settlers could do whatever they thought necessary to conquer and colonise the new world. Christopher Colombus had just discovered the Americas the year before and was wanting the OK from on high. Importantly this was prior to the split between Protestants and Catholics. This was the undisputed stamp of approval from the highest authority in the European realm. “The 1493 Papal decree aimed to justify Christian European explorers’ claims on land and waterways they allegedly discovered, and promote Christian domination and superiority, and has been applied in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. If an explorer proclaims to have discovered the land in the name of a Christian European monarch, plants a flag in its soil, and reports his “discovery” to the European rulers and returns to occupy it, the land is now his, even if someone else was there first. Should the original occupants insist on claiming that the land is theirs, the “discoverer” can label the occupants’ way of being on the land inadequate according to European standards. This ideology supported the dehumanization of those living on the land and their dispossession, murder, and forced assimilation. The Doctrine fueled white supremacy insofar as white European settlers claimed they were instruments of divine design and possessed cultural superiority.” - (https://upstanderproject.org/learn/guides-and-resources/first-light/doctrine-of-discovery#:~:text=The1493Papaldecreeaimed,NewZealandandtheAmericas.)    Young Black Dog, Osage, from the American Indian Chiefs series (N2) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands by Allen & Ginter is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Racism’s Religious Doctrine

This is where racism holds its most sacred design. It is out of this holy authority that white supremacists still believe that they have the right to do bad things to people other than their own kind. And people say that religion is harmless and that Christianity is a good thing. The Catholic Church took 500 years to repudiate this decree. “Nearly 500 years after papal decrees were used to rationalize Europe's colonial conquests, the Vatican repudiated those decrees on Thursday, saying the "Doctrine of Discovery" that was used to justify snuffing out Indigenous people's culture and livelihoods is not part of the Catholic faith.” - (https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167056438/vatican-doctrine-of-discovery-colonialism-indigenous) Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Church’s Appalling Record

I do not know any other organisation or entity, which has done so many God awful things and still carries on unashamedly. Hundreds of thousands of children have been sexually abused by paedophile priests, brothers, educators, and ministers of religion around the globe. Still, the Church goes on in its many forms. Millions of illegitimate babies have been stolen, given away and sold by representatives of churches around the world. Still, it is business as usual for the Church. God knows how many women have been sexually abused, secretly married, and treated disrespectfully by Catholic priests and their kind across the globe. No matter, the Church keeps on pretending it is a moral arbiter internationally. This is the insane world we live in. The death toll from the Doctrine of Discovery would be in the billions! Religion & Racism The irrationality of religious belief, of faith, is the equal of the irrationality of racism and white supremacy. The two are bosom buddies in fact. You cannot separate these twisted branches, as they are both from the same tree. The Ku Klux Klan was first and foremost a religious organisation. These hooded creeps saw themselves as Knights of a holy order, like crusaders. They despised blacks, Asians, Mexicans, Jews, and Catholics – as they were a Protestant brotherhood. White, Anglo Saxon men who hid their faces like the cowards they truly were. These foul folk lynched and burnt blacks all over America. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford funded a movie industry which celebrated the Klan early in the 20C. America saw itself as a superpower for white Protestants for much of its history. It began by killing Indians and stealing their land and resources. It worked the land by enslaving Africans imported for the purpose. It built its economy on the back of this massive industrialised slavery. It was not just the south involved in this, as the banks everywhere bought and sold bonds based on slavery. Slavery funded the technology essential to the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. Nobody talks about this these days, as it has been conveniently forgotten. “As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.” “ - (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html) Photo by Clement Eastwood on Pexels.com Slavery & Racism Does anyone really think that you can invade, murder, steal, and enslave for centuries and then when you stop everything will be hunky dory? America fought a Civil War over this issue and it still took another seven decades for peonage slavery in the south to cease in 1942. This stuff is not in the distant past. The exploitation continues to this day via the GOP and its gerrymanders disenfranchising African Americans. The Republican Party has hung onto power in the southern states via political trickery and chicanery. Trump supporters believe that they are entitled to rule America via this Doctrine of Discovery. Photo by Life Matters on Pexels.com White Christian Nationalists Many of these white Christian nationalists believe they are more American than anybody else. Schools in the south were not desegregated racially until the 1970s and 1980s. They may have lost the Civil War militarily but many observers think that they have ended up with the better bargain ever since. The electoral college system still rewards them despite the fact they have less Americans living in their red states. Trump has never received more votes in the Presidential race than his opponent. Yet he won the 2016 election. The GOP has clung onto power via this unfair voting system in many instances. Trump, like many white Americans, does not like to lose. He and they will do whatever it takes to win or retain power. The rule of law is not something they abide by unless they are holding the whip handle. Photo by Maurício Mascaro on Pexels.com Guns & Racists There are way too many guns in America. Many of the gun manufacturers are based in the south. Big business controls Congress and thus the nation is hamstrung over gun deaths. There is a massacre of children just about every week in the US. Big business has bought the Congressmen and women and the Senate. White Christian nationalists support the existing lax gun laws. Indeed, many of them are armed to the teeth themselves. A majority of ordinary Americans support much more stringent gun laws but nothing ever changes on this score. Guns and racism and religious intolerance toward Jews are a real problem in America. The Doctrine of Discovery sits in the bottom drawer of white Christian nationalists. They say that you can never take back bad things. Mass genocide of billions of human beings may fall into that category. In his books The End of White Christian America and White Too Long, Robert P Jones has steadily built the argument that this movement is animated by shifting demographics. He points out that in 2008, when Barack Obama, the first Black president, was elected, 54% of Americans identified as white and Christian. By the end of Obama’s second term, that share had fallen to 47%. Today it is 42%. “It’s just a continued slide,” says Jones, 55, sitting at his desk at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), where he is founder and president, in downtown Washington. “Most importantly, moving from majority to decisively non-majority white and Christian has set off a kind of ‘freak out’ moment among many white Christians.” In The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, effectively the third book in an unofficial trilogy, Jones traces the roots of Trumpism back more than 500 years. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.  ©MidasWord Photo by Thgusstavo Santana on Pexels.com Read the full article

[nj-ayuk1]

NJ Ayuk on How Africa Can Find a Balance for Its Energy Future

As the world continues to weigh its demands for energy against the creeping realities of man-made climate change, Africa has been thrust into a precarious situation, according to energy expert NJ Ayuk. 

Across the globe, wealthy nations are constantly devouring more fossil fuels like coal and oil while simultaneously pushing incentives to make renewable options more affordable and enticing. However, many countries in Africa are struggling to keep the lights on.

The question before NJ Ayuk, the most prominent energy lawyer on the continent and founder of the globally recognized Centurion Law Group, is how to balance energy needs for millions of Africans who currently lack access to electricity or rely on spotty infrastructure against the global outcry for cleaner options.

The gravity of the situation isn’t lost on him. 

“We live in a world where climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our generation and our time,” said NJ Ayuk, who also serves as executive chairman of the African Energy Chamber. I think our challenge would have to be building climate change and [fighting] energy poverty at the same time.”

Because of the differences in access and natural resources, the debate around energy policies and production in Africa will necessarily be different from places like the United States and Europe, he said. But that doesn’t mean that Africa should disregard the environmental impact of fossil fuels.

“I think there is a very Western misconception about the needs of everyday people in Africa,” NJ Ayuk explained. “In the West, the dialogue can sound like, ‘We want to save the planet, we want to save the planet’ — which, of course, we all want to do. But climate change and energy poverty are two sides of the same coin. We have to do both. We have to end energy poverty while also moving forward with technology and policies that can ensure that we’re moving in the right direction for sustainability.”

The good news, NJ Ayuk said, is that many countries in Africa have an opportunity to address multiple needs at once. He promotes policies that not only increase access to energy across the continent, but also address the broader social good at the same time. 

“We don’t need simply an energy transition that brings more power to more people,” he said. “It has to be a just energy transition, where we see African women being part of that.”

The focus on African women is crucial for development, according to NJ Ayuk. Centering women is central to his efforts to raise as many Africans out of poverty as possible. Recent studies have shown that when women work and receive equal wages, their families enjoy more significant benefits. 

Carving out a space for women in the energy industry also serves as a way to engage more of the population and inspire the next generation of African workers, NJ Ayuk said. 

“Because wherever we come from, whether it is oil or natural gas, African women have been the last hire. They've been kept behind. And they have not really had opportunities to really drive new things. A lot of financing that is going in, even in the clean energy industry, African women are still receiving less than 2% of that, and nobody's really raising that rate. We are always hush-hush about that.” 

When women have greater access to capital, they become a political force — one that may have the power to reshape governance in a way that directly benefits families, he added. He pointed to the United States as part of his inspiration. 

“What I want to see in Africa, and what I learned in my American sojourn, is to really look at Africa and say, ‘Why do we have about 10 to 15 states without sexual harassment laws that would really protect women at work?’ Because we've just been stuck on the environmental issue only. We’re not looking at the social and the governance aspects,” he said. 

“We’re not really seeing this social change, so how can we be that change that we want to see?” he added. “When you really look at it, and you look at where we are going, people are saying, ‘Let’s abandon natural gas and just focus on transitioning to renewables.’ But what are you going to transition from? From the dark to the dark? You need to have something, then you transition. Africa's greenhouse gas emissions are 2.73% [of the global total]. They're not even up to 3%. So for places like Europe or the United States that are somewhere in the 20s or the 30s, they need to decarbonize and they need to decarbonize fast. And Africa needs to be given a chance to industrialize. But Africa needs to get its act together. We need to cut corruption and cut out mismanagement. That’s what I’m focused on.”

[sea-moon-star]

THE PERILLA LEAVES SCANDAL || KTH

Pairing: Kim Taehyung x reader

Genre: Fluff, slight angst

WC: 1k

Summary: Inspired by the MBTI Lab episode of BTS, wherein Tae makes it clear that he's ANTI perilla leaves & absolutely wouldn't accept his S.O. peeling leaves for his friend, as it's far too romantic & intimate a gesture. And he's as possessive & jealous as it gets (not in a toxic way ofc, this is BTS we're talking about. They're gentlemen in the truest sense). Also featuring the Wooga Squad & mentions of Our Beloved Summer!! 🌊🌙⭐️

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

Y/N's POV

I couldn't believe my luck, I'd been in love with Kim Taehyung since I was a starry eyed teenager and as much as every song, fanfic and dream of mine revolved around him... I'd never once imagined that we'd actually meet in person, forget the fact that we'd end up dating. He was THE Kim Taehyung, member of the biggest musical act in the world, winner of handsomest face in the world and the bias of millions of people across the globe. And somehow, I'd found my way to him and he'd found his path to me. I worked in the k-drama industry as a writer and all it had taken was him singing an OST for my show, one which was led by one of his best friends - Choi Woosik to serve as our meet cute.

He'd come on set multiples times- to meet his friend, to watch us incorporate the song into the show, sometimes to suggest storylines for the show itself. But by the end as the wrap party came near, he came up to me and made it clear that he was just finding excuses to be on set so he could spend more time with me. And just like that, I happened to show him, the 4 o clock tattoo I'd had on my flesh, since I was in university. It was his song, it was proof that I'd fallen in love with him way before he'd fallen for me. And just like that, we began our lives together.

Tae's POV

I'd just begun dating Y/N but it felt like I'd known her a lifetime. And it felt so unfair that she had years to get to know me but I'd met her only so recently. I'd taken it up to spend all my free time with her so I could catch up on knowing more about her life, the same way in which she knew everything about mine. Ofcourse, that meant my friends and others began to complain that I'd all but forgotten them because I had a girlfriend now. So to appease them, I decided that this weekend I'd have a joint dinner with the Wooga squad and her. It seemed like a safe and easy bet for her to meet them before she met the members or anyone else as she already knew Wooshik and was acquainted with the television industry.

I was far more worried she'd faint the moment one of the Bangtan members walked in, she was a huge army of us and I wasn't certain she was still ready to face them one on one outside of a concert setting. It amused me to no end, seeing how flustered she got around them even though her work routinely involved meeting celebrities. It just showed how this professional and calm headed 20 something, turned to a decade younger version of herself the moment she thought of BTS. But that was an exception, apart from that she amazed me at how she stayed calm in any situation. I'd always worried about how someone would fit into the glamour and yet pressures my lifestyle provided but halfway through the meal as the 6 of us sat down and ate grilled meat and drank baekju, I knew she was born for it.

It was like she's fit right in without any effort at all. But just as I was happy about how comfortable she was with everyone, I bit my tongue wondering if I'd spoken far too soon. Maybe it was far too cozy and I shouldn't have let it get this far, atleast that's what I thought to myself as I saw her help Seojoon pick up and seperate the perilla leaves on his dish when he struggled with it. It was probably the fact that I was drunk but something about that set me off.

I got up from the table and left the place, with the door banging behind me without bothering to give any explanation even as they asked me for the same. I went out for a breath of fresh air to cool myself down, as minutes she followed. She tried to get me to tell her what was wrong even as I insisted I wanted to be left alone. But she kept pushing and I couldn't stop myself anymore.

I cornered her against the wall, our eyes gazing into each other's ferociously, my hands pinning her from both sides keeping her from escaping as I growled softly under my breath and said, "You really don't know what's wrong? I'm your boyfriend, you do remember that right? Or do you need reminding? Me. Not the other members of bangtan that you blush over every time a new music video drops and certainly not any of my hyungs in there who you're happily serving drinks and peeling perilla leaves for. They can get their own bloody girlfriends but you're mine, you wanna be all kind and helpful then do it for me. Pick me, choose me and love me. Not them. I can't tell you how my blood boils when I see you being that close to someone else. I know that neither of them nor you would ever betray me but still... You don't know how amazing you are. It would be so easy to get swayed, so please just downplay your charms and keep them close to your heart. For me? Please? I can't bear the thought of losing you. I thought I had everything I ever wanted with my career and family but until I met you, I didn't know what I was missing. And now that I have you, I can't imagine life without you. Am I making any sense at all?"

Y/N's POV

I wanted to be mad at him, so badly for creating such a scene. But there was something about the way his pout made my heart ache, that all I wanted was to see his boxy smile return to his face. He was jealous, the man who could have anyone in the universe wanted me and was insecure about our relationship? I laughed despite myself, unable to process how this was happening. I couldn't be angry at him, I loved him too much to not give in.

So I cupped his face with my palms, steadily staring at him at eye level as I said firmly, "Taehyung, you are the love of my life. You have been for more than a decade. And I promise, nothing and no one could ever come in the way of that. I hated the color green, I didn't know a single thing about art galleries, I had never heard good jazz music but I now that's changed. And it's all because of you. I've always wanted to go to a BTS concert, always wanted someone who'd not take me for granted and prioritise me, I always wanted a house full of children but I thought all of that was impossible until I met you. So do I have to keep going or do you understand how much I love you? And why me pouring a drink or peeling perilla leaves is an absolute non issue?"

He nodded and sighed in relief as leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead, leaving me weak in my knees. Once again, I couldn't believe his duality, the fact that he was capable of going from that angry to upset to this soft and caring in a split second. And wrapped my hand around his waist and pulled him close as smiled and walked back into the restaurant, together- the perilla leaves scandal left behind us.

THE END. 🌊🌙⭐️

[toomanystoriessolittletime]

Distraction

Summary: Meeting a single Dad on the plane back to the states was maybe just the distraction you needed to get over your fear of flying.

Pairing: Frankie Morales x F!reader

Wordcount: 3k

Warnings: reader is afraid of flying, one panic attack

A/N: First time writing for Frankie. I don’t know about fear of flying or about babies, so of course I decided to write about both 🙈 Let me know if you like it 😂

Masterlist

taglist in reblog

Maybe it was time to find a new job. A job that didn’t require traveling to other continents at least once a year. You could be a barista. Or… any work that would require you staying on the ground where you belonged. Not in a tiny capsule that traveled way too fast and way too high.

You felt anxious throughout the whole day when you knew you had to go on a plane. It wasn’t even the height you were scared of. You couldn’t describe it. You always were very independent. Maybe it was the fact that you had to trust a stranger not to fuck up and make the plane crash. You didn’t know who would be the pilot. Of course, you knew that they were all trained professionals, they have to be but… ugh. Overthinking. You were overthinking again. Handing the stewardess your boarding pass she smiled kindly at you and you tried to smile back before you sighed and slowly walked down towards the plane.

As soon as your nose smelled the engine (yes you could smell it) you felt like your stomach wouldn’t make it. Closing your eyes you breathed in deep, trying to remember that millions of people did this every day. Opening your eyes you looked at the plane door where a man was just climbing in, a baseball cap on his head. He was carrying a baby that was sleeping on his shoulder as if nothing else mattered. You smiled softly. If a baby could do it, you could too.

Nope. No you couldn’t.

You felt your throat getting dryer the further you walked into the plane in search of your seat. You never sat at the window, always in the middle. You read that it was more safe once. When you arrived in the row you would be sitting you couldn’t help but smile, finding the man with the baby sitting on the window seat, the baby carrier in the middle seat. He looked up and you were met with warm brown eyes. His hand was on the baby’s back, almost covering it entirely. He gave you a tired smile and you nodded.

“Hi,” you whispered, not wanting to wake the baby.

“Hey,” he nodded quietly. You took your coat off, putting it in the cabinet over the seat, and sat down. You intended to work on your way back to the states so you brought your laptop. Pushing your bag under your seat you got out your phone, putting it in flight mode before you secured the seat belt. People were still coming into the plane and you felt yourself getting more nervous. Sucking your bottom lip in, you took out the card with the safety instructions in front of your seat, reading it carefully. Your assigned security exit was just two rows behind that was good to know. You were unaware of the man sitting two seats next to you watching you. You crossed your legs, your sweaty hands on your thigh when they closed the doors. You turned your head as you heard the man next to you mumble in Spanish and noticed that the baby had woken up and was now looking at you with big eyes. She was still lying against the man’s chest, her head just under his chin, his lips kissing her head. You looked at him then, noticing how attractive he was, his eyes closed as he gently rubbed circles on the baby’s back. His base cap sat deep on his head, dark wild curls underneath that peaked out. You never thought a mustache could be attractive but maybe he was the exception.

People were finally settled in their seats and you felt the plane move as the announcement from the boarding crew came for the safety instructions. You heard a tiny whimper and looked at the man. The baby was clearly not happy with the loud voices from the speaker. You wondered why he was alone on a plane on a seven-hour flight back to the states with a baby that couldn’t be much older than maybe four months. A noise made you jump and he looked at you.

“Sorry,” you mumbled embarrassed.

“First flight?” he asked. You shook your head.

“I wish it was. That wouldn’t make me being scared so embarrassing,” you sighed, your eyes wandering between him and the baby on his chest. He smiled a little.

“You can’t choose your fears,” he shrugged. He was right you couldn’t.

“I wish I could though. I feel like I’m gonna faint every time I have to fly.”

He looked at you before he began to open a bag that was laying in the baby carrier.

“You probably already heard all kinds of solutions for going over your fear but as a pilot let me assure you, that it’s perfectly safe.” He seemed to have found what he was searching for, a baby bottle with milk in his hands.

“You’re a pilot?” you asked fascinated.

“Was. Military. But can’t with this one needing me around,” he kissed the baby’s head.

You smiled. “She’s adorable.”

“She’s my whole world,” he put her in the crook of his left arm, his right hand checking the bottle.

“Gotta make sure the entire plane doesn’t hate me for bringing you on here, baby girl,” he said quietly. She looked up at him with big eyes, her little arms going up as he brought the bottle in her line of view and you chuckled. He looked at you, giving you a soft smile.

“It’s our second flight but she’s a trooper,” he explained. “Feeding her during take-off and landing helps with the ear pressure,” he explained.

“Are we taking off already?” you asked, feeling the nervous flutter inside your belly.

“I can talk you through it, if you want to?” he offered as he brought the bottle down and the baby began to suck eagerly just when the plane seemed to be in starting position.

“I don’t want to bother you,” you shook your head.

“I wouldn’t have offered, if it would bother me,” there it was again, that shy smile that made your heart seem to stop for a second.

“Okay. Thank you…”

“Frankie,” he offered.

“Thank you, Frankie,” you smiled.

You still felt nervous after an hour in the air but now you weren’t sure if it was the flight or the man sitting next to you. Finding an attractive and, as you found out, single Dad that looked at his baby girl like it was his whole world, didn’t help to settle your nerves or ovaries. But you would take this kind of nervousness in a heart beat instead of your fear of flying. He had talked you through every little step on what the pilot would be doing. It may vary from flying a helicopter as he did, but the steps were the same. He had squeezed your hand that was grabbing the seat like a lifeline an hour ago. You swore you could still feel the warmth of his hand.

Sofia, the 3 ½-month-old girl that was his daughter was now laying in the baby carrier in the middle seat, her hand squeezing your finger as she slept. Every thought of working on your project was gone as you looked down at the sleeping baby.

“She’s got a pretty hard grasp,” you said looking down at her.

“Yeah. She’s so big already. I can’t believe it,” Frankie said. You looked up, seeing him lift his hat, his hand running through his hair before he put his cap back on. You smiled at him.

“What brought you over here?” you asked. He made a face.

“One of my military friends was wounded.”

“Oh. Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s fine. Thank you for asking.”

“I wish I had friends like that. Flying for me over the globe in a heartbeat,” you sighed, trying to overplay the sadness in your face.

“Oh I’m sure you have someone,” he mused.

“I used to. But I moved across the country after my father died and I never really got settled in where I live now if that makes sense?”

“Well, why don’t you hang out with me… uh us?” Frankie suggested. You looked up at him.

“Careful with an offer like that. I might just say yes to hang out with Sofia,” you teased. As if she could hear you, she squeezed your finger and you just about melted.

“She’s great to hang out with, I’ll give her that,” Frankie said “But can she hold an hour-long conversation with a beautiful woman?”

You looked up then, seeing him look at you and you felt your cheeks getting warm.

“Guess I’ll have to talk to you until she can, huh?” you teased.

“Guess so,” he shrugged, a small smirk on his lips.

Frankie had just left to use the bathroom, leaving Sofia under your watchful eyes when her eyes blinked open. She seemed to look for her Dad until she looked at you. You could see her small lips pouting, her face frowning and your heart broke before she had even whimpered for the first time. Carefully you took her out of the baby carrier, hoping Frankie would be okay with you taking her out and took her into your arms. She was fully crying now.

“Shh…” you mumbled, propping her up so she was lying in the crook of your arm.

“Dad’s gonna be here any minute now, sweet Sofia,” you said soothingly. She didn’t stop. Sighing you changed so she was with her head on your shoulder as you got up from your seat. Maybe taking a little walk with her would help. You run your hand over her back like you had seen Frankie did before as you walked down the aisle and her cries got quieter until they stopped when you were close to the cockpit.

“There you go. You just wanted to see something different, huh, baby girl?” you asked whispering soothingly.

“Where’s your papa? What’s taking him so long?” you ask, beginning to walk back towards the seat. Frankie’s wasn’t back so you took Sofia down to the other side of the plane. You giggled as you found Sofia grab your hair and pulling lightly.

“Hey… Do you do that with your Dad’s hair too?” you asked, knowing you wouldn’t get an answer. You pulled her from your shoulder and she looked at you with big eyes as you put her in your arm so she could look up at you. Passing an older lady you smiled.

“She looks just like you,” the woman smiled softly as she looked down at Sofia who was still looking at you. You felt your cheeks getting warm again.

“Oh... I’m not…” you began but she only nodded at you and walked back to her seat. Confused you walked further until you saw Frankie walking towards you. He had an unreadable expression on his face as he looked at you and you hoped you didn’t overstep.

“I’m sorry. She was crying and…”

“She likes you,” he said, his hand brushing over her cheek and she smiled, clearly noticing her Dad was back.

“You want her back?” you ask, secretly hoping he didn’t.

“I think she looks very comfortable where she is,” he said. You looked up, finding him looking at you. He was taller than you but he was close. So close. You didn’t notice the spot on his jaw that was beard free before and you found yourself wanting to kiss him there. Kiss him everywhere. You gulped, looking down again.

“Let’s get back to our seat, huh, little lady?” you asked and walked back.

Sofia was sleeping again and you were trying to read your book. And not think about the man sitting two seats next to you. You looked at him from the side and found him always already looking at you. You felt like a teenager. You had to smile to yourself, thinking that must have been the longest date you had ever been on. You chuckled to yourself which made Frankie look at you, an eyebrow raised. You just shook your head embarrassed.

“I was thinking…” he began.

“Yes?” you asked.

“Can I invite you for a drink?”

You blinked at him, sucking your bottom lip in. You were about to answer when the whole plane shook with a turbulence and you sucked your breath in harshly. For a moment you had forgotten where you were.

“Shit…” you whispered to yourself, leaning with your head against the seat, closing your eyes, while your fingernails grabbed into the seat. The plane shook again and you breathed in and out to control your rising panic.

“Hey…” you felt someone grab your hand. You were too scared to open your eyes.

“It’s just some minor turbulence. We gonna be out of it in no time,” it was Frankie. He felt how your hand was shaking and didn’t let go.

“Just breathe. Can you open your eyes for me?” he asked. You shook your head, squeezing his hand harder.

“I know you can, look at me Hermosa,” you could sense that he was closer. Turning your head towards his side you opened your eyes.

“There you are, now breathe with me,” he looked at you and you got lost in his eyes as he breathed with you and you felt yourself calm down.

“That’s better. You made it,” he smiled. He was still holding your hand.

“Thank you, Frankie,” you said quietly. He leaned down, kissing the back of your hand he was still holding and you shivered when his lips connected with your skin.

“You’re very welcome,” he mumbled.

He didn’t let your hand go until Sofia woke up and demanded very loudly for her bottle.

It was you who gave Sofia her bottle as the plane landed and it made you forget about your fear of flying. Frankie watched you the whole time and it made your heart flutter. You wanted this. Only 7 hours ago you were on another continent and alone and now you had the baby of a man you met on a plane in your arms you didn’t want to let go.

You never even thought about children. There never was someone you could imagine having children with. It was always you. Just you.

But Frankie had shown you more attention in the last hours than any other person ever since your father died. You were lonely, you knew that. But you had made your peace with it. You were enough. But maybe you didn’t have to be just enough. Maybe you wanted to be more. Maybe Frankie wanted to be more.

The plane stopped and you smiled sadly down at Sofia in your arms. Slowly you put her in the baby carrier and she wasn’t happy about it. You almost cried.

“Come on you were so good the whole time…” Frankie whined and you giggled. He looked at you with a playful pout.

“I think she misses you already,” he said and you sighed.

“I’ll miss her too,” you smiled down at her, your hand brushing over her head and she took hold of one of your fingers again, making you chuckle.

You helped let Frankie out to get his stuff first, staying seated with Sofia. He gave you your coat and you reached for your bag under the seat before you got out of your seat. He had a backpack on and reached for the baby carrier. You were the last people on the plane. You waited until he had everything before you slowly walked towards the exit of the plane. Thanking the stewardess who was standing near the cockpit with a smile you got out of the plane, thankful to finally be on solid ground. You were about to turn around to look where Frankie was when you felt him grab your hand, squeezing it once. There it was, the nervous flutter in your belly again as you looked up at him and saw his small smile.

You were standing together waiting for your suitcase. Frankie had put Sofia in her stroller where she was sleeping peacefully. He already had his suitcase and was waiting for you.

“So…” you began, looking at him. He turned, now facing you fully.

“So?” he asked, a teasing smile on his lips.

“I was wondering about that drink you offered?” you asked. He nodded.

“How would you feel about dinner on Saturday? I’ll come and visit you in the big city?” he smiled. You felt your heart almost jumping out of your chest. You couldn’t wait.

“What about Sofia?” you asked.

“My friend can watch her. He owes me and… I want to be alone with you,” he stepped closer and you sucked your bottom lip in as you looked up.

“It’s only an hour drive, please say yes…” he whispered.

“Yes,” you breathed.

“Great. You have to get a table I have no idea what’s good over there. I’m more of a country guy…” he brought his hand up, cupping your cheek and you leaned into his touch.

“How about I cook dinner?” you offered, “So we truly are alone,” you clarified.

He leaned down, his lips brushing over yours softly and you closed your eyes, your hand clutching his soft shirt. He leaned his forehead against yours when he parted from your lips, breathing deeply.

“Yeah. Alone. I like to be alone with you,” he whispered, his nose brushing over yours. You nodded before you took a step back.

“Saturday?” you asked as you walked out.

“Saturday,” he replied and kissed you again.

[mitsukui]

cherry explosion | b.w.

Pairing: Bill Weasley x female reader.

Summary:  unexpectedly, Bill finds a way to give you the best New Year’s Eve you have ever had.

Word Count: 1,7k.

Warnings: smut! Oral sex (female receiving). Mentions of alcohol, drinking, and one-night stands ending badly.

Disclaimer: none of the pictures used in the edit below belong to me; I simply put them together.

A/N: sending all of my love to those who are spending their New Year’s Eve by themselves! Dear @maddi-sun18​, thank you so much for the request, and I hope this can bring you some comfort. Please, leave me some feedback if you feel like it! My askbox is open for your opinions, thoughts and requests. Thank you so much for your time and attention ❤

Masterlist!

Sometimes, it was so easy to read men. Their actions were so predictable, and they never failed to act exactly the same as the ones who had been there previously.

You wondered if there was some sort of training for young gentlemen on how to pick up girls at hotel bars. There seemed to be four steps for a man to follow in order to get lucky: one – exchange looks with the chosen pretty girl; two – lure the prey by offering her a fizzy and fruity drink; three – make small conversation, and say she is different from any other girl in the room; and, finally, four – get into her panties.

All of that was bullshit, and you would never fall for it.

And, perhaps, that was why you panicked a bit when a painfully attractive man approached you in a different way.

“Hey.” He shot you a small, yet, charming smile. “Do you mind if I sit here? If I listen to Patricia Rakepick talking about her adventures in Japan for one more bit, I might die.”

Both of you were taking part in an international conference on Curse-Breaking. The event had gathered wizards and witches from all around the globe, which caused Gringotts to rent a few areas on a muggle hotel in London for it. Although it was a knotty task for so many people to act as if they had no magical powers rushing through their veins, every participant seemed to be doing well on their own.

His presence there was perfectly reasonable, once he was a Curse-Breaker himself. Yours, however, was a bit questionable. You, as a columnist for the Daily Prophet, had been asked to cover the event, and could not be any less excited about it.

It was New Year’s Eve. All you wanted to do was go home to your family and friends.

While many people were not shy on showing their personal preference for Christmas, you were crazy about New Year’s Eve. The upcoming novel 365 days for you to live as if they were your last, the fancy dresses you always insisted on wearing, the taste of fizzy and fruity drinks lingering in your mouth until January 1st – all of that meant something to you, as brainless as it sounded.

Your peevish ways were soon destroyed by his sudden presence and polite attitudes. After you agreed with his company, it did not take long until you were laughing about the event and the people attending it.

As a matter of fact, Curse-Breakers were rather odd and monotonous people. The man with fiery, long hair seemed to be a clear exception to them, with his exotic fang earring, and his dragonhide boots. He also was to be the only good-looking one in that crowded bar, in that stupidly sophisticated hotel.

He was surprising you second by second. Breaking every single trait of loathing you had piled up for men, due to failed relationships and other women’s reports, he was showing himself as a funny and respectful man.

Between a few drinks, you had talked about his insanely big family, your repetitive daily life, his experiences in Egypt, and how you accidently had Apparated in Colombia once, being left without any knowledge of Spanish.

There was something sweet and intoxicating about him; about the way he asked to hold your hand while you were talking, and about the way he confessed and apologized for being unable to stop staring at your lips and wondering what they felt like.

“They probably taste like cherries now.” You leaned in and whispered, the dizzy sensation caused by your Cherry Bomb drink starting to tingle your insides. In a bold movement, you took your cocktail glass towards him. With your other hand, you touched his chin, and pushed it down a bit, forcing his mouth to part open. Your gaze transformed itself into a flirty one, and you told him to sip your drink so he could get a better grasp on what you tasted like.

It did not take long for you to crash your lips against his after that. You felt comfortable doing exactly what you were doing. You felt like you were in command of your own feelings. There was no stupid game of prey and hunter. There was no lie being told so one would get lucky.

At that moment, there were only two adults, being nice to each other and understanding their desires fully.

Unlike so many other men, he had respected you and, in the midst of slightly drunken kisses and touches, he kept on trying to be certain you were okay and you really wanted that.

Bill was briefly tipsy as well, his tongue tasting like the scotch he had earlier. The mixture between your cherry-like taste and his own made you feel like you were in heaven, although his kisses were growing to be hungry and more desperate.

Half an hour later, your hair spread across the pillow he was temporarily using for sleeping purposes. Your dress had been lifted up until your stomach, and your underwear was now nowhere to be found.

His soft hands roamed around your inner thighs as his tongue lapped your juices. Surprisingly, he was terrific at that, and you suspected you would crave more once he was done.

As he gave short licks to your clit and his tongue ran around your folds, two of his fingers were inserted in you. You arched your back, and reached out for his hair. You allowed your own fingers to tug delicately on his locks, his name leaving your lips religiously. He kept on pumping in and out of you, the pressure on your soft spot increasing each time.

The burning knot in your loins became tighter, and he adored how you clenched your walls around him so strongly. You were a mumbling, breathy mess, but he was entirely mesmerized by the sight, and the intimacy you were sharing.

Almost as if destiny was playing a prank on you, when you hit your first orgasm, fireworks started exploding outside the window of his hotel room. You squeezed your eyes shut, and cried out in the greatest pleasure you had ever felt in your entire life.

Slurping and sinful noises were produced as you came back from your high, still moaning. Your entire body trembled violently, but his big hands soothed your delicious torture.

He looked at you and chuckled quietly, your fluids still hanging on his lips, making them even more kissable than before. You were stunning in his eyes, and he feared not being able to let you go after the morning would come.

“Happy New Year, darling.”

January 1st came as softly and quietly as it possibly could. You dozed off in his arms after you spent a bit watching the fireworks show, and talking as well. The fact he was a grown man, but still could hold a decent conversation for so long, without any visible struggles was amusing.

You woke up to the next morning weak daylight peeking through the curtains and tickling your cheeks. Something inside your chest felt amazing. Flashes of the previous night appeared in your mind, and you could not hold a smile back. Funny enough, the taste of your Cherry Bomb drink still lingered faintly on your tongue.

However, all of your peace of mind vanished in the very instant you realized you had woken up by yourself. Waves of embarrassment and regret crashed in your heart, and you felt ridiculous for falling for all of the sweet nothings that had escaped his lips.

“Yes, that would be all. Yes. Room 716. Thank you very much.”

His enchanting voice shattered your own trance into a million pieces, and his bare footsteps announced he was returning to the same spot where you were at. You pulled the white sheets up and covered your naked torso, still unsure of how you would have to deal with the rising tension of the situation.

He soon captured the image of you being up and a glorious grin painted his lips. “Good morning.” His lower body was covered by a pair of dark jeans, which seemed to embrace his existence perfectly well, despite being different from the visual image he displayed last night. How was it possible for someone to look that good early in the morning? Or was it really early? What time was it? What did happen after the fireworks? With a timid voice, you wished him a good morning, too, but remained silent afterwards. It was difficult for you to ponder your next actions.

“So, the room service guys will be here shortly. I took the freedom to order us some breakfast.” His eyes gleamed with a pure kindness as the words slipped out of his lips. “I hope you fancy some orange juice in the morning.” He was offering you nothing but soft spoken words, and thoughtful actions

What was that?!

“B-Breakfast?” You repeated the key word of the whole conversation in surprise. No one had ever prepared, or even ordered, you breakfast after a night of sex and lust.

“Yeah.” Bill was quick to notice your tone of surprise and, somehow, it was funny to him. A girl like you, whom had shown him nothing but a great personality so far, should be used to being pampered like that. “Did you think for one second that I’d just eat you out like that, and leave you hanging the next morning?”

Honestly? Yes. You did think of that. You feared you would be tricked once more. One more disappointment to be added to your personal archive. One more reason to continue living your life despising men.

His arms were crossed against his chest and he shook his head, a dismissive, short laugh echoing through the room. “I would be mental if I ever did that. In a few hours, you managed to wow me.”

He made his way to the bed, and his body sank down on the mattress, being placed right next to yours. Truth being told, without the alcohol, you felt quite shy being that close to such a handsome man. “And, if you allow me to, I want to continue seeing you. I want to get to know more of you.”

A snuggly heat erupted in you, and it was a novel sensation for you. Perhaps, not all men had those devilish ways in them.

“I’m terribly sorry, but I really feel like kissing you right now. But, given your astonished behaviors, I’m not sure if you’d enjoy that. What do you tell me?”

Perhaps, this new year would not be so terrible.

[mandoalorian]

I Believe In Love [Max Lord x F!Reader] - Epilogue

Summary: When you find your calling to leave Themyscira, you venture out to the World of Man with intentions of helping and healing a very specific person’s relationship with his son. You’ve heard his voice before, but only in dreams. You’ve felt his pain and anguish and you’ve never been able to relate to anything more. But things don’t come easy for you, and they certainly don’t come easy for him either. [This series contains spoilers for WW84 and is my interpretation of what happens after the movie ends].

Warnings: the long awaited epilogue. food mention, alcohol mention, pregnancy mention and FEELS.

Word Count: 2000>

REBLOGS APPRECIATED.

Masterlist

Previous - Epilogue - The End.

July 7th, 1985 (One year later).

So much had happened in the space of a year. You’d gone from being an Amazonian Goddess, haunted by the voice of a man from a far off world, to destroying the God of Lies for good, and discovering the beauty in true love. You still kept the crumpled up polaroid of Alistair and Maxwell that you’d taken back when he invited you into his home, last July. It had proven to be a better good luck charm than your tiara or lasso; and it served as a constant reminder of home.

Because home wasn’t Themyscira anymore. It was wherever Maxwell and Alistair were.

“And over here we have a vast collection of quartz! It’s usually mined in Brazil, and it’s the second most common crystal in the world.” Maxwell explains, using the most outlandish hand gestures everytime he speaks. He always spoke with his hands; even when he was on the television. You guessed that some things just didn’t change.

You watch him from afar, unable to contain the smile on your lips. His eyes sparkled and gleamed like diamonds as he gave facts about each of the gemstones he presented.

Black Gold had become an extension of the Smithsonian’s paleontology and gemology department, just like you had planned with Diana. When she had sorted it all out, and you broke the news to Maxwell, he was overjoyed. He hadn’t lost the business he’d worked so hard on, it had only been replaced by something even greater. And he couldn’t have done it without you. He’d spent so much of his life searching for happiness— looking in all the wrong places.

Through meeting you and gaining full custody of his son, he learned that success wasn’t money or wealth or having a solid career. For him, success was family. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

His eyes caught you standing in a shadowed corner. Alistair was holding your hand, and in your free arm, you were cradling your three month old daughter. He knew now, he’d finally found his happiness. He smiled over at his little family and you shot him a kissy face, giggling when you noticed the rose coloured flush that crossed his cheeks.

You and your little family waited for Maxwell to finish his tour guide of the museum, admiring his work ethic. You were so grateful that he was able to adopt his superb salesman skills and apply them to a profession he was truly passionate about. He’d always loved rocks and gems and stones, even having his own collection at home. But this… this was infinitely better than drilling oil and accidentally scamming millions across the globe. Maxwell was putting genuine smiles on people’s faces, kids too, and that in itself was a beautiful thing.

Once the tour group disbanded, Maxwell was quick to run over to you. He took your daughter from your arms and pressed a kiss to your forehead.

“I missed you,” you smiled, watching as Maxwell fussed over his daughter. “How was work?”

Maxwell’s dark eyes met yours and he beamed with delight. “Oh it was fantastic,” He grinned before excitedly telling you all the details about his day at work. He knelt down to Alistair’s level and ruffled his son’s black hair. “Did you enjoy visiting the aquarium with mommy?” he asked.

“It was amazing!” Alistair squealed, sharing the same excitement as his father. It was unbelievable how much Alistair was growing to be a Mini-Max.

Maxwell checked his wrist watch and gasped when he saw the time. He called Raquel over, who had agreed to watch the kids this evening while you and him had ‘date night’. It was a rarity for sure, and neither you or Max liked to be without your children, but tonight was extra important. It signified exactly one year since you entered Maxwell’s life and changed his world forever.

Once it was just you two, Max couldn’t keep his hands off you. “You look beautiful.” he grumbled, pressing kisses along your jaw and down the column of your neck. His large hands roamed your body, paying extra attention to your breasts. Clearly, he didn’t care if anyone was looking. You giggled and slipped out beneath him.

“Save something for tonight.” You laughed, rolling your eyes and taking his hand.

Tonight.

You had no idea what was to come.

“I’m sorry it’s not Greece,” Maxwell chuckled, reminiscing on your first holiday together (if he could even call it that). It was quite an unconventional one— as he’d never expected to go cave exploring with two Amazonian Godesses’ and kill a God. You laughed, rolling your eyes.

“It feels like yesterday,” you admitted. “Leaving Themyscira… giving up my powers. I can’t believe it’s been a year.”

Maxwell nodded knowingly. “Tell me, princess, if you could go back and change things, would you?”

You’d thought about the question numerous times. You did miss your mother, and the beautiful tranquil oceans of your home world. But if you could change things— would you? The answer was simple.

“No.” you beamed brightly, pressing your lips together.

“Good.” said Maxwell. He gestured a waiter over and ordered a bottle of the finest champagne.

Things had been a little rough for Maxwell, after the dreamstone debacle and all. Inevitably he had to sell his white suburban mansion, as he didn’t really have the steadiest of incomes rolling in. But in a way, he was relieved. He didn’t need all that space anyway, and actually he’d really come to like the much cozier apartment where you, him and Alistair were living now. But with a little one on the way, you had both been discussing the prospect of finding a place with an extra bedroom.

He was happy with his job at the Smithsonian. He was passionate about it too, which was the main thing. He was still a businessman , but a much nicer one. After all, the oil-mogul Max Lord was long gone, and had been replaced by a darker haired, sweater-wearing Maxwell Lorenzano. You had no complaints.

“Here’s the thing,” Maxwell announced, straightening his composure after you’d both finished dinner. “And there’s really no easy way to say this—“

You giggled, scrunching your nose up with curiosity. “Spit it out Maxie.”

“I’m in love with you,” Max revealed, brushing his thumb over your knuckles tenderly.

You nudged him playfully. “I know that, silly,” you laughed. “I’m in love with you too. But tell me, what’s really on your mind.”

Maxwell stiffened slightly. It was now or never.

“You have shown me so much kindness, and you’ve shown me hope when I didn’t believe things could get any better. You made sacrifices for me… for my family. Gave up your powers and the chance to see your own mom again. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make your decision worthwhile but I’ve known for a long time now that— I at least want to try. I don’t ever want to stop loving you. I want to be with you… forever. For the rest of my life. An eternity. Because you make me happier than I ever thought I could be,”

Tears pricked your eyes at Maxwell’s sentiment, your heart clenching with adoration in your chest.

“And with our family growing, and the possibility of getting a new house, I just… I want to know. I want to know if you’ll be my wife and— if you’ll marry me?” he finished, a hopeful glint in his chocolate brown eyes.

You couldn’t rid yourself of the smile that crossed your cheeks. “Yes Max,” you cried, leaning over the table and wrapping your arms around your fiancée. “Yes I will marry you.”

—————The end.

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I Believe In Love tagged in replies 💕

[rebeccalouisaferguson]

"I always just rode the waves,” Rebecca Ferguson says with a shrug. The comment hangs in the air, as if the Anglo-Swedish 37-year-old is only now processing that a combination of currents and tides has led her not just to an acting career but to the brink of big-screen stardom.

“I’ve never been ambitious,” she says. “I’ve always thought that that was a bad thing.” She’s seen others in the industry consumed by constant striving and asked herself why she hasn’t hungered for fame since childhood, slept in cars outside castings, barged into directors’ offices or thrown herself in the path of a producer. “But should I not be burning for this? Out meeting people and networking for the next job?” says Ferguson, who has chosen the sort of quiet, private life outside the big city that so many actors claim to crave. “My life just took another turn. But I’ve always thought: Am I where I should be?”

At the moment, on this late July day, Ferguson is slumped in the backseat of a Mercedes-Benz sedan, crawling through rush-hour traffic on the M4 out of London. She is capping off a hectic week during a particularly busy period. Most immediately, she’s coming from a table read for Wool, the Apple TV+ adaptation of Hugh Howey’s bestselling postapocalyptic trilogy. Ferguson is both the star and, for the first time, an executive producer. “I’m sitting in all the different rooms, listening and learning like the students,” she says. She’s filming Mission: Impossible 7, her third tour of duty in the long-running series that first brought her widespread recognition. She’s also promoting the film Reminiscence, the sci-fi noir written and directed by Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy in which Ferguson stars opposite Hugh Jackman. And now she is starting a press push and festival prep for her role as Lady Jessica ahead of the much-delayed release of Dune (in theaters October 22), director Denis Villeneuve’s reimagining of Frank Herbert’s novel. “After this film, I think everyone will see what I see in her,” the filmmaker says. “She has a beautiful, regal, aristocratic presence, elegance. But that was not the main thing: The most important thing for me was that depth.”

After tracing a long, meandering path, Ferguson has landed in a rare and rarified position: ascendant in her late 30s (still an anomaly for women in the film industry) and sought after by some of the biggest names in the business. “When you meet Rebecca, you just see it. She’s very open, candid, collaborative, hardworking, funny—and not pretentious,” says Tom Cruise, who handpicked Ferguson to star opposite him in the Mission: Impossiblefilms, which are known for their demanding shoots. “She just rose to the occasion every single time.”

In February 2020, when the pandemic began, Ferguson left Venice, where she’d been shooting Mission: Impossible 7, and hunkered down with her husband, their 3-year-old daughter and Ferguson’s 14-year-old son from a previous relationship at their farm in Sweden. After four months, Ferguson returned to the M:I set and basically hasn’t stopped working since.

Dune has sat idle for far longer. By the time the movie premieres, more than two years will have passed since it wrapped. Ferguson recently asked to screen the film again: “I miss it,” she says. She ended up bringing along her Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg. After the credits rolled, Pegg broke into a smile and wrapped her in a congratulatory bear hug. “That’s all I needed,” she says.

Despite being a sci-fi epic based on a novel from 1965, Dune feels “very timely,” Ferguson says, pointing to its handling of environmental issues, religious zealotry, colonialism and Indigenous rights. The plot of the film, which cost an estimated $165 million, centers on occupying powers battling for the right to exploit a people and their planet, named Arrakis, for melange (or spice)—the most valuable commodity in Herbert’s fictional universe, a substance that provides transcendental thought, extends life and enables instantaneous interstellar travel. “Spice,” Ferguson says, “is equally about the poppy and oil fields.”

Ferguson’s Lady Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a powerful secretive sisterhood with superhuman mental abilities. She defies her order by giving birth to a son, Paul (played by Timothée Chalamet), who may be a messianic figure. “She basically just f—s up the entire universe by having a son out of love,” says Ferguson. In her hands, Jessica is equal parts caring parent, protector and pedagogue. Among the skills she wields and teaches Paul is “the Voice”—a modulated tone that allows the speaker to control others.

The movie was shot in Norway, Hungary, Jordan and Abu Dhabi, whose desert landscape stood in for Arrakis. Filming there was particularly arduous, as temperatures exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit, limiting the shoot window to only an hour and a half each day at 5 a.m. and again at dusk. “We were running across the sand in our steel suits being chased by nonexistent but humongous worms,” Ferguson recalls, referring to the sand-beasts later rendered in CGI. “To be honest, it was one of the best moments ever. It was the most beautiful location I’ve ever seen.”

Back in London, Ferguson is approaching home. She leaves the following day for a small town on the coast of England, where she plans to spend her first vacation in two years and to do some surfing. “Let’s hope it’s good weather,” she says. “If not, I’ll surf in the rain.” Not that she’s the sort to paddle out into storm swells. “I think I’ve managed to stand on a board once in my entire life,” she says. “But it was quite a high. Complete surrender to the waves and total control all at once.”

Born Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström to an English mother and Swedish father, Ferguson grew up bilingual in Stockholm. She immersed herself in dance from a young age, enjoying ballet, jazz, street funk and tango. Despite being shy and prone to blushing and breaking out when forced to speak publicly, Ferguson found she was at ease in front of the camera. She dabbled in modeling and then, at 15, attended a TV casting call at her mother’s urging. Ferguson ended up getting the lead role in Nya Tider (New Times), a soap opera that became wildly popular, splashing Ferguson’s face into Swedish homes five times a week.

When her role ended about two years later, Ferguson was adrift. She had no formal acting training to fall back on, no clear sense of how to steer a career and no major connections to the industry. She had a short run on another soap and appeared in a slasher flick and a couple of independent shorts, then…nothing. “I was famous in Sweden, but I didn’t really have an income anymore,” she says. “So I went and I worked in whatever job I could get.” That meant stints at a daycare center and as a nanny, in a jewelry shop and a shoe store, as well as teaching tango, cleaning hotel rooms and waitressing at a Korean restaurant. She eventually landed in a small coastal town named Simrishamn, where she lived with her then-partner and their toddler son, content to be a where-are-they-now celebrity.

When fame again came calling, Ferguson ran away. She was at the flea market when she recognized the acclaimed Swedish director Richard Hobert, and he saw her. As he shouted her name, Ferguson grabbed her son, who lost his shoes and sausage, and fled. “I panicked,” she says. “I don’t know why.” When Hobert eventually caught up to her, Ferguson tried to act nonchalant as he proceeded to tell her he’d admired her work and pitched her on the lead role in his next movie: “I’ve written this role, and I think I have written it for you. Do you want to read the script?”

Her work in Hobert’s A One-Way Trip to Antibes earned her a Rising Star nomination at the Stockholm International Film Festival. She quickly got an agent in Scandinavia, then one in Britain. On her first trip to take meetings in London, she read for the lead in The White Queen, the BBC adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s historical novels about the women behind the Wars of the Roses. Ferguson got the part, and her portrayal of Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort of England, earned her a Golden Globe nomination and the admiration of at least one Hollywood heavyweight.

Ferguson was in the Moroccan desert filming the Lifetime biblical miniseries The Red Tentwhen the assistant director whisked her off her camel. “We’re going to have to pause shooting,” he said as he asked her to dismount. “Tom Cruise wants to meet you for Mission: Impossible. We’re going to fly you off today.”

Cruise had seen Ferguson’s work in The White Queen and her audition tape and couldn’t believe she wasn’t already a major star. “What? Where has this woman been?” Cruise recalls exclaiming to his new Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie. “She’s incredibly skilled,” Cruise says, “very charismatic, very expressive. As you can tell, the camera loves her.” Ferguson landed a multi-picture deal to star opposite Cruise in the multibillion-dollar franchise. He and McQuarrie built out the role of Ilsa Faust for Ferguson, creating the anti-Bond girl, an equal to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. “We could just see the impact she could have,” he says. “She’s a dancer. She has great control of her body, of her movements. She has the same ability to move through emotions effortlessly.”

Ferguson threw herself into the films and quickly found a shorthand with the cast and crew. “There was a dynamic that worked very well with all of us,” she says. “One of the things I absolutely love is doing all the stunts.” That physicality has given her a reputation as an action-minded actor. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve done 20 other films where I don’t kick ass,” Ferguson says. “Mission comes with such an enormous following. That was what made my career.”

Ferguson’s M: I movies bracket a number of films in which she played opposite marquee names: Florence Foster Jenkins, with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant; The Girl on the Train, with Emily Blunt; The Greatest Showman, with Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams; Life, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds; Men in Black: International, with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson; The Snowman, with Michael Fassbender; Doctor Sleep, with Ewan McGregor. And now Dune, opposite Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem, Zendaya and Chalamet, whom she calls “one of the best actors, if not the best actor of his generation—of this time.” She was similarly impressed by Zendaya, who plays the native Fremen warrior Chani. “She’s quite raw and naughty and fun,” says Ferguson. “She has an enormous f— off attitude.”

When Ferguson first spoke to Villeneuve about appearing in the movie, “he started telling me about this woman who was a protector, and a mother, and a lover, and a concubine,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry. You want me to play a queen and a bodyguard? And you want me to kick ass and walk regally?’ I was like, ‘Denis, why would I want to do that? That’s the last thing I want to do.’ ”

After the call, Ferguson says, “I went downstairs to my hubby and said, Oh, my God, he’s amazing, but I’m not going to get the job. I just criticized the character.” Ferguson worried she was being cast as a stereotypical “strong female character,” where “it’s constantly, ‘She looks good, and she can kick.’ That is not what I want to portray.”

Ferguson hasn’t always been able to work with collaborators who’ve given her the space to question or opine. “I’ve been bashed down. I’ve been bullied,” she says, though she opts not to say by whom. That was never a concern with Villeneuve, who welcomed her critique. He and his co-writers had already decided from the start to make women the focus of their screenplay adaptation, and he promptly offered her the part.

“I want Lady Jessica to be at the center, the forefront. For me, she’s the architect of the story,” Villeneuve says. “I needed someone who will convey the mystery and the dark side of the film in a very elegant and profound way. Rebecca was everything I was hoping for. She’s so precise. She brought a beautiful, controlled vulnerability—it becomes very visceral on-screen.”

Ferguson vaguely recalls trying to watch the 1984 version of Dune, directed by David Lynch, in her youth, but she fell asleep. And she had never opened Herbert’s novel until being offered the part in the new adaptation. As she dug into the book, she says, she learned that her character was subservient and far more like a concubine, forced to eat alone in her bedroom, not spoken to and not allowed to speak. Ferguson ended up relying primarily on Villeneuve for her research and prep—his notes and comments, his references and the pages in the book he suggested she focus on. “I would feel ignorant not to have read Frank’s book at all,” Ferguson says, though she admits there are parts of the sprawling novel (which Villeneuve is splitting into two films) she’s only skimmed. “I have to finish it.” That will not happen on her upcoming vacation, however. “Absolutely not,” she says “I am surfing.”

By the way, if you saw, I am snaking on the ground, snaking around my room to get good Wi-Fi—it’s not some dance or yoga thing,” Ferguson says. “You have to do that in this old house.” It’s a week and a half after our first meeting, and Ferguson is at her new home, a more than 500-year-old property southwest of London that has, over the years, been home to numerous English Royals. It’s more spartan than stately now. “Empty except for a rock star,” she says, turning her phone’s camera to reveal a framed duotone poster of Mick Jagger that’s leaning against the wall. “We haven’t even started renovating.

Ferguson has returned from her holiday fortified and with renewed confidence, thanks in part to her success on the surfboard. “I went up nearly every time,” she says cheerfully, “but the waves weren’t very high.” She shrugs. “I was proud. I was up. I rode them, not the other way around.”

After years of going with the flow, Ferguson is eager to replicate that sense of control in her career. She values her role as an executive producer on Wool, she says, “because I am, for the first time, a part of it from the beginning.” She relishes weighing in on every aspect, from casting (the show recently added Tim Robbins) to cinematography to her character—which has not always been easy for her. “Why do I feel it’s difficult to speak up? I still battle with these things,” she says. Alluding to those times she was pushed around in the past, Ferguson says, “I was angry, but it was more me getting off at ‘How can I let that happen? Why am I letting myself react this way?’ And I take it with me to the next thing where I go, ‘OK, how do I stop that from happening?’ ”

She is learning that she can ride on top of waves without giving up her agency or maybe just let them break against her. “I want to feel I can go home and think, That was a hard day or that pissed me off—and that’s OK,” Ferguson says, with a nod and tight smile. “Because I still stood there as Rebecca. I didn’t shift.”