#this is THE pettiest thing imagineable but the only thing that ever really annoys me about

[mokutone]

i can never remember if i posted the fully colored one or not

[6sakusa]

‘last’ sakusa kiyoomi.

a/n: so this was a request for and i quote ‘angst that will cause extreme pain.” i hope this lives up to it.

warnings: angst, death & mentione of it, self-blaming, relationship issues.

“you just don’t stop don’t you? is it that hard to be less irritating?” sakusa huffed. the two of you had been engaging in an argument over the pettiest matter once again, and at this point you weren’t even near surprised. it had kicked off with you asking your boyfriend if he had eaten out of concern and then him proceeding to label you as ‘clingy’.

recently things were just different, he wasn’t treating you the same anymore and he barely made time for you. most people would say this was a common occurrence once any relationship had come out of the honeymoon phase, the only problem was you and sakusa were long out of that fairytale whirlwind. but through it all, he still showed immense love towards you, considering you had been together for years you were honestly expecting a proposal soon. but that all changed recently, and to make matters worse you couldn’t for the life of you pinpoint why.

maybe, just maybe.. was there someone else?

“i just care about you that’s it, why are you so adamant on turning things into an argument?” you sighed recalling at the way he snapped at you. his reaction would have shocked anyone but at this point in time, as much as you hated to admit it, you were almost getting used to it now.

but that didn’t mean it hurt any less, no, definitely not. it was just as painful each and everytime you saw the blank expression on his face, the way he went out of his way to avoid you and the growing irritation on his features everytime he was made to face you.

“because you’re annoying.” he blurted out seemingly without thinking, in all truth sakusa definitely did not think you were annoying, actually, he quite loved when you made an effort with him. but lately, he just doesn’t know what’s gotten into him. he loved you with all his heart and he wants to propose to you more than anything but the concept scares him, the fact that the two of you being married would mean you’re practically stuck with him. and he doesn’t want that for you, you deserve better. you deserve someone who is comfortable parading you around to the world, someone who is okay with going out on dates in crowded places, someone who will give you affection whenever you need it, someone who is good with words.

sakusa is not that person.

it would break his heart to see that one day you were regretting your decision of saying yes to him because he couldn’t provide what you needed. so his last resort? push you away. not far enough so that the two of you are no longer together because he couldn’t bare the thought of no longer being able to call you his, but far enough for him to have time to get his shit together, so he could come to you better and improved.

“so you don’t want me to talk to you is that it? God what has gotten into you? do you not want to be together anymore?” your voice faltered towards the end as you broke eye-contact with your boyfriend, tears were threatening to spill any moment and your heart was breaking in your chest. you were a bad person, you were a bad person because you were practically forcing him to stay with you even though it was so clear that he didn’t love you anymore.

well, that’s what you thought.

he stayed quiet at your question.. no, he doesn’t want to break up, that would be catastrophic for the both of you and besides he couldn’t ever love anyone the way he loved you. but if he responded saying he wanted to stay together that would prompt you to spark a conversation about why he was acting the way he was, and if there was one thing sakusa hated it was vulnerability.

“i just need some time to think.” that was a good response, he thought. he wasn’t ending things but you wouldn’t push further after that and he knew that, it was .. perfect.

“i’ll give you some time then.” tears were already staining your new top, you were excited to show it to sakusa because it was one of your favourite purchases you had ever made, but instead you had decided not to, you were weary of bothering him.

of course your tears didn’t go unnoticed by him, he watched as you put your shoes on and grabbed your coat from the hanger. he made a mental note to beat the shit out of himself for making you cry the moment you had stepped foot out of the door, and that’s exactly what he did.

he turned to the counter slamming his hands against his head, he needed to get his shit together and he needed to now.

it had been years and you had never expressed any distaste in sakusa’s personality or his methods of affections, would you really start now? maybe this was all stupid, it wasn’t like he would be forcing you to marry him so if you ended up getting tired of him in the future there wasn’t much he could do about it.

if anything, he knew he would regret not getting to put a ring on your finger at all and never knowing what could have been.

so that’s it, that’s decided. he was going to marry you and he would get it together the second you walked back through the door, he would give you the most loving embrace he could possibly muster up, and he would spend the next few months apologising for his behaviour. he would sit and listen to you babble all about the new top you bought because he did notice how much you had adored it when you had brought it home a week ago. and tomorrow he would go out and buy you a few gifts, there was that necklace that you loved from the quaint jewellery store down the road. that’s where he would be heading to first. because sakusa kiyoomi would do anything for you.

meanwhile you were imagining every possibility that could occur the moment you stepped back in. he would break up with you, it was inevitable. he practically hated you, you were acting like such a burden, an irritating and annoying burden. but you wished more than anything that things could be different because you loved sakusa with your entire being, there was no way you would move on once he discarded you. you had imagined your entire future with him and no one else, there was no way that you could change things now.

you sighed pulling out a polaroid of you and sakusa, the cold air that hit your hands just made you feel that much more alone. but you ignored it as you ran your hands over the picture, it was the two of you during the first christmas you had spent together. he had spoiled you so much that day with gifts that you had cried numerous times and begged him to return atleast half of it because it was way too expensive and you felt bad. you were cheery eyed with a wide smile and a small tear adorned your cheek, one of joy as sakusa hung off your arm. his smile was small but it was there, he was just happy that you were happy, he had loved you so much and you couldn’t help but wonder where it had all gone wrong.

why didn’t he love you anymore?

sakusa bumped his leg up and down on the livingroom couch, he couldn’t stop glancing at the clock. it had been three hours which was far too long for you to be gone without a word, to make things even worse you had left your phone in your shared bedroom meaning he had no direct method of contacting you.

a buzz resounded in the room and your boyfriend had never moved so fast so pick up the phone in his life, admittedly he was getting severely worried. he didn’t want you walking out of his life, but thankfully by tomorrow he would wake up next to your beautiful smile and everything would go back to normal.

“hello? is this uhh — sakusa kiyoomi?” there was a feminine voice on the other side of the line who sounded cautious about the pronouncation of his name, additionally, her voice sounded unsteady, it was almost as if she was scared.

“yes.” he responded bluntly wondering who this wench thought she was to be wasting his time, she had even called on no caller id. he had half the mind to hang up on her now, if anything you could be calling him this very moment and it was sending you to voicemail because he was occupied with this girl.

“sorry to impose but you are listed as l/n y/n’s emergency contact, are you aware of this?” his back pricked up at the mention of your name, emergency contact? now he was beyond worried.

“yes i am.”

“i’m sorry to say but— l/n was hit by a vehicle moving at almost fifty miles per hour and — she didn’t make it.” in that moment sakusa had never felt more dread in his life, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. was she saying that you were.. dead? but you couldn’t be dead, no you couldn’t be because he never even got to apologise to you, and you never got to accept his apology. he never got to buy you that necklace, things never got to go back to normal, he wouldn’t be able to live out the rest of his days with you.

he never got to propose. so no, you couldn’t be dead.

then why was he crying? this is the first time sakusa remembers crying as an adult, if it wasn’t true why was it feeling like his soul was being sucked out of him? why did it feel like even though he was a well renowned volleyball player loved by millions he meant nothing anymore? why did it feel like life had no meaning?

he didn’t even realise the phone call was still going on until he heard the woman clear her throat on the other line. “she wanted to tell you.. she’s sorry and she loves— loved you.” she corrected her mistake almost immediately but this didn’t do anything but make him feel worse.

“the hospital will contact you with more details soon, sorry for your loss.” and with that, the line went dead.

sorry? she was saying sorry too? and you.. why were you apologising? in your last moments did you really spend that time asking the paramedics to tell him that you were sorry? you hadn’t done anything wrong, you had never done anything wrong, it was all him, he was the problem, he was a fool.

he threw his phone against the wall and watched as it clattered against the floor with tear-filled eyes. this was his fault, if it wasn’t for him you would never have gone out, maybe if it was just one second later, maybe if hadn’t acted this way, maybe if he had stopped you from leaving, maybe—

so that was it.. even if he thought he was doing everything he could to protect you he had hurt you anyway, in the worst way possible. and how could he forgive himself? he never would.. he never could. because that day he lost everything, because you were his everything, the most precious thing to enter his life, his pride and joy, his entire life.

you were too distracted by the picture of the two of you together, now it laid discarded on the side of the road with a streak of blood staining the bottom half. thankfully the picture was still recognisable, because you made sure it was in your last moments, kiyoomi would be mad if you got it dirty.

regret was an understatement.

[applerubyy]

Ciao Adios

Summary: When you find your boyfriend cheating on you yo decide to expose him in the pettiest way you can think of.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader (some Loki x Reader if you squint)

Word Count: 4k

Warnings: Cheating and cursing (I think that’s it?)

A/N: Hi! So this is my first time writing and posting anything here so if its terrible please tell me nicely :). This is some AU where everyone lives and all is happy ok? Also english is not my first language so I apologize in advance for any grammar or spelling mistakes. Anyway, if it turns out that some of you like it I think I’d be willing to do a part 2 if you like. Hope you enjoy it! <3. Btw, the gif is not mine so credit to whoever made it.

Crack. That’s the sound of your heart breaking, ripped to pieces in just a few seconds. And no, you were not exaggerating. Seeing your boyfriend kissing someone else while taking off their clothes would do that to a person. And in his office of all places.

How did you not see that coming? They had a lot in common and they did spend a lot of time together but you were just so naïve thinking that he was the most trust-worthy person ever that you looked the other way and believed him when he told you she was “just a friend”. 

Just a friend my ass you thought as you calmly walked to your room. No running, that would draw attention to you and you didn’t need that. No crying either, because once you started you wouldn’t be able to stop. Walking down the hallway and taking the elevator to your floor feels like it takes forever. 

Time is funny that way. It has that annoying tendency to slow down or speed up at the worst times. Like when you were in college and the clock seemed to literally stop, you would look at the time and it was 10:20 am and check again after what felt like half an hour for it to be 10:25 am. Or like when you are having fun with your friends at a club and you see it’s 12:30 but when you look again a few minutes later it’s 2:40. Right now it feels like the former, time seems to have slowed down. Maybe Dr. Strange did something to it? No, that’s stupid, he wouldn’t play with time that way.

Finally the elevator pings open and you rush to your room. Well, it’s not only your room anymore. You share it with him and everything is a reminder of what you just saw. The art supplies on the desk by the window, the famous shield leaning against the wall near the door, the messy bed where you sleep together every night …

And every single thing brings tears to your eyes until finally, the dam breaks and you let the tears fall down. You bring your hand to your mouth to muffle a sob that brings you to your knees. Crying is the only thing you can do right now because your brain is stuck on a loop. All you can see is Steve kissing her, unbuttoning her shirt with one hand while the other grabbed her ass. And all you can hear are their moans, Sharon’s whimper when he touched her and his groan as he did so. 

And now you are full on crying and choking on air because that scene keeps replaying itself over and over no matter how much you want it to stop. And you do, Gosh you do because there is so much your heart can take and this is too much. It shatters you in more ways than one. It makes you question everything you thought you knew about him, about her, about your relationship and about yourself.

You remember the first time you met him. You were already in college and looking for an internship. Luckily you happened to be the niece of the one and only Pepper Potts. And who wouldn’t want to work near Earth's mightiest heroes? You sure did. You were studying journalism and communications in New York and working with the Avengers was the ultimate dream, one that was about to come true.

Your first day was uneventful, it consisted mainly of coffee runs, delivering files and passing messages along. That was until your third coffee run where you ran straight into a wall, well actually it wasn’t a wall but it felt like it. The coffee spilled everywhere, on your clothes and his, and you were going to fall on your butt if it wasn’t for him grabbing your arms to steady you. Imagine your surprise when you looked up to see Captain America himself.

And that’s the moment your love story started. It seemed like something straight out of a romantic comedy and you loved it. It started with flirting, a date and then another, him asking you to be his girlfriend and finally asking you to move in once you graduated. It felt like a fairytale.

Tony wasn't very happy about you and the Capsicle but he saw how happy you were so he tried to be happy too. Tony was your uncle even if you didn’t share any blood. Growing up you would visit your aunty Pepper in New York and he was always around, you even stayed at his house when Pepper and him had to work. So, you two became really close even before he became Iron Man and started dating your aunt. 

The same thing happened with Rhody. Your close relationship with Tony meant you were close to him too, seeing as he was one of the most important people in his life. Rhody treated you like his niece and was the only one he didn’t make fun of which you took as the ultimate compliment. 

So those three you knew before you started working at the compound and before Steve. But once you started working there you met the rest of the Avengers. Being Pepper and Tony's niece and Steve's girlfriend meant they all wanted to get to know you. 

You met Bruce Banner, the Hulk, and you became really close. But that was thanks to his close relation with Tony and all the time you spent with him working on his social media presence to make sure people saw him as more than just the green monster who smashes things. After a while of working there they promoted you and now you manage the Avengers social media.

Nat and Wanda became your best friends from the moment you met. You just clicked and hung out as much as possible, being the only girls on the team meant they were really happy to have another female added to the mix. As for Vision, he liked you because Wanda did, simple as that.

Bucky and Sam were the funniest people ever, their constant bickering always brought a smile to your face and they welcomed you with open arms. Happy that their friend had finally found someone to be with.

Thor and Clint were like the fun uncles you got to see every once in a while. The God of Thunder was like an excited puppy and would hug you till you couldn’t breath every time he came to Earth and Clint would joke around with you and FaceTime you when he was with his kids because they loved you (“best babysitter ever” that called you).

You met Peter when he started working for your uncle. He was a sweet kid and your love of memes, vines and pop culture made you instant friends. He would ask you for advice on girls and tell you science jokes.

But we all know not all fairytales have a happy ending and this one definitely didn’t. You’re feeling so many things at once. There’s anger, sadness, jealousy and something else you can’t put your finger on. You keep crying and are unable to move from your kneeling position on the floor. Checking the clock you realize you’ve been on the floor crying for an hour so you stand up.

Taking a shower seems like the best thing to do, your head is pounding and your face is all puffy. As you shower it hits you, that other feeling swirling around is inevitability. In a way you always thought he was too good for you, you always thought he would eventually get tired of you and trade you for someone else. 

It just hurt too much that it was her, the woman he shared so much with. The niece of Peggy Carter, his first love. An agent of S. H. I. E. L. D.  Someone who risked their life for the world like he did. Someone prettier. Someone better than you.

Yeah, you were definitely on a self-pity party. But you needed to be miserable for a while, to cry it all out, to hurt so that you could move on to the next stage of grief: anger. And when that came, there was no stopping you.

You weren’t a mean person, or a petty one. You gave everyone countless opportunities and forgave way too easily so you never really got angry. But when you did, when you said enough is enough, yeah, you better watch out. That could be the meanest bitch you ever met and she had no mercy.

So you got out of the shower, dried yourself and started getting ready. Tony was throwing yet another party about who knows what and you were not missing it. You liked parties, they were the perfect excuse for wearing pretty dresses and putting on make up. And tonight you were going all out. 

Your inner bitch was concocting a plan and you were going with it.

You hear the door open and prepare yourself to put on the best acting of your life. You take a deep breath and in the sweetest voice you can muster say: “Steve is that you babe?”

“Yeah doll it’s me” you hear him say. A few second later he pops into the bedroom and gives you a peck on the lips as you continue with your makeup.

“How was your day?” Steve asks as he takes off his clothes, probably to take a shower. “I missed you today, i went by your office but you weren’t there” he says with a small frown between his eyes. You could stare at his blue eyes forever but snap out of it when you remember what he did. 

“Oh not much, i left work earlier to get ready for tonight” you answer. Shit your work. You really did leave like that, but after tonight hopefully they’ll understand. “You should start getting ready, the party starts in thirty minutes”.

He smiles at you and tells you he’s going to take a quick shower before getting dressed. He goes to the bathroom and you feel like breaking the mirror but instead take a few deep breaths and remind yourself he’s getting what he deserves later on. With that in mind you finish applying you makeup and smile at yourself, you look good. Moving on to your hair you decide to do some loose waves and that’s it, you really don’t know how to make those complicated updos.

Steve gets out of the shower and starts putting on his suit. Men really do have it easier you think to yourself when you see all the work you had to do and he just showers and that’s it.

You take your dress out of the closet and admire it. It really is beautiful. It has a deep plunging neckline that shows a lot of cleavage and is skin tight with a slit on one side. The fact that it is silver with sequins makes it even better. Pepper helped you pick this dress. 

You put on the dress and admire yourself in the mirror. You look good. Behind you, you hear a whistle and turn around to see Steve watching you lust in his eyes. He comes closer and grabs you by the waist, pulling you to him.

“You look stunning” he says as he wets his bottom lip. “I can’t wait to take it off of you when we get back”. Lying cheating bastard.

“Can't wait” you lie as you wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him. This is just a kiss goodbye you tell yourself. One last kiss before he’s out of your life and probably runs to her. Tears threaten to fill your eyes but you hold them down. Not now.

You break the kiss when the need to breathe is too strong. Grabbing his hand you start walking towards the door and say: “Come on, we’re already late”.

——————————————————————————

The party had already started once you walk in and in true Tony fashion it is elegant and extravagant. Everyone is there: S. H. I. E. L. D. agents, the Avengers themselves, politicians and a few famous people. 

You and Steve walk to the bar and order drinks. A whiskey for him and a strawberry daiquiri for you, yes you are that basic but hey, it tastes awesome. He offers you his arm and with drinks in your hands you start looking for your friends. A lot of people stop you on the way, nobody wants to miss an opportunity to talk to Captain America.

One thing, or rather on person, catches your attention: Loki. He’s sitting on one of the cushions alone with a drink in his hand. It’s weird to see him there. Sure, he was redeeming himself for what he did in 2012 and Thor said he was doing better but he rarely left Asgard (he “hated mortals”) and when he did come to Earth it wasn’t for a party.

As if he could feel you staring he turns his head and locks his eyes with yours. You weren’t going to lie, he was gorgeous. He was incredibly tall, had those charming green eyes and was actually funny (but you’d never admit that to anyone). But you were in love with Steve and never saw him as anything more than Thor's hot brother. And everyone in the Avengers was hot so that’s not saying much.

You turn away from him and see Nat and Wanda on the dance floor and you tell Steve you’ll see him later and to go find his friends. He’ll need them after tonight you think to yourself. You greet the girls and start dancing with them, for a moment forgetting about what you saw today and putting Loki out of your mind.

The three of you decided to take a break and order some more drinks. Once at the bar Wanda orders for you and when your drinks arrive you go back to the dance floor. You spend the next few hours dancing, talking to your friends and pretending that nothing's wrong. Talking to Steve and pretending that nothing's wrong. Hugging Steve and pretending that nothing's wrong. Kissing Steve and pretending that nothing's wrong.

The fact that Sharon is at the party doesn’t help at all. When you see her talking or touching him you feel like you’re gonna lose it but you remain strong. You remind yourself of your plan and try to keep them out of your mind.

There’s a small stage at the far end of the room and you see your uncle Tony step on it and grab the microphone.

“Hello everyone and thank you for coming to another one of my amazing parties. I hope you are having a good time and taking advantage of the free bar over there” he points to the other side of the room and continues, “Now for what we have all been waiting for: karaoke! And yes, i want everyone to sing something because that’s the whole point of this. I'm looking at you Manchurian Candidate, you’re singing”.

With that he gets off the stage and passes the mic to Sam who decided to sing a Marvin Gaye song. He’s pretty good actually but you can’t fully concentrate on him because your mind is going a thousand miles an hour for what it’s going to happen later.

More people go up and sing their songs and you applaud when they’re done. Nobody is talking much, they're all too busy either laughing at the others performance, drinking or actually listening to the songs. You’re sitting with Steve to your right, Bruce to your left and the rest of the Avengers nearby. You’re your own little group.

It’s finally your turn and as you walk to the stage you can hear your friends whistling and cheering you on. Once you’re up on the stage you choose the song and start singing. 

Ask you once, ask you twice now

There's lipstick on your collar

You say she's just a friend now

Then why don't we call her?

So you wanna go home with someone

To do all the things you used to do to me

I swear, I know you do

Used to take me out in your fancy car

And make out in the rain

And when I ring you up

Don't know where you are

'Til I hear her say your name

Used to sing along when you played guitar

That's a distant memory

Hope she treats you better than you treated me, ha

As you continue singing you get more and more confident and take the mic. You walk off the little stage and over to your friends while dancing and you can see them smiling, clapping and having fun. They have no idea how much i mean all of this you think. You look at Steve and he’s completely oblivious. Good, you want to take him by surprise. You arrive at your little circle of friends and start singing the chorus.

I'm onto you, yeah you

I'm not your number one

I saw you with her

Kissing and having fun

If you're giving her all of your money and time

I'm not gonna sit here wasting mine on you, yeah, you

Ciao adios, I'm done

Ciao adios, I'm done

Ciao adios, I'm done

You keep dancing and go back to back with Wanda who’s also singing along. You then turn to Nat and she grabs your hand and makes you do a little spin. 

After three, after four times

Why did I bother?

Tell me how many more times

Does it take to get smarter?

Don't need to deny the hurt and the lies

And all of the things you did to me

I swear, I know you did

And now you take her out in your fancy car

And make out in the rain

And when she rings you up

She know where you are

But I know differently

Now she sings along when you play guitar

Making brand new memories

Hope you treat her better than you treated me

You go up to Tony and he starts dancing around you busting out some dad moves. You laugh and keep on singing and dancing.

I'm onto you, yeah you

I'm not your number one

I saw you with her

Kissing and having fun

If you're giving her all of your money and time

I'm not gonna sit here wasting mine on you, yeah, you

Ciao adios, I'm done (I'm done)

Ciao adios, I'm done (no, no, no, no)

Ciao adios, I'm done

If you're giving her all of your money and time

I'm not gonna sit here wasting mine on you, yeah, you

Ciao adios, I'm done

And now you take her out in your fancy car

And make out in the rain

And when she rings you up

She know where you are

But I know differently

Now she sings along when you play guitar

Making brand new memories

Hope you treat her better than you treated me

You walk back to the stage as you sing and step up. You put the mic back into place and sing the last part of the song.

I'm onto you, yeah you

I'm not your number one

I saw you with her (with her)

Kissing and having fun (and fun)

If you're giving her all of your money and time

I'm not gonna sit here wasting mine on you, yeah, you

Ciao adios, I'm done (I'm done)

Ciao adios, I'm done (you get on with your life, I'll get on with my life)

Ciao adios, I'm done

If you're giving her all of your money and time

I'm not gonna sit here wasting mine on you, yeah, you

Ciao adios, I'm done

When you’re done people are clapping and cheering and you look to your friends to see them all smiling. You look at everyone and make a little mock bow and when you straighten you see Loki sitting on the same couch as before. But this time he’s looking at you and he’s laughing, not smiling and cheering but actually laughing.

You look back at your friends and say “Thank you, thank you” with a smile on your face. You continue , “I wanted to dedicate this song to my boyfriend Steve” you point at him.

“In case it wasn’t clear enough, i wanted to tell you that i saw you with Sharon”. You could hear a pin drop. No one was talking and all eyes were on you. This is what you wanted, to humiliate him as much as he did you. And what better way to do it than publicly? Oh but you weren’t done.

You could see Steve's face going pale and nobody knew where to look, if at you or at him. Tony look ready to murder him as did Rhody, Pepper, Peter and Bruce. Thor, Clint and Vision looked shocked. But Bucky, Sam, Nat and Wanda looked guilty.

Your heart breaks a little more when you realize they knew. You can’t really blame Bucky and Sam for not telling you, they were Steve's friends after all. But you thought the girls were your friends, that they would have told you. Apparently you overestimated that friendship.

You keep on smiling and continue “So… I’m breaking up with you. Hope she was a good fuck and wasn’t uncomfortable with the fact that you were once in love with her aunt”. You do a dramatic pause and make a little disgusted face. “Anyway, if I’m lucky i´ll never see you again. Have a great life!”

And with that, you walk off the stage and make your way to your friends. Steve is rooted to the spot and his face is red with embarrassment. You walk up to him, look him straight in the eye and give him an evil smile. He gulps and opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something and then closes it. He does is two more times and still nothing comes out.

You turn to your group and look at Wand and Nat, who can’t seem to be able to look you in the eye. You sigh and say: “Who want enemies when they can have you as their best friends right?”. They look up then and start talking. Telling you how sorry they are and to please forgive them. You raise your hand to silence them and they do.

You go to your aunt and uncle who look like there should be smoke coming out of their ears and say: “I’m gonna stay in a hotel for the night, can’t stand to be here anymore”. Tony scrunches his eyebrows and look at you like you’re crazy.

“Hell no. You’re staying here. We can find him another room to sleep in but you’re not leaving. If anyone’s leaving is Mr. Star-spangled over there” he practically screams the last part as he points at Steve.  

You take a deep breath and hug him. It takes him by surprise but he puts his arms around you. “I appreciate it uncle Tony but i can’t stay at the compound, it just hurts too much” you say as you let go. Turning to your aunt you hug her as well and say: “Thank you for everything but I quit”.

The moment those words leave your mouth everyone starts talking at the same time telling you how crazy you are and to think about it. You just smile at them and tell them you already made up your mind. “I'm gonna go pack a bag and ask Happy to take me to a hotel nearby. Please make sure he doesn’t follow” you say as you point to a still red-faced Captain America. 

With that you turn around and leave. The room is silent for a few seconds before you hear your friends all screaming at Steve. You look around for a second and notice that Loki is staring at you with a smirk on his face. When you look him in the eye he raises his glass at you ant takes a sip. 

You give him a small smile and walk through the doors towards the elevator.  

[demetriandelibinaryboyfriends]

Fake dating au where demetris on his third strike with the school counselor so when they're about to fight again he holds his hand instead. Hawk cant help but blush and counselor Blatt jumps to conclusions and tries to be overly accepting

PFFFFT okay this is fuckin great

Like I’m just imagining Demetri doing the PETTIEST bullshit to get back at Hawk for that destroying-his-science-project business, like he writes “COBRA KAI SUCKS” all over his locker in sharpie in cleverly-disguised handwriting or pours soda on Hawk’s karate equipment and tough dude sportsballs (because come ON--Eli’s had the same locker combination for years, and just because he’s badass now doesn’t mean it would occur to him to change it) or steals his portable hair gel so that the ‘hawk will be sad and sagging by 6th period, and as soon as Hawk catches on to what’s going on, it doesn’t take long for him to figure out who’s behind all this chicanery. And he fuckin goes RIGHT up to Demetri during the next passing period (he knows exactly what part of the school that little nerd is in because he figured out and memorized Demetri’s class schedule SOLELY for harassment purposes and not because he likes him or anything) like “BRO YOU WANNA GO YOU WANNA FUCKIN GO” and Demetri gets ready to fight like “COME AT ME ASSHOLE” and Demetri’s getting ready to throw the world’s meanest punch to start the brawl (because his douchebag ex-best-friend ain’t the only one who can strike first) when the accursed Counselor Blatt rounds the corner.

She turns and fixes an icy glare right on them, and Demetri has to think fast. He unclenches his fist mid-punch and wraps a hand around Eli’s wrist. Eli’s hand flexes out in surprise, and before he can react, Demetri’s fingers have found their way up his wrist and laced with his own. Hawk’s face goes redder than his (already, sadly, beginning to sag) mohawk.

And fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Hawk was absolutely not prepared for this. He absolutely was not prepared for the same goddamn helpless sensation of vertigo to hit as that time he held Demetri’s hand during Red Rover in the 6th grade (how in the hell did a couple of losers like them get invited to play, anyways? The teacher probably made the other kids include them or something). And Hawk fucking hates how warm and pleasant Demetri’s hand feels in his own, and how it fills him with the same hopeless longing that he hoped he could punch away into oblivion as soon as Kreese started training him.

But here comes that stupid-ass counselor, and something tells him that now is not the time to yank his hand away and slam Demetri into the lockers behind them, no matter how much he would like to.

“Demetri? Eli?” Counselor Blatt looks back and forth between the two of them, perplexed. “What’s this?”

“What’s what, Counselor Blatt?” Demetri pulls Hawk closer and swings his other arm around the shorter boy’s shoulders. Hawk can only bristle in barely-concealed rage.

“Did I just...see you about to punch Eli?” she continues. “When you’ve been to our seminar on respectful alternatives to physical aggression?”

“Oh no, you misunderstand!” Demetri laughs, and Hawk wants to smack him. God, his laugh is annoying. He’s annoying. Hawk wants to scream into a wall and he’s not sure why.

“I was just in a hurry to hold my boyfriend’s hand,” he goes on gleefully. “I haven’t seen him all day! Is that okay with you, Counselor Blatt?” He gives the counselor a challenging stare, and Hawk almost feels sorry for the woman and how utterly lost she is.

“I thought you were upset with Mr. Moskowitz here for ruining your science project,” Counselor Blatt says slowly.

“Oh, that?” Demetri snorts. “We were just on a little break. I think that was my indication that good ol’ Eli wasn’t taking it too well. But we worked everything out, and it’s alllll good now!”

He gives the counselor his most winning grin, and Hawk just turns to gape at him. Out of all the absurd directions Demetri could’ve taken this thing, framing him throwing a soccer ball across the cafeteria to smash Demetri’s project as a couple’s fight was one Hawk had not seen coming.

But then again...that did kind of let him off the hook, didn’t it? If all of his messing with Demetri was nothing but silly relationship drama. After all, Counselor Blatt hadn’t lifted a finger when the utter spectacle that was Kyler and Sam LaRusso’s breakup had ravaged the school’s gossip chain.

“You know, you really should be more accepting of LGBT relationships,” Hawk says, making a point to pull out the kicked puppy expression. “It’s hurtful enough that my boyfriend and I get as many stares as we do from other students.”

“I...! Well! I mean!” Counselor Blatt splutters, looking everywhere but their eyes. “I think it’s great you boys are able to...express yourselves so freely! I want this school to be an environment where students of all sexualities are able to be themselves. I’m so happy West Valley High is such a diverse place!” She smiles, brightly but still very confused.

“With all due respect, Counselor Blatt, we’re not just some token gay couple.” Hawk doesn’t let up on the puppy dog eyes. “We’re just two guys who love each other. That’s all. All we want is to be accepted for who we are.”

He feels Demetri stiffen beside him with surprise, but the grip on his hand and around his shoulder doesn’t loosen in the slightest.

Demetri’s really acting like he doesn’t want to let go. He’s really committing to this façade.

Makes sense. When they were in middle school, Demetri always tried to be the class clown--not that it ever worked. Eli would always cheer him up by insisting he had a natural talent for improv. The kid isn’t half bad at acting, he’ll admit.

“And...you are accepted!” Counselor Blatt reassures awkwardly. “I’m...sorry I misunderstood your relationship, boys. I should be better about checking my heterosexual privilege.”

“Not to worry!” Demetri says cheerily. “Anyone who works at being a good ally to the community is always appreciated!”

Hawk resists the urge to roll his eyes. What was this, a fucking gay Sesame Street episode?

“Sorry again, Demetri. Eli. Have a nice day.”

As soon as Counselor Blatt shuffles around the corner and out-of-sight, Hawk tears his hand away (as...reluctant as he admittedly is to do so. Feeling another hand curled around his made him feel calmer and safer than he had in months, no matter what utter pussy’s it was. Disgusting. Kreese would never train him again if he found out, that was for sure.). He shoves Demetri hard--not into the lockers, not in any way that’ll make a noise to be noticed, but enough to knock the wind out of that fucking runt.

“What the fuck was that?” Hawk snarls.

Demetri crosses his arms and glowers at him. “I just saved both of us from a month of detention. It was only so long before she figured out Cobra Kai’s the aggressor around here just as much as Miyagi-Do is.”

Hawk surges forward and tries to shove him again, but Demetri is ready this time and quickly blocks. “What the hell was your grand plan, anyways?” he scoffs. “Pick a fight with me in the middle of the school day?”

Demetri sighs, starting to back away. “Eli, Eli, Eli. I know you’ve got a good brain in there, buddy. Maybe start using it, if all the punches to the head haven’t messed it up too much.”

He taps his head a couple times before turning and disappearing into the throng of students around them. Hawk groans.

Mitch doesn’t make matters better as they walk away. “Dude, were you blushing?”

“Shut the fuck up, man! I was just fucking embarrassed!”

Bert sniggers. “I’ll say. Should I start planning the wedding?”

“Don’t make me fucking deck you! Look...he wanted to stay out of trouble, and I realized I could spin it to our advantage. So I did. We’re in the clear for now.”

“Yeah, only took a bit of...hand-to-hand combat,” Mitch snickers. “What’s next? Judo wrestling him in the janitor’s closet?” He and Bert break out in giggles, and Hawk shoots them both his most seething glare.

“If you mention any of this to Sensei Kreese, I will kill you,” Hawk growls.

“Fair enough,” Mitch says, shrugging. Bert nods in agreement.

Hawk reminds himself to wail especially hard on both of them during practice today.

[roc-thoughtblog]

Sense and Sensibility Readthrough Part 7

Chapter 10, Pages 39-45

Previously, Marianne and Margaret went for a run up a hill, got rained on, and ran all the way back down. A romance novel male love interest picks up a fallen Marianne, takes her home, and acts very mysterious-romance-novel-male-love-interest-like.

Marianne is obviously infatuated.

I end up thinking too much about the unfathomable nature of skin-tones today, though I think I also managed to struggle a bit more than usual concentrating. Definitely ran quite overtime.

Readthrough below.

Chapter 10 Willoughby visits, and is charmed.

Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer.

Oof. Wait, hang on; we're getting description. This is the most description of Marianne's appearance! Incoming:

Posture's not as good as her sister, but she is taller. Skin is of very brown overtone but a very visible "uncommonly brilliant" undertone. How brown is very brown? Are undertones a thing or did I just make up something I think I overheard once? I'm about to go on a tangent into what undertones & overtones are aren't I. BRB. Also she has very dark eyes that are quite full of life.

My understanding of skin tones mostly comes from being a poor artist and getting messed up trying to figure out how they work because they DON'T STAY THE SAME OVER ANY PATCH OF SKIN OR CONSISTENT AT ANY ANGLE. And SPLOTHCY. SPLOTCHY EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME. So I get a vague sense of what Jane Austen is trying to get at. From what it sounds like, Marianne is pretty generally brown on the surface but also fairly rosy in all those fleshy parts that do the most weird multidimesional optical illusioning that skin-tones tend to do? She probably turns very red when she's blushy, is the implication anyway, that I could have just said on the outset but then I went and buried my head in seasons and carotene and foundation.

Maybe I'll use Marianne as the subject of a skin-tone study. I suck at skin-tones and this is the most I've ever thought about it in years.

Anyway, she's embarrassed at first but they quickly hit it off; this is all still a no-dialogue cutscene so Austen's really skipping over any occasion for Willoughby to talk. Well, from the sounds of it they'll be chatting for hours... mutually charmed, all the same tastes, etc. Ah, haha, she does bulldoze over their differences a bit. Willoughby doesn't put up a resistance; either he's too charmed or, as a 25 year old, he doesn't want to debate an enthusiastic teenager. Well, at least he's not 35.

Dialogue resumes as soon as he leaves. I should keep a note of which important characters have been conspicuously reserved by the narrative; Willoughby and Edward both been. Poor Margaret is just unimportant.

Elinor thinks Marianne's going to fast. Run out of things to talk about soon. Marianne gets snippy and returns fire;

"But I see what you mean. [...] I have erred against every commonplace notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull and deceitful - had I talked only of the weather and the roads, and had I spoken only once in ten minutes, this reproach would have been spared."

She's getting her back for the attraction-to-fever line. I sort of agree with Elinor, I get the feeling Willoughby isn't y'know. As passionate as Marianne is, so much as just humouring her. But either way he's charmed so. He keeps coming back day after to day, to "check in" on Marianne's recovery.

Oh! But he does participate in her activities though. That is encouraging. And he reads emotively haha. Mama Dashwood loves him, but naturally Elinor finds his general, hmm, incautious demeanor to be disapprovable. Marianne has seen in Willoughby the saviour that justified her impossible standards! I call that she's probably more than a little infatuated and Willoughby's gonna turn out to be less than everything she thought he was, or that she wanted.

Infatuation is wild isn't it.

Mama Dashwood's already hearing wedding bells, as she would. Elinor's starting to see that Colonel Brandon really does have small interest in Marianne (after everyone else stopped caring because he's not interesting). He gets Elinor's pity and compassion for generally being a guy whose disposition implies like he's had a bit of a downer past, and also for generally being compared against Willoughby. Also because Marianne will never stop being mean about his age. Though I wonder how much of his improvement in Elinor's eyes is precisely by nature of Willoughby having arrived to be worth disapproving.

Oh Willoughby finally talks, and the first things he says involves going off on poor Brandon;

"Brandon is just the kind of man," said Willoughby one day, when they were talking of him together, "whom everybody speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to."

Aww. My image of Brandon has really changed. Before it was like some kind of caricature of a retired military man, making him look very much on the 50-60 end of 35 years, with a brush moustache. But after all that, man. Now I just see a tired older millenial. You know, the particular kind of tired millenial who are just stuck in a perpetual state of scraping by slowly while anticipating middle age behind the next big hill, while still getting berated by the older gens for being millenials, and getting memed on by the Gen Z for being old.

Did I just call Marianne a zoomer?

Well, meming on older people is just an age/maturity thing, not a generational thing. Happens every time. Even 200 years ago, in a book.

A... Anyway...

Elinor justifiably defends Brandon from Willoughby's more exagerrated character attacks. Then he keeps talking, so she just sticks to calling him and Marianne out instead for being prejudiced and-

"In defense of your protégé you can even be saucy."

HOLY SHIT. I mean the more I hear out of Willoughby's mouth the more of a jackass he seems. No wonder Austen kept his mouth shut for a bit. This whole thing just escalates into an argument that ends in a disagreement. Elinor thinks Willoughby as holding an unjustifiably contemptuous attitude towards an inoffensive and unfortunate person; Willoughby's annoyed that Elinor's pressing him on the matter as he simply views his own observations of Brandon's social deficiencies as factual, and probably to his eyes therefore not contemptuous in nature.

And Marianne is just being actually the pettiest and meanest one here because she's Marianne and Willoughby is enabling her.

"You shall find me as stubborn as you can be artful. I have three unanswerable reasons for disliking Colonel Brandon; he threatened me with rain when I wanted it to be fine; he has found fault with the hanging of my curricle, and I cannot persuade him to buy my brown mare. [...] And in return for an acknowledgement, [...] you cannot deny me the privilege of disliking him as much as ever."

Willoughby's whole closing argument is some great character stuff. He said earlier that he didn't dislike Brandon; I like that it's a bit up in the air whether or not he genuinely had no issue with the man, and was just being very distastefully insensitive, or whether he was actually heartily prejudiced against Brandon for those three petty reasons and wasn't being up-front with himself or anyone else until Elinor called him out. I'm leaning towards the latter, personally.

Either way, he is petty enough now to really double down on disliking Brandon in this moment; for no other reason than as to spite Elinor for managing to convince him not to.

Yeah I don't think I like Willoughby very much. Literally, one of those guys who seems nice until they open their mouth, wow.

As a side note, for the spitefulness of the dialogue, the narrator's been very sparing of the less pleasant aspects of Marianne and Willoughby's characters. Imagine if they were minor characters like Sir and Lady Middleton! Would definitely have just torn straight into the two of them on top of just letting them talk.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

a handful of fun-or-something selections from my four separate attempts at writing a benston fic (prior to the s5 premiere evidently lol). shit is On Brand in there. ordered vaguely along the lines of [most Depressive Introspection] <-> [most Things Almost Actually Happening]

"Ben's talked to him after they were in a meeting together, sure, but also when Winston was having lunch, or sitting at his desk, or waiting outside Taylor's office to bring them a weekly report and maybe having selected that particular time to do so because he knew Ben was around. But why wouldn't Ben talk to him specifically, and even seek him out? He's in charge of Taylor's quant department, it's probably only polite, and Ben's always polite—to Winston, and to the other higher-ups, but also to other random analysts, and really anyone he meets. And if the way Ben treats him during their interactions always seems kind and gentle to the point of carefulness, or maybe delicacy, it's probably only because, from the very start, Winston has been flustered and tongue-tied around Ben, sometimes so unprepared to be in his presence that it makes him tense. If anything, Ben's probably a friendly enough person to feel bad for Winston, the social inept, unpopular computer nerd who really doesn't have anything going for him and is less on top of things than ever when Ben's around.

He can't let himself start thinking maybe Ben likes me, too? Maybe just a little? because there's absolutely nothing to indicate this. Ben's nice to everyone. He's given Ben nothing to like. It makes sense for him to catch feelings for Ben, of course, but no sense for Ben to be having the same experience over him, of all possible people. He can humor himself just a little, enjoy getting to talk with such a thoroughly lovely person, maybe even try to tentatively flirt—as long as he can remember there's only going to be one outcome. If he does nothing, he won't have a relationship with Ben. If he outright asks him on a date, he won't have a relationship with Ben. And if he tries for some compromise—like allowing for the fact that maybe Ben really was specifically hoping Winston would show tonight, and strategically sitting near him but not too near him, and seeing what happens—he won't have a relationship with Ben."

_

"But then again, they don't seem that keen on being friendly with anyone at all in the first place. Less competition - though if Ben hasn't turned the heads of any other Mase Cappers a radian or two, Winston wouldn't understand it either, though it might encourage him a little more. Despite how warm and patient and welcoming Ben is, Winston doesn't even know if he's single. Or if he's interested in men. Or if he'd be interested in Winston. And despite the fact they're technically coworkers and Ben's willing to be a go-between, maybe he's not willing to get romantically entangled with anyone from Mase Cap.

And it'd be easy for Winston to just beat himself up and call himself a coward for not simply acknowledging his interest in Ben and shooting his shot, but he knows that the level of rejection he often inspires in people goes beyond a simple "no." In some way it might be a relief to have Ben definitively turn him down - he'd just be able to set the crush aside and not end up pining his way to greater heartache. He's not exactly afraid of that; he'd be disappointed but completely unsurprised. It's the possibility he'd make Ben uncomfortable. His smile might flicker at the sight of Winston. He might want to avoid Winston to the point it could interfere with work somehow. Winston might have to watch Ben's expression fall once he infers Winston's meaning, and that thought alone is disheartening enough to keep him from going for it."

_

"He had to admit he was sometimes afraid of this, enough to linger in a relationship with someone he knew didn't even like him all that much, but who still sometimes kissed the corner of his jaw or got into bed with him."

_

"And, hell, maybe a cashier at a bodega near Ben's apartment is crushing on him. It's obvious just from a moment with Ben—Winston must have so much competition.

And what's he offering against anyone else? He might head a department at Taylor Mason's fund, but even that's probably not enough to make his career as a quant seem glamorous to anybody besides another quant. He blends into a crowd or even a small group; there's nothing strikingly attractive about him like there is with Ben. He's not charismatic or charming. People don't really take to him—he's been all too aware of this for a long time. Even if he were to go up to Ben and make some sort of move—try to flirt or just try to make any kind of positive, lasting impression—he'd surely just cement himself in Ben's mind as annoying, offputting, awkward, or any combination thereof. 

Also, Ben might be straight. Or maybe he's already with someone. Of course Winston isn't going to go up to Mafee or Taylor and ask about Ben's sexual orientation or relationship status. But even without confirmation one way or another, there's no reason to think that Ben's available, or interested in guys, much less interested in Winston in particular.

The fact that Winston is trying to convince himself to keep his hopes down, though, probably means he's already gotten his hopes up too much."

_

"He was well-aware that he was lonely. And he'd had bad experiences from a setup like this - maybe leaning too hard into a crush because he was hard-up for something positive and wanted a new relationship to change things for him - and he'd simply get turned down in varyingly embarrassing ways, or spend a while agonizing over how to make any sort of move, only to eventually judge that the interest was not at all mutual, or end up with someone who wasn't that great to be with, and be stuck there for months longer than he wanted, because he was the one who wanted this in the first place."

_

"But he's supposed to be managing this crush, not indulging it to the point it runs away from him. So he has to be okay with the probability that he might not catch Ben's attention at all tonight, save maybe for a cursory greeting and/or goodbye. And why should he expect more? He shouldn't. But he'll put himself in the position to have a chance. Because a workplace crush is okay if he keeps himself grounded and realistic about it—if it's just some small, private embellishment to his day, harmless, just adding this aspect of fun and color to what can often be a fairly lonely and dreary workweek."

_

"Nowadays, with Taylor Mason Capital a supposedly temporary subsidiary of its supposedly former rival, Axe Capital, it's hard to imagine what could properly compensate for the daily stress levels. And Winston knows he doesn't have it half as hard as Taylor does - they're keeping their feet under themself as always, and it's hardly as though he never saw them unhappy, tense, or worried during their fund's first year, but there's an edge to them so frequently now, coiled and guarded, which he hates to see but completely understands. Worse, he has to be grateful for some of the additional stress they're heaping on themself. Taylor works to protect him and their other employees from not only Axe himself, but the pettiest bullies and hotshots and every struggling analyst with something to prove. It's miserable for all of them, stuck in the same office as these people who barely bother to temper their obvious antagonism.

In this situation, there's a head-turning gleam to the least silver lining. So "in having to work alongside these people, you also get to work alongside Ben Kim" is like sunshine.

Of course Winston had noticed Ben the first time the core Mase Cap team strode together into the heart of Axe Capital HQ. A guy standing at the front, obviously attractive, and the double endorsements in the form of another Axe Capper shutting him down but Mafee returning his greeting meant that Winston could admit to himself that Ben was cute. A bright smile, a baritone to make you weak in the knees - Winston had kept a wary eye on everyone and everything around him all that day, but this only made it easier to periodically glance at Ben."

_

"The closest he ever got to a usable moment falling into his lap was the time Ben and another Axe Capper (one of the less aggressive ones, luckily) rode the elevator up from the lobby with Winston and Lauren. Winston had been rendered incapable of speaking, but Lauren kept up a fun, relaxed exchange for the duration of the ride, and Winston at least managed to look back and forth between the others, following the conversation, and when they were two floors away Ben caught his eye and smiled and Winston immediately smiled in return and couldn't entirely stop smiling until he'd been settled in at his desk for a solid ten minutes or so - and it would've taken longer for the mood boost to dissipate if any workday's baseline stress level weren't so high."

_

“"But formally meeting Ben just the once was more than enough to make an impression. It wasn't a situation where Ben wasn't as nice up close and personal, or where his face fell when Winston introduced himself - in fact, he'd smiled brighter, and Winston's hand had tightened in Ben's, and once again, Ben's expression didn't sink in the slightest. Winston spent that meeting trying to play it safe - only speak when directly asked a question. And spontaneously jumped into the middle of an exchange only three times. And at the end of that meeting, Ben's lovely, kind smile hadn't closed off to him at all.

Winston doesn't like having crushes. But despite what most people think of him, he's not clueless. Which is why he knows that most people think he's clueless. And it took about twenty minutes to know he had a crush on Ben, and, within a week of having met each other's eyes and exchanged smiles, he knew his interest in Ben wasn't going to evaporate overnight. But this wasn't the first time Winston had been in this situation, and he knew better than to just sink into the warmth and fuzziness."

_

"As he listened, he thought Taylor seemed slightly more relaxed than usual—it was a subtle difference, and although he was usually tuned into Taylor's wavelength with precision, it also might be wishful thinking on his part, wanting to see the best in Ben, like Taylor was indirectly endorsing him."

_

"He's already thought about Ben like that, too. Not so much outright fantasizing as with the pleasant memories of his ex, more of just...wondering. Exploring, almost. He's had plenty of fleeting thoughts at the offices, noticing things that were attractive about Ben from afar. Watching his arms as he leaned back in his chair and stretched them overhead, focusing on the lowness of his voice when he trailed off to complete a thought in a murmur, letting himself glance at the occasional emergence of scruff along his jawline, at his lips, at the small wedge of bared skin at the open collar of a button-up. Whenever he's actually directly interacting with Ben, though, or even close enough to him, that observation of Ben's attractiveness loses granularity. He's hit with so many aspects of him at once and just gets swept up in the experience."

_

"Winston's generally aware when Ben drops in, even when Winston's just spending the whole day at his desk. In part because Ben tends to swing by to greet his team at some point before leaving, which...he has to do just to be nice. Nobody has any incentive to schmooze with the quants. Especially not fundamental analysts from a the fund which is only technically an affiliate because their CEO wants to feel like he's got their CEO in a cage. But Ben appears for at least a moment anyways, smiling and soft-spoken, asking if they're okay today. He never looks at Winston first but inevitably does, like he's deliberately holding off on it, and Winston meets his gaze in that moment because he's waiting for it, and Ben smiles a little wider with a nod, and Winston twitches his shoulders up and smiles faintly in return. 

He's reading into these kinds of routine moments, and that means he's sitting poolside on the verge of slipping right in too deep."

_

"He was also told that he would need to attend such a meeting that upcoming Thursday—that he didn't have to prepare anything, or even really expect to say anything at all, but should be present in case this Axe Cap liaison had any questions regarding the quant team. Once he stepped into the meeting room and saw Ben sitting beside Sara, it immediately clicked—the beautiful, velvet-voiced man who'd been friendly to Taylor and Mafee. It made perfect sense he'd be the one willing to regularly visit Mase Cap headquarters—it just hadn't occurred to Winston to think he might be this lucky.

He'd hesitated at the sight of him, caught up in a double-take, which gave Ben plenty of time to look over and meet his gaze and at once offer a smile. Small, but still incandescant. With that alone, Winston decided he needed to figure out a word for this effect that hit him where he stood, making any sense of self-possession scatter from his grasp like dropped papers. What was it called when a moment of "a guy this cute smiling at the sight of you" caused you to careen down a tangled mental tangent of word-invention when all you should be doing is acting like a regular person who knows how to smile and nod and sit down—instead of staring breathlessly at him for half a second too long like you've never seen another person before, then be somewhat mentally overwhelmed by the task of figuring out which chair to take?

Taylor had spoken up then, offering him something of a reset by introducing him to Ben by name, then vice versa. Ben Kim, Winston had told himself, firmly suppressing any mild panic as Ben again turned to him, smiled, and leaned in to shake his hand. Don't let this keep you from remembering his name. Ben Kim, Ben Kim—his handshake was solid, but not the aggressive-assertive clasp you'd maybe expect from some random high finance businessperson wanting every interaction to be a power struggle. Hands warm. Ben Kim. Ben Kim. Winston managed to flicker a smile in return, hoping his nervous tension wasn't going to read like he was offput by Ben, or trying to act distant, or anything at all—regardless of how pleasant and attractive Ben was, it just made sense to want the Axe Cap go-between to like him, to make a good impression for Taylor's sake if nothing else. But his thumb twitched against Ben's as they ended the handshake, and Winston blinked in a flurry but couldn't make himself look away first, so they were just looked at each other for another moment, and he probably seemed ridiculous, if not incompetent."

[crazyrandomfucker]

Marichat May day 2: Bell

Summary:

Chat Noir, with all of his bravado, tries to do a flip and slips, getting his bell stuck in Marinette’s balcony.

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

Marinette could swear that she never had ever imagined that this could happen, that she couldn’t have ever foreseen this situation and that she did not snort when Chat realized that he was stuck. But she would only be telling lies. She had warned Chat Noir against it. She knew that due to the recent rain, her balcony’s floor would be slippery. And she definitely snorted like a pig when Chat couldn’t get his bell out of her balcony’s handrail. It really wasn’t her fault; she couldn’t help that Chat was an idiot and his luck wasn’t always the greatest.

Everything started when Chat went to visit her and it began to rain cats and dogs. She had offered him snacks and a dry space to stay while the downpour was going on and he gladly accepted, obviously worried about his health and not because of the cookies.

They played a few games and Marinette completely destroyed Chat’s honour. After losing too many times, Chat shows Marinette a funny video that he had recorded on his baton to show Lordbug. This led to Marinette showing Chat Noir some TikToks Alya had send her and a minor discussion about Chat Noir’s capabilities to do a flip or not.

When the rain finally stopped, Chat Noir insisted in going upstairs to prove Marinette that he could do a flip flawlessly, despite Marinette repeatedly telling him that it was a bad idea and that the floor would be all wet and slippery. And just like Marinette had told him, when Chat tried to jump to do the flip, he slipped and crashed into the handrail instead.

In her pettiest mood, Marinette rolled her eyes as she thought ‘I told you’ and then she went to check on Chat Noir, worried since he hadn’t gotten up yet. When she saw that it wasn’t that Chat hadn’t gotten up, but that he couldn’t get up because his bell was stuck on the handrail, Marinette snorted loudly and immediately covered her mouth to prevent herself from laughing out loud, which was a bit late since she already had snorted ad he had heard her perfectly if the grunt he had let out was any indication.

“What happens Chat? Are you trying to bell the cat or are you getting out of my handrail” says Marinette chuckling. “It seems that this time you didn’t had a cat chance in hell to do a flip”.

“Har har, you’re so funny” says Chat Noir pouting as he mentally laughs at Marinette puns.

“I mean, I’m not the cat’s mother, but I think I did warn you that doing a flip in wet floor would be like putting the cat among the pigeons” says Marinette now openly laughing.

“Marinette, can you please stop laughing at me and help me out of here?” asks Chat blushing mortified.

“Oh, but you’re such a cool cat, I’m sure you’ll be able to do it by yourself” says Marinette. “Or is it maybe that this cat doesn’t have nine lives?”

“Princess, please. Could you help me for the love of Lordbug?” asks Chat Noir wanting to die.

“This is what you get for not listening to me” says Marinette as she takes some pictures. “By the way, I’m totally sending these to Ladybug and Lordbug”.

“Princess don’t you dare send those photos! Princess! I’m warning you!” says Chat Noir as he repeatedly tries to get the bell out by force to no avail.

“Too late, I’ve already sent them and it seems that Lordbug has already receive it” says Marinette teasing him, because she hadn’t sent any photos to her other phone nor to Marin’s other phone.

“Let’s make a deal! Okey?” asks Chat Noir panicking. He was determined to prevent that Ladybug saw him in such a situation. “If you delete those pictures before they see them, I’ll be doing whatever you want! I could be your model! I could get you pricey fabrics!”

“Okay, I’ll accept the deal” says Marinette as she saves the photos on her cloud and deletes them from the mobile to show it to Chat. “See, I deleted them even from my phone”.

“Thank you Mari” says Chat relaxing a bit. “Now, could you please help me to get out of here?”

“Fine, I’ll help you” says Marinette rolling her eyes amused. She tries to pull him out, but she can’t. “Uh oh”.

“Please, don’t say it” says Chat anticipating Marinette’s next line.

“Fine, I won’t say it” agrees Marinette. “But we have to get you out of there before anyone notices you in my balcony”.

“I agree. Besides, this position is definitely not the most comfortable at all” says Chat.

“Oh! I know! What if I cover you with a blanket and you detransform? That way you’d be free” says Marinette. “Unless you also wear a bell as a civilian”.

“I don’t wear a bell as a civilian” says Chat quickly. “But wouldn’t your blanket get dirty and wet?”

“Chat, it’s a blanket, I can put it on the washing machine and let it dry” says Marinette rolling her eyes.

“Oh, you’re right”.

“I’ll go for the blanket then. What does your magical thingy eat?” asks Marinette feigning ignorance about Plagg’s massive passion for cheese.

“Plagg likes cheese, preferably camembert” says Chat remembering that Marinette is best friends with the bugs and has seen Tikki and Tekke multiple times.

“Got it” says Marinette before getting inside of her room. Minutes later, she returns with a plate of camembert and a bunch blankets that she puts over Chat Noir, also covering the handrail completely to ensure that no one sees him detransform. “Here you go catboy, you can already detransform safely”.

“Thank you Princess. Plagg, claws in!” chants Chat Noir and turns into Adrien.

“Pffft, I can believe you did that kid!” says Plagg bursting into laughs. “Way to embarrass yourself!”

Adrien glares at him, but doesn’t say anything just in case Marinette would recognise his voice

“Plagg? I have camembert here for you” says Marinette giggling.

“I’ve just met you and I already love you Princess” says Plagg winking at Marinette as he phases through the blankets and devours the camembert. “Fu fetter take car uf her kit, ur I’m cataclyfming fur aff”.

“You shouldn’t speak with your mouth full Plagg” admonishes Marinette as she scratches his head.

“Sorry Princess” says Plagg after engulfing the camembert completely. He purrs at Marinette as she pets him.

“It was nice to meet you Plagg, but I’m sure that Chat must want to get out of those blankets and dry his clothes” says Marinette.

“You’re right Pigtails, duty calls for this poor kwami” says Plagg dramatically as he phases into the blankets. “I hope that we’ll meet again”.

“We’ll see about that” says Marinette. “Maybe when Hawk Moth has been captured”.

“Plagg, claws out!” whispers Adrien and transforms into Chat Noir. “Ah, much better now”.

“Be careful not to get stuck again please, I’m not sure if I could resist the temptation to send it permanently twice” says Marinette giggling.

“I’m sorry for the mess I caused” says Chat plainly ignoring her teasing. “Let me help you to put these in the washer machine”.

“Oh! My hero!~” sasses Marinette.

“I am a gentlecat after all” says Chat and Marinette snorts. ”Hey!”

“If you say so kit-cat” says Marinette giggling. "Except for when you insist on ignoring the warnings of the girl you one-sidedly decided to blatantly call her Princess without concerning for said girl".

"Excuse me but this cata here has some honour you know?" says Chat indignant. "And I thought you liked that I call you Princess, it's a cute nickname!"

"Sure thing kit-cat" says Marinette flicking his bell. "I do like the nickname now, but don't take always things for granted".

"I should have asked" agrees Chat mumbling with a low voice, trying that Marinette doesn't hears his pettty confesion.

"You should" says Marinette. "Just like you should have listened to me when I told you that doing a flip on a wet balcony was a bad idea".

"You're not letting this go anytime soon, are you?" asks Chat Noit pouting.

"I don't know~ Maybe I'll let it go just like my balcony let your cute bell go" says Marinette flickin again Chat's bell. "Oh wait, it didn't".

"You're making very hard for me to keep considering you as a good girl miss" says Chat.

"Says the daredevil who stubbornly tried to prove his value" replies Marinette and Chat Noir pouts more. After seeing that Chat doesn't talks, Marinette smirks. "Did the cat got his own tongue?"

"Maybe I did" says pettily Chat.

"And you say that you're a gentlecat" says Mari giggling. She flicks Chat's bell again and Chat grabs his bell.

"Aren't you touching my bell too much now Princess?" says Chat Noir. "If you don't stop I'll report this as sexual harassement to the local authorities".

"I was simply checking it was all fine Chat" says Marinette rolling her eyes. "Maybe teasing you a bit, but it seems that the gentlecat can't take it".

"I'll have you know that the bell was always perfectly fine, thank you" says Chat.

"Pffft. You weren't saying the same when it was stuck on my balcony's handrail" says Marinette now snorting.

"Sometimes I wonder why I hang out with you" says Chat looking away annoyed.

"Ahh, must be because you like me" says Marinette laughing as she puts everything in the washing machine.

"Yes, I do" thinks Chat stealing a glance from Marinette with a faint blush on his cheeks. "Maybe more than I ever imagined".

[domesticfluffsimulator]

enide-s-dear a réagi à votre billet “honestly I have a lot of really really really small grievances with...”

Anything in particular that's been bugging you?

I mean, the one thing that really, really feels super weird to me is the fact that in certain areas you’ll get a minimap in the corner of the screen, but in others you won’t have it appear automatically you have to open the map from the menu, but in others you have a kind of radar thing on top of the screen instead. Like. It’s very petty but just settle for one of these? For clarity?

In the same vein, you just press triangle for basically every interaction with everything, except for opening chests, which could be interesting because yeah, opening a chest does take more time than other things and it could mean that you’ll be thinking twice about trying to sneak past enemies to get a treasure for example (it’s never the case, but it could be). But each time you have to trigger a switch you ALSO have to hold the triangle button for three full seconds? Why? Couldn’t I just press the button once for that? 

And I know they switched from Luminous engine to Unreal Engine 4 during development, so I can imagine that there are some stuff that they started doing with Luminous that then conflitcted with how UE4 works, but it’s kind of just. Weird that I keep remembering that fact when I play, as an excuse for that kind of weird tweaks. A smooth finish doesn’t sound like that much to ask (even tho I also agree that complaining about that stuff doesn’t make me look good).

Also like, speaking of which. The Pettiest Shit Ever, but I can’t let it slide. Luminous engine was built for FFXV and was the reason behind the insanely pretty sunlight effects and transparency. And I am sure that they had good reasons to give up on using it, I’m sure it was a pain to use, it was holding together by sheer force of spite and it probably was just easier on the devs to switch to a game engine that was actually thought of as a finished product rather than a set of rules improved during the development of one (1) hellish game. BUT. I am a little bit annoyed as well at the weird “blinding” transition effects that we get every time we come out of a building, and I am also super annoyed at that ULGY ASS MORNING LIGHT when sector 7 is attacked by the weird ghosts thing. THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU GOT ME USED TO, SQUARE.

Anyway.

I’m also a little bit confused by certain parts of the game where I’m given control of Cloud and it’s only to like, carry him ten meters away to trigger the next cutscene. It’s possible that there is just, like, a limitation on cutscenes duration for them to load properly or something. I honestly don’t know enough about that. It’s just that this game relies Very Heavily on cutscenes. And I feel like this also doesn’t help my general feeling of “I’m not playing a finished product” because in the end there are a lot of situations in which I’m just. Not playing enough to my taste, you know?

(I really don’t mind the cutscenes mid-fight to show you that you enter a new phase, and I do believe that some stuff Cloud does is a lot more fun to watch than it would be to play. Like, if head to QTE our way into Cloud jumping off every falling bridge he gets stuck on, that would have ruined the rhythm. But also, at some point, “take Cloud here so we can Show You A Cool Thing” becomes pretty tiresome. Just make a movie if you wanted me to watch something so much.) (Also it creates a kind of weird, almost disturbing contrast between how fucking Lethal Cloud is shown to be, versus me getting my ass beaten three times in a row by bandits in a sewer pipe. But that’s a different conversation.)

And then there’s the whole “Avalanche is actually a sub-part of the real Avalanche organization” that throws me off because. They announced that in interviews before the game was out, so I’d say it’s pretty normal to expect it to be a Big Thing? But instead they just? Come here and save your ass Once, and are never brought up again? And once you’re outside Midgar how is that going to be an important thing?

I know a lot of people have complained about the game’s general duration. I personally am not necessarily a fan of side quests for the sake of side quests and I appreciate the game not sacrificing a sense of urgency by throwing a million mundane things to do at the players. So I’m okay with the number of side quests and how they’re integrated into the story. But it feels like the general story is missing a beat or two, still, and especially the Avalanche thing makes me tick.

[bellatrixobsessed1]

I’ll Meet You At The Bottom (Part 57)

So I think I’m actually gonna start to wrap this fic up. As much as I love it and enjoyed it, I’m starting to fear that if I keep it going much longer it’ll get redundant and ruin a good thing. I am a firm believer in too much of a good thing is a bad thing so I’m going to begin bringing the fic to a close. Please feel free to leave feedback and let me know if you think that there are any loose ends that need tying (aside from Xanu’s scheme, that’s already part of the plan).

Azula lie in the sand with her hair fanned out around her. Sokka threaded another hibiscus into the crown he was making for her. But it never seemed to work quite well. He didn’t know how Yoona did it she was pumping the things out like an old war-age Fire Nation factory. His seemed to crumble before he finished them. He could already see a tan creeping into Azula’s complexion a she lounged leisurely on her towel. With her so invested in her sunbathing, Sokka was left with time to think and he found himself wondering again why she was so willing to put herself at risk for this Wire guy. Sokka had conversed with him briefly, he seemed like a nice enough kid Sokka supposed.

 “Hey Tribesman!” Hollared Khoza. “Put that flower crown away and join us in the ocean.”

 “He doesn’t like the ocean.” He heard Toph shout back.

 “Neither do you.” Katara pointed out as she neared the shore.

 “Yeah, but I’m not from the Water Tribe.” Toph replied. “Imagine if I was afraid of rocks.” She picked up the tiniest pebble she could find and started shrieking at it.

 “Toph, stop it.” Katara covered her ears.

 “Exactly! See how annoying that is?”

 “I don’t yell and scream whenever I see the ocean.” Sokka shot back.

 .oOo.

 Azula rolled onto her back. They were a noisy bunch that was for sure, unlike Zuko, Mai, and TyLee. It was odd to be in company so different from the kind she used to keep. She listened to them go back and forth for some time, feeling the sun soak generously into her skin. Already the island sun seemed to be burning away her troubles and the waves washing away the last of her guilt. Though it did pain her to admit that she was curious as to what kind of other exotic drinks the place had to offer. Maybe she could have a taste in a more controlled environment.

 “They loud.” Yoona pointed at Toph and Sokka who were still engaging in their battle of wits.

 “Yes.” Azula agreed. “Quiet. I’m sure we could probably find a quiet place if we wanted.” She eyed a particularly shady cluster of palm trees. “I think Khoza would enjoy reading under those.” On the contrary, the young man was trying his very hardest to dunk Wire—who despite his short stature, always seemed to have the upperhand.

 She stood and stretched, deciding that if she was going to get Sokka in the water she may as well do it then. “Come on, Sokka.” She took his hand.

 “Where are we going?” He sputtered.

 “Where do you think?” Azula replied. “I want to go for a swim, and I want you to join me.” Before he could protest, she tugged him along with a mischievous grin.

 “You can’t hate the water forever, Sokka.” Katara gave her input.

 “Watch me.” Sokka argued. But somehow he had a feeling that Azula wouldn’t let him resent it forever. She was chest deep in the saltwater before he could give one single cry of protest. A more primitive part of him feared for her. Feared that the ocean would swallow her up and he’d never see her again.

 The feeling of the waves beneath her as she floated on her back was rather divine. Unexpectedly so. It had been a great many years since she’d gone swimming. “Come on Sokka, don’t tell me you’re going to let a firebender out swim you.” The look in his eyes told her that if he were a waterbender she might have received the splash of her life. Instead he charged—somewhat hesitantly—into the water and splashed her the old-fashioned way. As annoying and peace-breaking as that was, she was glad to have the man in the water. With any luck she would help him create some fond memories of the water to replace the ones that haunted him so. With even more luck it would distract her from the jittery feeling that came with thinking over how to approach Chan.

 .oOo.

 The woman was a beautiful nightmare. A reoccurring nightmare that always came to him when he expected it the least. Granted if she were to make an unexpected appearance, it would make sense that her face would be seen in the party crowd. In his party crowd. He had to admit that he hadn’t thought of her in ages. Azula was dressed relatively simply in comparison to her usual flair. But she was still a radiant presence in the room. A vibrant presence that he didn’t know what to make of. All at once he wondered how bad things were with her tribesman to have her running back to him. He ought to ask her how lonely she was. He pretended not to notice her as she weaved through the crowd, but he had a sinking feeling that she knew that he already had.

 “What’s she doing here?” Bo-Rem grumbled.

 And from Yoko he heard a harsh. “You invites her?”

 “That’s the thing, Yoko. I don’t have to.” Chan replied. “She has a habit of showing up unannounced.”

 “Can’t really do anything to stop her.” Boryuk noted.

 Chan left a moment of empty quiet for Taeyul to chime in, but as of late he was even less for words than usual. Ever since his run in with death, he scarcely uttered a word. Wire had always been the one to get him talking again when he was in one of his somber moods. Their group was in tatters, dispersed and separate and it seemed to affect poor Tae the most. If Chan had to guess he’d say that Taeyul somehow blamed himself. Chan had to admit that he might have been responsible for that, on one such occasion he considered that if Taeyul hadn’t contracted that infection then they would still be together in the Pit. He shook his head, thinking of the place had his stomach twisting in melancholy knots. He adored the grand splendor of Ember Island but it no longer felt like home. Not like the Ash Pit did. Ember Island was breathtaking and clean…and safe. But it was a cesspool of upper class lies. At least with the Pit, he knew who to trust, who really wanted his companionship. There was a sense of loyalty in the Ash Pit that he couldn’t find in the upper rings of society.  And to his great dismay, Azula—a quintessential example of a deceitful noble—was nearing him fast. She had played him for a fool many times, she had probably been stringing him along just so she could get her fix all along. He was finally finding a sense of stability again and she was going to undo it.

 “Hey, isn’t that the bitch who trashed our party a while back?” Ruon-Jian asked.

 He hushed his boyfriend. As charming as Ruon-Jian was, he had no tact when it came to matters of holding the tongue. He never had grown out of his boyhood taunts and jests and often tangled himself with people of statuses higher than he held. One badly placed snide remark or two had him on the blacklist of high-ranking traders and military generals among others. According to his recounts, he’d been chased clear down the beach by the husband of a woman had called a hippo-cow. Chan was faintly amused, such a fiasco was how he had come to reunit with his childhood companion. Even so he didn’t want to deal with Azula’s reaction to jabs at her ego, especially since she had likely just gotten it back intact. Lost in his anticipation, he felt Ruon-Jian elbow him. “Isn’t she?”

 “Yeah, Ruon, that’s her.” He muttered.

 “Tell ‘er to go back home.” Bo-Rem demanded.

 “Where she belong.” Yoko added.

 “I’ll be back in a minute.” Chan replied. “Just let me deal with this.” He cast a look in Azula’s direction, he could see her eyeing him with a purpose. With a fair deal of spite, he kissed Ruon-Jian as firmly as he could. She probably thought that he was the pettiest fool in the world.

 .oOo.

 “How are things?” Azula asked the tropical night wind gently tousled her hair. It had been so terribly long since she had last been on this balcony and with it came a myriad of memories, both pleasing and not so much.

 “They’re fine and they’ll be fine again when you leave.” He replied.

 She admitted that, that had stung. She’d expected reluctance but the bitter bite to his voice…he resented her. And it bled through in his tone. “I wasn’t planning on staying.” Azula fought to keep her gaze locked with his. “I was here to drop someone off.”

 “What?”

 She motioned for Wire to join them on the balcony. “It was kind of tricky to find him but I thought that you would like to see him again. Yoona and Khoza are here too.”

 “For how long?” Chan asked.

 “Yoona really likes it here.” Azula smiled softly. “She has a thing for the volcanoes. She wants to explore one sometime. I don’t have the time to take her, maybe you’d like the honor?” She watched Chan ruffled his own hair, something he did often when he was frustrated. Or when he didn’t know how to take something. She assumed that he had expected her to show up at his doorstep, hands ablaze with blue. “Wire is going to stay with you, I’ll make sure of that.

 “What are you talking about?” He asked.

 “I’m not letting him go back to that woman.” Azula said firmly. “She reminds me of my father. She treats him how my father treated me…” she trailed off. “Maybe worse. At least with my father, you could tell that he didn’t care. That woman, she’s nice to Wire but only when she has a crowd.”

 Wire shifted uncomfortably.

 “He needs some place to stay, I suppose if you don’t…”

 “No!” Chan shouted. “I do, I want to help him. You know that I do.”

 “But…”

 “Nothing.” Chan muttered. “He can stay with me. I just didn’t think that I’d be seeing him so soon, I thought that I lost him.”

 “You thought that you lost Ruon-Jian too.” Azula shrugged. “You always seem to find your way back to the people who need you.”

 “What about you?” He asked. “You care about them too.”

 “It’s a lot easier for me to throw some money around and visit you here then it is for you to come back to the mainland.” Azula shrugged.

 “So, is this your way of apologizing for using me?” Chan asked.

 Azula scowled to herself. Frankly she had enough of apologizing. Heartfelt sorry’s were never her thing anyhow. “I guess it is.”

 “Well then I’d actually like to hear an apology.”

 Azula scrunched her nose. In some ways Chan was a lot like Sokka, and this was, without a doubt, one of those ways. “Listen, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have Ruon-Jian.”

 “Say it.” He pestered.

 “No.”

 “Then your apology isn’t accepted.” Chan crossed his arms.

 “You’re an ass just like Sokka.” She grumbled as she propped herself against one of the wooden pillars of the balcony. This drew a small snicker from Wire.

 “I can’t believe your using me as an apology present.” He declared.

 “I can take him back.” Azula noted. She looked back and assessed Wire’s reaction to the suggestion. He didn’t seem to disprove.

 Chan rolled his eyes. “Thanks for bringing them back. Yoona told me she wanted to see Ember Island, it was a dream of hers. You also gave Khoza a taste of his dream life.” He sighed. “I suppose you did more good then harm.”

 “You’re welcome.” Azula replied, her smug expression was cut short by Chan’s arms wrapping around her. She had missed the way he held her. She faintly missed being in the raw atmosphere of the Ash Pit, laying next to him.  She was forgiven.

 For some time, he remained with his arm slung over her shoulder. The sound of the ocean lapping and the palm fronds rattling put her more fully at ease. It reminded her of old times. Times that were much simpler, yet somehow so complex at the same time. Of a time when she had met a boy she found on par with herself and tried to flirt with. He rubbed her arms like he had so long ago, before they had their first falling out. For all the world, it reminded her of those quiet nights with him as she recovered from her first bought of insanity. A time when she had a string of golden pearls in her hair and a fake laugh to give. This time when she laughed it was genuine. His joke was just as terrible, worse than any of Sokka’s, but his confident delivery of it…that’s what humored her. He placed a hand on top of hers and they listened to the call of a tiger-toucan. She hoped that Sokka wouldn’t mind. She liked to think that he felt secure enough with her. She would make sure to have a nice night with him when they got back to her vacation house. She imagined that Chan and Ruon-Jian would have a night of their own.

 “You’re going to write me.” Azula broke the silence. “When I leave Ember Island, you’re going to write me a long letter about how you managed to patch things up with your father and Ruon-Jian.”

 “My dad was pretty easy. I left, he realized that I wasn’t as bad as he liked to think I was, he regretted his decision, you know how it goes. Now Ruon-Jian and I, yeah, I’ll have to write you the whole story.”

 “Once I get that, I’ll tell you all about how I found Wire.” Though she wasn’t sure that it would be as compelling as Chan’s tale. She looked up at the stars, thinking that perhaps throwing in a recount of her time spent in the Water Tribe would help her outdo him.

 “Or I could tell him about how you found me.” Wire put in. “And I’ll have to introduce him to Petro.”

 “Oh right, Petro.” Azula replied, “yes, you can stop by sometime tomorrow and pick her up.”

 “Who’s Petro?” Chan asked.

 “His new girlfriend.” Azula answered without missing a beat.

 “She’s an elephant-mouse.” Wire said.

 “Well that’s an awful thing to say about your girl.” Chan jested. It might have been the only genuinely humorous joke he’d made all night. And Azula found herself grinning. What a ridiculous thing to find funny. It felt so normal. Everything about that day felt so normal. For that it felt right. She had a small taste of what it would have been to just be an ordinary woman in a flashier beach house. An ordinary woman just conversing and peering down at the beach where campfires burned and the smell of cooking meat wafted up to meet them. And that sense of normalcy felt so wonderful.

 .oOo.

 Azula arrived later than he expected. But that was alright because it had given him more time to prepare. The room smelled of nag champa incense and hibiscus petals, though the incense seemed to vastly overpower the petals. The room was lit only by a few flickering candles that cast a warm glow about the place. He wasn’t a good chef by any means so Katara had to walk him through it. As he followed her instructions they had another long discussion, sorting out the matters that he thought needed more addressing. They talked until his mind eased some and by the time the discussion was through, he had finished his baking. He arranged different platters on the floor, he knew that they’d never be able to eat it all but he would save the leftovers for Toph and Katara. He re-arranged the layout a few more times before settling on the one he’d picked to begin with. With all of the spare time Azula had left him, he sprinkled a few petals around the floor and waited.

 At last the Fire Lord made her way inside. “Why is it so dark in here?”

 “Just trying to set the mood.” Sokka answered.

 Azula cocked her head, “what mood?”

 “You’ll know it when you feel it.” He replied unhelpfully. She narrowed her eyes in confusion. It would seem that Azula was even less romantically inclined than he had initially anticipated. He sighed, she was something else. He took her by the waist and led her to the center of the room where he had arranged all of the candles into the shape of a heart. He tried to anyhow, it was a little lopsided. He motioned for her to sit and handed her a strawberry.

 “Oh.” Azula mused softly. “The mood.”

 He might not have been the best at this kind of thing, but he wasn’t alone. Maybe that in itself was why things had gone so well. Neither seemed to have dauntingly high expectations for one another. Sokka thought that they might not have had any expectations at all. He certainly didn’t expect to be sprawled out on the floor with her on top of him, laughing because he had forgotten to add ice cream to his ice cream cake. He didn’t know why they had to be on the ground to do that, but he didn’t mind. He was fond of the way her head felt on his chest and how her fingers curled in the fabric of his shirt. Her hair getting in his face was something he could do without, all the same he wouldn’t have it any other way.

 The soft smile that tugged at her lips was mirrored on his own. For the first time in a long time, he felt completely undisturbed, untroubled. In the faint illumination of the candles, he could tell that she was completely relaxed. As he did so often, he found himself rubbing up and down along her back as the candles flickered. She tapped her fingers on his collar bone. “I love you.” He whispered. He thought that it might have been the first time he blatantly vocalized it.

 Azula nuzzled her head against his chest, “yes, thanks for doing that.”

 He rolled his eyes. Again, he found himself amazed by her apparent struggle to be affectionate. Even so, she kissed his neck, leaving her lips to linger there. He decided that—in the same way Azula was comforting—she was loving in her own way. Very loving, but very unconventionally and borderline awkwardly so. And much like the progression of the night, he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

[ciathyzareposts]

Day of the Tentacle

Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write. Both applied, both were shocked when they were called out to George Lucas’s beautiful Skywalker Ranch for an interview, and both were fortunate enough to be hired to work for a division of Lucas’s empire that was still known at the time as Lucasfilm Games rather than LucasArts. It was quite a stroke of luck for two innately funny and creative souls who had never before seriously considered applying their talents to game development. “If I hadn’t seen that job listing,” says Schafer, “I would have ended up a database engineer, I think.” Similar in age, background, and personality as they were, Grossman and Schafer would remain all but inseparable for the next four years.

They spent the first weeks of that time working intermittently as player testers while they also attended what their new colleagues had dubbed “SCUMM University,” a combination technical boot camp and creative proving ground for potential adventure-game designers. Schafer:

A group of us were thrown into SCUMM University, because all of the LucasArts games used SCUMM [Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion]. The four of us were messing around with it, writing our own dialogue. They gave us some old art to work with, so we were just writing goofy stuff and joking around, trying to make each other laugh. I think LucasArts was watching us the whole time, and they picked me and [Grossman] out and said that they liked the writing.

Grossman and Schafer were assigned to work as understudies to Ron Gilbert on the first two Monkey Island games. Here they got to hone their writing and puzzle-making chops, even as they absorbed the LucasArts philosophy of saner, fairer adventure-game design from the man most responsible for codifying and promoting it. In early 1992, shortly after the completion of Monkey Island 2, Gilbert announced that he was quitting LucasArts to start a company of his own specializing in children’s software. He left behind as a parting gift an outline of what would have been his next project had he stayed: the long-awaited, much-asked-for sequel to his very first adventure game, 1987’s Maniac Mansion. The understudies now got to step into the role of the stars; Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle became Grossman and Schafer’s baby.

Times were changing quickly inside LucasArts, keeping pace with changes in the industry around them. After first conceiving of Day of the Tentacle as a floppy-disk-based game without voice acting, LucasArts’s management decided midway through its development that it should be a real technological showpiece in all respects — the first adventure game to be released simultaneously on floppy disk and CD-ROM. Along with X-Wing, the first actual Star Wars game LucasArts had ever been allowed to make, it would be one of their two really big, high-profile releases for 1993.

It was a lot of responsibility to heap on two young pairs of shoulders, but the end result  demonstrates that Grossman and Schafer had learned their craft well as understudies. Day of the Tentacle is a spectacularly good adventure game; if not the undisputed cream of the LucasArts crop, it’s certainly in the conversation for the crown of their best single game ever. It achieves what it sets out to do so thoroughly that it can be very difficult for a diligent critic like yours truly to identify any weaknesses at all that don’t sound like the pettiest of nitpicking. The graphics are as good as any ever created under the limitations of VGA; the voice acting is simply superb; the puzzle design is airtight; the writing is sharp and genuinely, consistently laugh-out-loud funny; and the whole thing is polished to a meticulous sheen seldom seen in the games of today, much less those of 1993. It’s a piece of work which makes it hard for a critic to avoid gushing like a moon-eyed fanboy, as Evan Dickens of Adventure Gamers did when that site declared it to be the best game of its genre ever made:

The 1993 CD “talkie” version of Day of the Tentacle is a perfectly flawless adventure, the rarest of rare games, that which did nothing wrong. Nothing. There is no weakness in this game, no sieve. Stop waiting for the “but” because it won’t come. This is the perfect adventure game, the one adventure that brought every aspect of great adventures together and created such an enjoyable masterpiece, it almost seems to transcend the level of computer games.

Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. Still, it’s hard for me to imagine very many people not being charmed by its gloriously cracked introductory movie and wanting to play further.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/dott.mp4

One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground, being content to work entirely within a template which LucasArts and others had long since established by the point of its release. It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy, always the lowest-hanging fruit for an adventure-game design. Within that template, though, it executes everything so well that it’s almost annoying. This is the cartoon-comedy graphic adventure perfected, serving as the ultimate proof that much of what is sometimes forgiven or dismissed as “just the way adventure games are” is really the product of poor adventure-game design. Most of the problems that so many players consider to be intractable ones for the genre simply don’t exist here. The puzzles are goofy but always soluble, the dreaded sudden deaths and dead ends are nonexistent, and pixel hunts aren’t a problem amidst the game’s bright, clearly delineated scenes.

Day of the Tentacle‘s predecessor Maniac Mansion stood out from other adventure games in 1987, as it still does today, for allowing the player to select her own “party” of three characters, each with his or her own special skills, from a total of seven possibilities. The result was an unusual amount of replayability for the adventure-game genre; every possible combination of characters was capable of solving the game, but each would have to do so in a different way. Although this made Maniac Mansion a much more interesting game than it might otherwise have been, it was all nightmarishly complex for the game’s designer Dave Gilbert to map out. He would later state that only sheer naivete could ever have prompted him to expose himself to such pain — and, indeed, his first statement after finishing the game was, “I’m never doing anything like that again!” He held to that resolution throughout the rest of his time at LucasArts; his 1990 game The Secret of Monkey Island was at least as good as Maniac Mansion, but it owed its goodness to its writing, humor, art direction, and puzzle design, not to a similar formal ambition.

Against Gilbert’s advice, Grossman and Schafer first envisioned Day of the Tentacle operating along the same lines as Maniac Mansion, with another group of a half-dozen or so kids from which to choose a team. But the escalating cost of art and sound in the multimedia age played as big a role in nixing those plans as did the additional design complications; the two soon settled for giving the player control of a fixed group of three characters — which, they didn’t hesitate to point out, was still two more than most adventure games.

As this anecdote illustrates, Day of the Tentacle was never overly concerned with aping the details of its predecessor. Certainly if you play it without having played Maniac Mansion before, you’ll hardly be lost. Grossman:

We really couldn’t imitate the style of the original in the way you normally would with a sequel. Too much time had passed and the state of the art was radically different. We stopped thinking of it as a sequel almost immediately and just did our own thing, slathering our own personalities on top of that of Maniac Mansion.

Grossman and Schafer did reuse those elements of the earlier game that amused them most: the mad scientist Doctor Fred and his equally insane wife and son; the rambling old mansion where they all live; a memorable gag involving a hamster and a microwave; a pair of wise-cracking sentient tentacles, one of whom became the centerpiece of their plot and provided their sequel with its name. But of the kids the player got to control in Maniac Mansion, only Bernard, the über-nerd of the bunch, shows up again here. (Not coincidentally, Bernard had always been the favorite of the original game’s players, perhaps because of his range of unusual technical skills, perhaps because — if we’re being totally honest here — he was the teenage archetype who most resembled the typical young player.) Notably, Dave, the oddly bland default protagonist of the earlier game — he’s the only one you have to take with you, even though he’s the dullest of the lot — doesn’t show up at all here. In the place of Dave and the other kids, Grossman and Schafer augmented Bernard with two new creations of their own: a bro-dude “MegaBreth” roadie named Hoagie and a terminally nervous medical student named Laverne.

The story here does follow up on that of Maniac Mansion, but, once again, it doesn’t really matter whether you realize it or not. Five years after his previous adventure, Bernard receives a plea for help from Green Tentacle, informing him that Purple Tentacle has drunk some toxic sludge, which has instilled in him superhuman (supertentacle?) intelligence and a burning desire to enslave the world. Now, Doctor Fred has decided to deal with the problem by killing both tentacles; this is an obviously problematic plan from Green Tentacle’s perspective. Bernard convinces his two reluctant pals Hoagie and Laverne to head out to Doctor Fred’s mansion and stage an intervention. In attempting to do so, they unwittingly help Purple Tentacle to escape, and he sets out to take over the world. And so, just like that, we’re off to save the world.

It doesn’t take Day of the Tentacle long to introduce its secret puzzling weapon: time travel. Doctor Fred, you see, just happens to have some time machines handy; known as “Chron-O-Johns,” they’re made from outdoor port-a-potties. With his plan for summary tentacle execution having failed, he hatches an alternative plan: to send the kids one day back in time, where they’ll prevent Purple Tentacle from ever drinking the toxic waste in the first place. But the time machines turn out to work about as well as most of Doctor Fred’s inventions. One sends Hoagie back 200 years instead of one day into the past, where he finds Ben Franklin and other Founding Fathers in the midst of writing the American Constitution in what will someday become Doctor Fred’s mansion; another sends Laverne 200 years into the future, when Purple Tentacle has in fact taken over the world and the mansion is serving as the dictatorial palace for him, his tentacle minions, and their human slaves; and the last time machine leaves Bernard right where (when?) he started.

You can switch between the kids at any time, and many of the more elaborate puzzles require you to make changes in one time to pave the way for solving them in another. In some instances, the kids can “flush” objects through time to one another using the Chron-O-John. On other occasions, a kid must find a way to hide objects inside the mansion, to be collected by another kid two or four centuries further down the time stream. “It was really fun to think about the effects of large amounts of time on things like wine bottles and sweaters in dryers,” remembers Grossman, “and to imagine how altering fundamentals of history like the Constitution and the flag could be used to accomplish petty, selfish goals like the acquisition of a vacuum and a tentacle costume.” Of course, just like in Maniac Mansion, it doesn’t pay to question how the kids are communicating their intentions to one another over such gulfs. Just go with it! This is, after all, a cartoon adventure.

Hoagie’s part of the plot coincidentally shares a setting and to some extent a tone with another clever and funny time-traveling adventure game that was released in 1993: Sierra’s Pepper’s Adventures in TIme. Both games even feature a cartoon Ben Franklin in important roles. Yet it must be said that LucasArts’s effort is even sharper and funnier, its wit and gameplay polished to a fine sheen, with none of the wooliness that tends to cling even to Sierra’s best games. The inability to die or get yourself irrevocably stuck means that you’re free to just enjoy the ride — free, for instance, to choose the funniest line of dialog in any conversation without hesitation, safe in the knowledge that you’ll be able to do it over again if it all goes horribly wrong. “The player is never, ever punished for doing something funny,” wrote Charles Ardai, the best writer ever to work for Computer Gaming World magazine, in his typically perceptive review of the game. “Doing funny things is the whole point of Day of the Tentacle.”

Although Grossman and Schafer were and are bright, funny guys, their game’s sparkle didn’t come from its designers’ innate brilliance alone. By 1993, LucasArts had claimed Infocom’s old place as makers of the most consistently excellent adventure games you could buy. And as with the Infocom of old, their games’ quality was largely down to a commitment to process, including a willingness to work through the hard, unfun aspects of game development which so many of their peers tended to neglect. Throughout the development of Day of the Tentacle, Grossman and Schafer hosted periodic “pizza orgies,” first for LucasArts’s in-house employees, later for people they quite literally nabbed off the street. They watched these people play their game — always a humbling and useful experience for any designer — and solicited as much feedback thereafter as their guinea pigs could be convinced to give. Which parts of the game were most fun? Which parts were less fun? Which puzzles felt too trivial? Which puzzles felt too hard? They asked their focus groups what they had tried to do that hadn’t worked, and made sure to code in responses to these actions. As Bob Bates, another superb adventure-game designer, put it to me recently, most of what the player tries to do in an adventure game is wrong in terms of advancing her toward victory. A game’s handling of these situations — the elses in the “if, then, else” model of game logic — can make or break it. It can spell the difference between a lively, “juicy” game that feels engaging and interesting and a stubbornly inscrutable blank wall — the sort of game that tells you things don’t work but never tells you why. And of course these else scenarios are a great place to embed subtle hints as to the correct course of action.

Indeed, Grossman and Schafer continually asked themselves the same question in the context of every single puzzle in the game: “How is the player supposed to figure this out?” Grossman:

That [question] has stuck with me as a hallmark of good versus bad adventure-game design. Lots of people design games that make the designer seem clever — or they’re doing it to make themselves feel clever. They’ve forgotten that they’re in the entertainment business. The player should be involved in this thing too. We always went to great lengths to make sure all the information was in there. At these “pizza orgies,” one of the things we were always looking for was, are people getting stuck? And why?

The use of three different characters in three completely different environments also helps the game to avoid that sensation every adventurer dreads: that of being absolutely stuck, unable to jog anything lose because of one stubborn roadblock of a puzzle. If a puzzle stumps you in Day of the Tentacle, there’s almost always another one to go work on instead while the old one is relegated to the brain’s background processing, as it were.

And yet, as in everything, there is a balance to strike here as well: gating in adventure design is an art in itself. Grossman:

We were very focused on making things non-linear, but what we weren’t thinking about was that it’s possible to take that too far. Then you get a paralysis of choice. There’s kind of a sweet spot in the middle between the player being lost because they have too much to do and the player feeling railroaded because you’re telling them what to do. People don’t like either of those extremes very much, but somewhere in the middle, it’s like, “I’ve got enough stuff to think about, and I’m accomplishing some things, and I’ve got some new challenges.” That’s the right spot.

Day of the Tentacle nails this particular sweet spot, as it does so many others. It could never have done so absent extensive testing and — just as importantly — an open-mindedness on the part of its designers about what the testers were saying. It’s due to a lack of these two things that the adventure games of LucasArts’s rivals tended to go off the rails more often than not.

In addition to the superb puzzle design, Day of the Tentacle looks and sounds great — even today, even in its non-remastered version. The graphics are not only technically excellent but also evince an aesthetic sophistication rare in games of this era. The art department was greatly inspired by the classic Warner Bros. cartoons of Chuck Jones — Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile. E. Coyote and the Road Runner, etc. One day near the beginning of the project, the entire team made a field trip to sit at the feet of the 80-year-old Jones for a day and absorb some of his wisdom. Warner Bros. cartoons were always more visually skewed, more manic, and more deviously subversive than the straighter, more wholesome reels of Disney, and both the visuals and writing in Day of the Tentacle consciously mimic their style. Just as in the cartoons, there isn’t a straight line or right angle to be seen anywhere in the game. Everything, right down to the font in which text is printed, is bent, leaning, crooked, a fun-house world viewed through a fish-eye lens.

The art team, the unsung heroes of Day of the Tentacle. Standing from left to right are Lela Dowling, Sean Turner, Larry Ahern, and Peter Chan. Kneeling in front are Jesse Clark and Purple Tentacle. One additional artist, Kyle Balda, wasn’t present for this photograph.

Peter Chan, one of the artists on the team, notes that Grossman and Schafer “really trusted us and just let us go to town with what we believed would look best. If anybody on the art team had a good idea or suggestion, it was considered.” Here’s Schafer, speaking in an interview at the time of the game’s release, and obviously somewhat in awe himself at what LucasArts’s animators have come up with:

The kids have all kinds of grimaces and gestures and facial twists and contortions while they’re talking. They smile and their mouths open bigger than their heads and their tongues can hang out. They don’t just stand there. They blink, tap their feet, sigh, and even scratch their butts.

As soon as a character appears, you laugh, and that’s really important. You stare at the main characters for about thirty hours when you play the game, so they’d better be entertaining. With Bernard, as soon as you see him walking around for the first time, before he even says or does anything, you laugh. He walks goofy, he talks goofy, he’s even entertaining when he stands still. Walking Hoagie around is like piloting a blimp through a china shop, and Laverne is fun just to walk around because she seems to have a mind of her own — like she might do something dangerous at any moment.

The sound effects are drawn from the same well of classic animation. LucasArts actually bought many of them from a “major cartoon house,” resulting in all of the good old “boings” and “ka-pows” you might expect.

Tamlynn Bara in the production booth at Studio 222.

And the voice acting too is strikingly good. LucasArts was better equipped than almost any of the other game studios to adapt to the brave new world of CD-ROM audio, thanks to the connections which went along with being a subsidiary of a major film-production company. The actors’ dialog, totaling more than 4500 lines in all, was recorded at Hollywood’s Studio 222 under the supervision of a LucasArts associate producer named Tamlynn Barra. Although still in her twenties at the time, she had previously worked with many stage and video productions. She was thus experienced enough to recognize and find ways to counteract the most fundamental challenge of recording voice work for a computer game: the fact that the actors are expected to voice their lines alone in a production box, with no other actors to play off of and, too often, little notion of the real nature of the scene being voiced. “Getting the actors into character is very difficult,” she acknowledged. “Half the studio [time] is spent cueing up the actor for the scene.” And yet the fact that she knew she had to do this cueing was in a way half the battle. In contrast to many other computer-game productions — even those featuring a stellar cast of experienced actors, such as Interplay’s two contemporaneous Star Trek adventures — Day of the Tentacle has an auditory liveliness to it. It rarely feels as if the actor is merely reading lines off a page in a sound-proof booth, even if that’s exactly what she’s doing in reality.

Jane Jacobs, who voiced the Irish maid found inside the present-day mansion, performs before the microphone.

Unsurprisingly given LucasArts’s connections, the voice actors, while not household names, were seasoned professionals who arrived with their union cards in hand. The most recognizable among them was Richard Sanders, best known for playing the lovable but inept newscaster Les Nessman on the classic television sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. During their initial discussions with Barra, Grossman and Schafer had actually suggested Les as the specific role model for Bernard, whereupon Barra made inquiries and found that Sanders was in fact available. He really was a perfect fit for Bernard; the character was “a bit of a stretch” for him, he said with a wink, because he was used to playing “more manly sorts of roles.”

Barra found the other voice talent using a process typical of television and radio productions but not so much of computer games: she sent sketches and descriptions of the characters out to Hollywood agents, who called their clients in to record audition tapes of their impressions. Then she and the rest of the development team chose their favorites. Many another game studio, by contrast, was recruiting its voice talent from its secretarial pool.

All of it led to an end result that feels today like it’s come unstuck from the time which spawned it. Certainly my own feeling upon firing up Day of the Tentacle for the first time in preparation for this article was that I had crossed some threshold into modernity after living in the ancient past for all of the years I’d previously been writing this blog. This impression is undoubtedly aided by the way that LucasArts steered clear of the approaches that generally date a game indelibly to the mid-1990s. Just to name the most obvious dubious trend they managed to resist: there are no digitized images of real actors shoehorned into this game via once cutting-edge, now aesthetically disastrous full-motion-video sequences.

Yet the impression of modernity encompasses more than the game’s audiovisual qualities; it really does encompass the sum total of the experience of playing it. The interface too just works the way a modern player would expect it to; no need to pick up a manual here to figure out how to play, even if you’ve never played an adventure game before. (The sole exception to this rule is the save system, which still requires you to know to press the F5 key in order to access it. On the other hand, keeping it hidden away does allow the game to avoid cluttering up its carefully honed aesthetic impression with a big old disk icon or the like.) Polish is a difficult quality to quantify, but I nevertheless feel fairly confident in calling Day of the Tentacle the most polished computer game made up to its release date of mid-1993. It looks and feels like a professional media production in every way.

The most telling sign in Day of the Tentacle of how far computer gaming had come in a very short time is found on an in-game computer in the present-day mansion. There you’ll find a complete and fully functional version of the original Maniac Mansion in all its blocky, pixelated, bobble-headed glory. This game within a game was inspired by an off-hand comment which Grossman and Schafer had heard Ron Gilbert make during the Monkey Island 2 project: that the entirety of Maniac Mansion had been smaller than some of the individual animation sequences in this, LucasArts’s latest game. Placed in such direct proximity to its progeny, Maniac Mansion did indeed look “downright primitive,” wrote Charles Ardai in his review of Day of the Tentacle. “Only nostalgia or curiosity will permit today’s gamers to suffer through what was once state-of-the-art but is by today’s standards crude.” And yet it had only been six years…

Ardai concluded his review by writing that “it may not hold up for fifty years, like the cartoons that inspired it, but I expect that this game will keep entertaining people for quite some time to come.” And it’s here that I must beg to differ with his otherwise perceptive review. From the perspective of today, halfway already to the game’s 50th anniversary, Day of the Tentacle still holds up perfectly well as one of the finest examples ever of the subtle art of the adventure game. I see no reason why that should change in the next quarter-century and beyond.

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of July 1993 and September 1993; LucasArts’s newsletter The Adventurer of Fall 1992 and Spring 1993; Play of April 2005; Retro Gamer 22 and 81; Video Games and Computer Entertainment of July 1993. Online sources include Dev Game Club podcast 19; Celia Pearce’s conversation with Tim Schafer for Game Studies; 1Up‘s interview with Tim Schafer; The Dig Museum‘s interview with Dave Grossman; Adventure Gamers‘s interview with Dave Grossman.

A remastered version of Day of the Tentacle is available for purchase on GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/day-of-the-tentacle/

[kaitemariz]

Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned

Hola! How’s your 2018 so far? Mine started out really great and I tend to make it stay that way for the next 11 months.

It’s 1 in the morning here in Manila and I’m writing this blog post from scratch. Unlike in my previous posts wherein I spend a lot of time thinking how to properly organize my overflowing thoughts, this time around, I only have the main topic idea but without any flow at all. For sure this is gonna be one helluva lengthy blog post again. You may choose not to read it because this is just me, writing and typing my heart out as per usual.

Well basically, I just wanna share my 2017 realizations and how I’m planning to own 2018. So here it goes...

No strong sword can be made without being beaten and plunged into immense heat. 

In 2017, our clan lost 3 loved ones. My grandmother being the 3rd and last one. I wrote about her in my previous blog post so you can check that out or you can just CLICK HERE. 

I have felt great and incomparable pain last year but I still won’t consider it as the worst year. In fact, I’m not holding any grudge towards 2017. I’m actually  grateful for it’s the year that has opened up my eyes to reality. I just tell myself, no strong sword can be made without being beaten and plunged into immense heat. 

Family is superior than all others that you consider close to you. No amount of money can equal blood.

People come and go but family, no matter how many times and intense you fight, you can’t escape that kind of knot. You may lose everything but you will never lose your family.

-- Got annoyed with their attitude? You can rant about it. Go ahead and voice it out. But try bonding with them afterwards. It’ll be like you’ve got nothing to complain about and you’t got nothing to wish for because your family is perfect as it imperfectly is.

-- Got a close relationship with your boss? It all ends there. When it comes to your boss’ family, you step aside. Give the family some respect and most importantly, have respect for yourself.

Value your children.

Your children will be the best definition of the kind of life that you have lived. Value your children, prioritize and take good care of your relationship with them. Teach them your ways, give them all you’ve got so that someday, they will give importance to your life’s work and continue your legacy. 

How did I end up with this kind of realization, I don’t have any kids yet? Well, the 3 deaths I have witnessed last year made me realize a lot of things including different kinds of love and relationships. Most especially when I lost my grandma. 

What I admire most about my late grandmother is her ability to love unconditionally. Her love for my gramps. She took his side, defended him, forgave him, and loved him until her very last breath. It’s the kind of love we’d all wish we’d have. But while being an amazing wife, she was also an amazing mother. When she was already really ill, one of the things she made sure her children will not forget is to keep an intact and good relationship among their kids.

Who will be there when your hair turns gray? When you don’t want to take a bath? When you can’t even feed or clean yourself? Will your money be there? No, but your children will be. So don’t praise your work or your partner like they’re some saint and instead, create a bond with your children. A bond that no earthly trial, not even death, can separate.

Let me end this part with this reminder...ALWAYS MAKE YOUR CHILDREN FEEL INVOLVED. Make them feel that their views and opinion are valued. Whether in your family business, small family decisions, make sure your children never fails to feel that they’re part of the process.

Relationships, regardless of its kind, are definitely complicated.

Imagine this: Your relationship with your neighbor is highly valuable to you. You give them the best that you can offer whenever they come over, you immediately respond to their text or call when they need you or to their last minute dinner invitation, you support their business even though you are aware that they’re pricing you overboard...you think the feeling is mutual then one morning, you wake up to the pettiest, shallowest, most disgusting social media rant of all time. You’re slapped by the reality that you aren’t as worthy as you think you are. Feeling sick? You’ll feel disgusted if that happened to you, that’s for sure.

If there’s one thing that life has taught me, it’s relationship towards other people apart from family, IS TEMPORARY AND FRAGILE. They could get easily broken because again, people come and go. Disputes within the family can and must be settled. Make truce and continue the good connection.

But disputes outside the family must be treated differently. Forgive even though no one is asking for pardon, move forward, and burn that bridge. Giving importance to acquaintances, colleagues, or neighbors must not be included in your priorities list. If one person becomes toxic, then flush that sh*t out. 

GOOD RIDDANCE.

CONTENT IS LIFE.

This 2018, one of the mantras I’d like to live by is “content is life”. I can’t help feeling disappointed with myself because I’ve been in the blogosphere since late 2010 but I was able to reach only a few steps away from the starting line. How terrible! So this 2018, I’ll definitely work harder to religiously post here on the blog and on my Instagram. I’ll try to curate more sensible and relatable posts and try on vlogging as well. Wish me luck and I hope you join me in this adventure!

Have the courage to leave everything, may it be good or bad, in 2017 and welcome with open arms what 2018 has to offer.

2017 will now be nothing but a memory. Let’s keep all the twists and turns in the memory lane and bring with us all the lessons learned as we go through 2018.

Early this year, I stumbled upon the “Bucket List” page as I was going through my 2018 planner. I usually find bucket lists cliche but I thought why not try it out? Lo and behold, I ended up enjoying filling those blank spaces up. I never thought I actually have a bucket list! LOL! 

My list includes changing my body clock and trying to be a morning person, eat healthy and drink more water, having an extravagant flower arrangement for my grandma’s 1st anniversary in heaven, going on a trip with all of my cousins (just us, no parents), spend a day in an orphanage or “home for the aged”, and the list goes on. Through the help of Beginner’s Luck, I hope I’ll be able to tick everything off my first ever bucket list.

All the lessons learned that I have written here are most likely what will guide me throughout the year. I can’t wait to make my list longer and learn and experience some more. I pray that may He guide us in all the things that we’re planning to accomplish this year. May we all see how great this year is ahead of us! Let’s all enjoy this roller coaster ride because we only got one shot on this.

Lastly, may we all be able to remember to always see the good even during the worst.

Love, love, love!

Ciao!