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wishmemel · 11 months

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OMGOMG SAFI congrats on 100 ml !! hihii im here to participate in your cute slumber party event ! (i even brought my fave pillow and totoro plushie)

okok soo yk i'm dria 🩵 black / caribbean, around 5'1 (i promise im so close to 5'2 don't @ me haters will hate i drink my milk and eat my veggies) i have huge hair!! like very big hair, too many curls!! it's alot! i love reading, i write plenty of poetry, which is what i use most of my time to do — i lovelove r&b and early 2000s rap music. however, if u open my spotify rn and shuffle my liked songs it would go in order of hip hop, rap, afrobeats, classical music bcus my taste is all over the place. (i also keep a folder of edit audios for my own maladaptive daydreaming purposes lmao)

im rlly a baby blue girlie, fave flowers are tulips (idk my brain js thinks they look yummy), fave season is autumn ofc bcus rainy weather and i have an excuse to stay inside under my blankets 😭 fave animal would beee a black panther or a tabby cat! (my bby bella is a tabby lmao) i love vintage shows (rlly old noir films of all types of genres) i love cinema and visual art it stimulates me sm (im autistic btw i forgot to say mb) i've watched almost every wes anderson film in existence i love soft color palettes in film so bad <3

i enjoy watching old cartoons to relive my childhood nostalgia, jewelry (esp rings i never go anywhere without one or two on), rainy days, late night car drives, baggy shirts, scented candles, afrobeats n anything astronomy related.

im very much a social science n humanities junkie - yearning to be a clinical psychiatrist or complete my dream of teaching literature / psychology. i cry very easily (im js a crybaby istg) - in general im just very very emotional and more often than not i forget common sense and instinct are a thing bcus wtv i feel i just go with it - though i am extremely introverted and freak out when overstimulated in huge crowds and whatnot.

for the event im picking toji bcus that man is the love of my life bye ☹️ the epitome of sunshine and sunshine protector - tiny human and big scary guard dog ! in terms of our compatibility, we're so opposite it's insane! but we balance each other out well. sometimes i have to serve as toji's brain bcus this man is spending money he does not have on all sorts of things for me js cause i looked twice (my sister hced that he'd go below bankrupt buying me sanrio plushies and rings) he works mostly off instinct where i go completely off emotion so we butt heads alot in terms of decision making but he does not know how to tell me no, all i do is sigh once and HES DONE FOR.

i stress this man out like hes my full time babysitter pls

we acc spend alot of time having deep talks about the world and life in general, (i told him ab the backrooms lore and it messed w his head for weeks) which is a side of him he rarely shows to anyone (also he listens to me rant abt daily pop culture developments bcus he lowkey loves the celebrity drama) he's rlly protective, and even moreso bcus of how my anxiety gets. in a crowd this man is standing in front of me and blocking my view of everyone (he also subconsciously pulls me into his side when we're walking in public bcus my autistic ass will see one thing and wander off never to be found again) im always talking like talk talk talking and he pretends he isn't listening but he's literally able to repeat today something i mentioned two weeks ago - he's attentive, shows his love through actions rather than words. if i even make a face that gives away that im uncomfortable being somewhere, or my social battery is dead, hes taking me home no questions asked not a care as to who says what.

im an affection junkie - physical touch is my thing ! and hes so big! so im always pouncing on him for bear hugs and he acts so unimpressed and cocky abt it like "oh you missed me? im not goin anywhere relax" but he acc melts bcus when was the last time someone gave him affection?? he prob thinks im a figment of his imagination lolol

days off / dates would mainly be : window shopping, grocery runs, sitting in the park at sunset, indoor ramen dates n movie marathons and cuddles !!

AHHH sorry if i ranted way too much omg i can't wait to see what you do safi, i'll love anything u write ily so baddd <33

note: hihi dria, thanks for bringing your fave pillow and your totoro plush to the slumber party.

dria x toji — ꒰ tojria

“in this space right here that we have made for each other, you can say anything and i will not abandon you. unwrap the worst things you have done. watch me hold them up to the light and not even flinch.”

height differences, cinnamoroll x badtz maru, protective touches, 3 am conversations about life, romantic picnics at sunset, shopping together, opposites attract, shy x protective, princess treatment, introvert x introvert, buckling your seatbelt for you, tired bf x hyper gf, teasing remarks, day x night, accidental eye contact, blushing, midnight walks, late night phone calls, giddiness, sunshine x sunshine protector, stealing his clothes, late night drives, deleted texts, holding hands under the table, "mean to everyone but her" bf, head pats, she fell first, he fell harder.

being with toji is not always as seamless or easy as you make it look. He's gruff and protective and difficult and incredibly stubborn. like that time you two fought because he was ignoring what you were saying and he flat-out refused to acknowledge your demand when you called him out on it. to be fair, he'd come home after an eight-hour shift and you'd started talking his head off, but it wouldn't kill him to listen. he wasn't paying attention when you were talking about that new hello kitty cafe with the fun milkshakes and the mini donuts that you wanted to try. hell, he ended up falling asleep on your shoulder after brushing off your argument and as much as you wanted to remain angry at him, you'd softened immediately upon seeing his tired face, all eyebags and troubled frown. and he did make it up to you later by taking you to said cafe and proving that he had been listening, though when you brought it up to him, he pretended not to know what you were talking about. but deep down he cares for you and he's trying — you know he's trying and you don't want to make him feel bad for things he can't control. a lot of the concerns you should bring up to him, you don't — you want this relationship to be easy and safe. you want him to feel comfortable with you the same way that you feel comfortable with him. even if sometimes he comes home with a busted lip and bloody knuckles and sends your heart skidding against your ribcage. but what matters is that he comes to you first and he comes home to you. so you know that no matter what, no matter how he's feeling, if he thinks he can talk to you or not, he'll always come home to you. and even if you doubt his commitment sometimes, he knows that you're home to him and he'll do anything to keep it that way.

NOW PLAYING

the way i loved you, enchanted, daylight, afterglow, how you get the girl, treacherous, sparks fly, so it goes...

join safi's perfect slumber party event — requests are open for everyone!

#꒰ safi's perfect slumber party. ꒱

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praiseinchains · 27 days

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Gratitude Journal Entry (8/25/24)

Today I'm Grateful For:

*It was potluck at my parents' church today and my parents brought me a deviled egg (YUM!!!), a small slice of meatloaf (SO good, but I always prefer mine with a LOT of ketchup! No one makes better meatloaf than Golden Corral) and a slice of lemon pie (not sure if it's lemon meringue or not - I don't think so, but it's SO good! I love anything lemon - except those lemon warheads!!!)

*My mental reset day. Even though it sadly did not go as planned, I still had a nice day.

*My baby girl, Lucy. When I lost my other baby (we'd been together since I was 10 - nearly 18 years) I was a complete wreck. I cried every day for 10 months. I was just in such a dark place, but the instant I laid eyes of the picture of Lucy at 3 weeks (the day before we picked her up) I fell in love completely. She's slowly filled a hole I never thought could be filled again.

Something I'm Proud Of:

Despite how much I love Lucy, I feel a lot of the time all I do is get after her or yell at her, which I absolutely hate, but she has the mind of a two-year-old. Anytime she's on the floor, she is CONSTANTLY looking for stuff to get into, no matter HOW much we sweep or how much we check to make sure she can't get into anything. She always finds a way. She has a designated area in my room where I put her when she's causing too much trouble, and it works to calm her down. I absolutely hate having to get onto her so much (it makes me feel like such a bad mom) but I'm taking steps to fix it (hopefully!). Starting tomorrow, I'm going to put her on a schedule as if I worked out of the house (I'm going to be writing during that time). After I've woken up and done my morning routine in my bedroom, I'll take her out and let her play for 30 minutes (she won't play without ME, of course, so I'll watch a show or something while we're playing) then she'll go back into her playpen, and I'll take her out every two hours to use the bathroom. Around 4:30 or 5 (my stopping point) I'll let her back out and we'll play, and she'll eat and then I'll let her hang out on my bed. I know a lot of people who work from home choose to keep their babies in their 'office area' and I've tried that, but she curls up RIGHT under my desk or at my feet and my room's not big enough so I'm always afraid I'm going to roll over her. Plus, I just want space for my feet. If I have to share with her, I'll wind up sitting on them. She also causes a lot of trouble under my desk. It's one of her favorite places to check out - probably because I drop a lot of paper pieces or because it's where the cords are and unfortunately, I can't do anything to fix them. The play area is best for both of us. And honestly, I just need time where she's NOT with me. I'm home ALL THE TIME with her and it's driving me stir-crazy and I want to get a handle on things because I completely lose my mind. So, I'm proud of myself for taking steps to fix the situation.

Tomorrow I'm Looking Forward To:

*My eye doctor is trying yet again to get me into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. I've been turned down twice. But now that I have a concrete diagnosis of something so rare, she's almost certain they'll agree to see me (if for nothing else than to be a guinea pig since so few people have what I do). Part of getting in means writing a letter, so I'm looking forward to writing that.

*My poetry challenge has helped me realize that I want to be a writer and tomorrow I'm going to really look into WHAT aspect of writing I want to get into. It won't be blogging, I know that. Blogging for entertainment is one thing, but blogging for a job is completely different. We'll just see where it goes...

Daily Affirmation:

I am making positive changes and growing stronger every day.

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sea-glass-and-fire · 2 years

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I posted 5,134 times in 2022

81 posts created (2%)

5,053 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@tinymacaroni

@canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit

@tigerlily1615

@ruffboijuliaburnsides

@newyorkcitywater

I tagged 1,680 of my posts in 2022

#tlt - 326 posts

#art tag - 237 posts

#tma - 144 posts

#ophelia speaks - 87 posts

#taz - 72 posts

#goncharov - 62 posts

#trc - 60 posts

#poetry tag - 54 posts

#dracula daily - 51 posts

#unreality tw - 38 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#you really set up a dichotomy that was clearly meant to label you as good & exciting and didn't think people were not going to dunk on you?

My Top Posts in 2022:

we need a resource to tell us if there's going to be an update today or not so i can minimize the amount of time i spend refreshing my email :(

31 notes - Posted May 6, 2022

i'm going insane. i have a distinct memory of jonny sims and alex newall talking about the casting of nikola orsinov -- basically alex was like, "love this character that you wrote, Jonny, but i just don't think we're gonna be able to find anyone to play them!" and then Jonny was like, "actually, meet my friend jessica law!!"

but i cannot find it ANYWHERE. I'm PRETTY sure it's not in any of the transcripts -- was it in a stream somewhere?? I'm going crazy. This is what the Stranger does to people.

EDIT: @jayqueenofhugs found it! About halfway through the second commentary episode (MAG 189.05)

32 notes - Posted October 23, 2022

i've only listened to the first season of the penumbra podcast but i already have a pretty solid appearance in mind for rita: she's short and plump, and dresses like a woman in a gary larson cartoon despite being no older than 30. she's incredibly skilled in martial arts, can wipe the floor with up to 3 men simultaneously, and has at least one weapon on her at all times. she never recalls either of those last 3 facts. she's been mugged 7 times in the last 3 months.

57 notes - Posted January 13, 2022

one thing that i LOVE about the queen's thief series is that MWT really took the time to make sure that we all understand that the protagonist is a weird, whiny little shit. like, she could have said "oh gen was just PRETENDING to be whiny and insufferable in The Thief, he's actually cool and suave!!"

but no. she establishes that he's a genius who's been running a con the whole time, and ALSO he's whiny and insufferable.

263 notes - Posted March 3, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

i know we gave my man jonathan a lot of shit for not being genre-aware, but to his credit, he got on board EXTREMELY quickly. he hung out with dracula twice and was like 'i'm going to die.'

529 notes - Posted May 13, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #i have NO IDEA what that longest tag was referring to

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sukirichi · 3 years

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total opposites

You and Toge swap bodies after encountering a fairytale curse, and similar to its origin, it also takes a fairytale method to break it.

REQUEST. body swap au + best friends to lovers

CONTENT/WARNINGS. slight crack fic, some cursing, implications of nsfw but nothing explicit, just Toge being a not-so closet pervert, usual best friend bickering, reader is fem bodied, unedited story (I should stop saying this, everyone knows I don’t edit my stuff)

NOTES. I enjoyed writing this, tysm for the request anon, this was really cute! definitely this is shooting up in one of my fav works ever (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

You stretched your arms overhead, feeling great after sleeping in. It wasn’t common of you to sleep this late, but you and Toge had gone stargazing the night before. A smile made its way to your face as you reminisced him reciting rice ball ingredients, signing that he was telling poetry to ‘match the mood’ until you’d both fallen asleep on the soft blanket atop a hill.

You don’t remember how you made it back to your room, but figured that Toge had carried you back home before the sun rose. Making a mental note to thank your best friend later, you yawned as you padded out to your room, hands rubbing in circles at your stomach.

Hopefully breakfast would be amazing today.

The door next to you opened, revealing your younger classmate, and you frowned, because wasn’t Kugisaki your next door neighbour? Well, whatever, he, Yuuji, and Kugisaki might’ve taken advantage of the rare, peaceful weekend that they probably had a movie marathon the night before.

“Morning, Megumi!” you greeted, coughing a bit when you sounded off, throat a little horse and itchy. At the sound of your voice, Megumi stilled in his tracks, eyes wide at you. His comical expression had you barking in laughter, shooting finger guns his way as you wiggled your eyebrows. “Ey, be a good dog and bark for me, will you?”

Semi-visible sonic waves drifted like waves after one another out your mouth. Megumi scowled before he froze the next second, ears perked up and backside wagging in replacement of a tail. “Woof woof!”

“What the hell?” you reeled back in slight disgust, your underclassman’s cheeks burning red. Then, your lips grazed against a soft cloth, making you look down.

You blinked back once. Twice. You were definitely...built different today. Curiously, you tugged at the zipper peaking out from your black collar, the familiar zhoop sound of the zipper burned into your memory after hearing your best friend do it countless times before.

In front of you, Megumi screeched – the most noise he’d made ever since you met him – his jaw dropped open while you – or rather Toge stood at the end of the hallway, his hands squeezing at your breasts that were still under last night’s pyjamas. You blinked back once. Then twice, steam pouring from your nose when Toge, in your body, pointed at his body.

“Oh, oh!” your scream bounced off the hallways hard enough that Panda slammed his door open, about to tell everyone to shut up when your voice let out a high-pitched scream.

“What are you doing in my body?!”

Looking down at where Toge was pointing, you were greeted by the sight of his dark uniform and sock clad feet, your chest replaced with hard muscles instead of the soft flesh. You turned to Toge with a stupefied look that mirrored his, both of you falling on the ground with fists pounding on the hardwood floor.

“I’m a fucking girl!” he cried out, whether out of happiness or frustration, it was hard to tell.

Meanwhile, you zipped his collar back up, tugging at his off-white hair as you forced yourself to remember his limited vocabulary. “BONITO FLAKES!”

Now you understood Toge’s frustration of being a cursed speech user.

“Bonito Flakes” definitely did not hold the same fury as “FUCK” did.

“You and I need to set down some boundaries,” you signed to him, brows pulled together. Toge seemed to be enjoying this sudden body swap a lot more than you did since he hadn’t stopped posing in the mirror the moment you pushed him back to your room, locking it shut to get some privacy. “You are not, under any circumstances, allowed to shower, do you understand?”

Toge scowled at your words, sassy as ever with his hands placed on his hips, buttocks jutted out. You hated, absolutely hated that he used your body this way because this time you couldn’t even laugh – not when seeing your body felt this awkward.

“You would really rather me stink?”

“You can’t undress too! Ever! Or if you will, your eyes better be closed. No peeking too!”

“Y/N, you and I grew up together. I’ve already seen everything,” he rolled his eyes, earning him a hard slap from the arm. Considering he was a lot more muscular than you were, your hit came a lot harder. “Ow!” he protested, rubbing the sore spot that ached, only to laugh at the sounds emitting from his lips. “Wow, I have to admit that this is really fun though. I’m actually talking,” he announced, “Hey, say salmon for me.”

“Bonito flakes!” you shook your head, “The moment Principal Yaga is back, we’re going to talk to him, okay? I don’t want to be stuck in your body any longer!”

“Please, you’re lucky you get to feel me up,” he winked at you, taking your (his) hands to flatten it on his stomach. “Come on, come on, feel my abs!” Whack. “Would you please stop slapping me? Your body is a lot more delicate than mine and my hands are – stop slapping me!”

Feeling bad for your friend and not wanting to abuse your body too much, you raised your hands in surrender with a roll of your eyes. “I can’t take you seriously with that voice. You’re too cute.”

“Complimenting ourselves now, aren’t we?” he scoffed, “Well, whatever, you are cute, especially when you’re angry. Such a shame I can’t see you do that right now because my handsome face is looking back at me.”

“I won’t hesitate to choke you, my friend.”

“You wouldn’t. You adore your body too much,” contrary to his words, Toge pulled a defensive stance. You threw a pillow at him, to which he easily dodged, clutching at the hem of your pyjamas afterwards. “Speaking of bodies, I really need to pee.”

“Hold it!”

“Are you insane? I’m not holding it, you’re going to kill us both!”

“Fine, I’ll take you to the rest room then,” you tugged at the hood of your shirt, pushing him inside the communal female restroom. Toge stood in the middle shock still, evidently flustered at the stalls and lack of urinals. You flicked a finger on his forehead, finger pointed to a stall. “Go pee. That’s my body – I need to make sure you’re not going to do anything weird with it.”

“I thought you trusted me, friend. Why would you think I’d touch you that way?”

You gave him an ‘are you serious?’ look. “You jack off every fucking night, Toge. I can hear you even from the next hallway. Plus, you’re a horny teenage male, who’s to say you wouldn’t be curious and try to see what female masturbation feels like?”

His eyes lit up at the idea, fist coming down to bounce at the palm of his hand as he nodded. “That’s actually a good idea—”

“Don’t you even dare.”

“What?!” you and Toge both exclaimed. He faced you with utter horror written on his face and you gasped, slapping both palms over your lips.

“It is true,” Principal Yaga affirmed with a grim look on his face. He’d recently got back to fetch your troublesome Gojo-Sensei who’d been caught starting a ruckus in Roponggi while women flocked around him, leading to your principal to haul his ass back to the school grounds. “Some curses are manifested through daily objects, and sometimes even through nature. That shooting star you saw was an example of that.”

“But is kissing really necessary?” Toge queried with a wary gaze sent your way.

“It’s a fairytale curse. It can only be broken through a true love’s kiss.”

“But sir, Toge and I have never dated anyone before. How can we miraculously fall in love with someone to break this curse overnight?”

“It doesn’t have to happen overnight. Sometimes, a simple crush will do,” Principal Yaga sighed, scratching his bald head with his face pulled deep in thought. “Y/N, you have a crush on Gojo-Sensei right? I’m going to kill him if he actually kisses you – and knowing that damn brat he might if you ask him – but I think a kiss on the cheek will suffice. For now, you both just have to...broaden your relationships. Maybe go out on dates.”

“I don’t mind that. In fact, I’m going to have the time of my life,” Toge cheered, his mood dampening once he saw you stiffen. “But my body is...”

Knowing full well that he’d get insecure over his lack of speech again, you glared at him hard enough that your best friend straightened up, lips puckered out in a pout as if you hadn’t just caught him talking badly about himself again when you’ve told him countless times he was perfectly fine the way he was.

It made you sigh, feeling slightly bad that until now he still couldn’t see himself the way you saw him – not that you’d ever vocalize this; Toge would never shut up (in the best way he could) if he had the slightest idea what went inside your head.

“You’re lucky you have a pretty face. Otherwise, it’s going to be impossible for anyone to like you,” you teased instead, somewhat flustered at your indirect compliment.

Toge merely scoffed at you, his gaze burning and hard, contrasting the teasing little shit grin he wore. “Oh, please, if I wasn’t the cursed speech user, I would’ve banged—”

“Kids!” Principal Yaga threw his dolls at you hard, the both of you clutching at your heads in pain. How were those dolls as heavy as rocks? “Take your bickering back to your rooms please. No more of this mess and noise. It’s late.”

You frowned at the old man, face pleading as you signed, “Principal Yaga, can’t we really do anything else? Aren’t there any techniques to undo this?”

You and Toge knew that combination so well – pitch black eyes, jaw clenched, lips pursed and palms interlaced under his chin – one that meant his words were final and irrevocable. None of you could argue or suggest more solutions the moment the words left his lips like an ultimate decree. “The technique is the kiss. Now leave.”

You and Toge tried, you both really did.

But following Principal Yaga’s suggestion of dating others had turned out to be a complete fail – even with your normal body and Toge’s physical charisma.

It simply didn’t work; not when Megumi ran away from you every time you tried to get him to kiss you with your arms wide open, and Toge wasn’t helping either by pushing Gojo-Sensei away from you every time the cheeky eyed teacher announced his willingness to help.

Eventually, you and your best friend had retired in his room, the scent of him coated all over his pillows and his shirt that you wore. That felt comforting, at least, and you buried yourself in the crook of your body’s neck, bodies tangled with one another.

Who knew dating could be so tiring?

A wave of irritation flashed over you from today’s events, knowing full well that this could’ve been avoided long ago. Scowling, you cuddled Toge closer, lightly flicking your fingers on your body’s chest. “This is your damn fault, Toge.”

“You were the one who asked me to stargaze with you.”

“You don’t always have to say no to everything I ask of you, you know.”

“You’re really dumber than I thought if you think I could easily say no to you,” he snorted above you, his chin resting atop your head. “I don’t have a lot of weakness because I’m a strong sorcerer—” another flick, a harsher one this time around. “Okay, okay, I’m just kidding! But I mean it though – you’re my best friend and my weakness. Of course I’d do anything to make you happy, even if it’s something as stupid as stargazing.”

“Hey!” you made a sound of protest in your throat, looking back at him with a frown. “It wasn’t stupid, it was romantic.”

Hell yeah, it was romantic indeed – your heart still skipped a beat every time you remembered Toge’s starry eyes matching the night sky’s beauty, the words salmon and mustard leaf surprisingly sexy every time it came from him. It was stupid – so fucking stupid – that you groaned into his chest to hide your flushed face.

“Yeah, I suppose it was.”

The room fell silent, your syncopated breathing soothing during this stressful times. Taking advantage of your voice, Toge began to hum, singing the songs you both had always listened to in the privacy of your room during lazy days. It brought a smile to your face as you clutched to him tighter, heart pounding in your chest as you gazed up at him, tapping his chin to get his attention. “Toge, can I say something weird?”

“Please, nothing you say surprises me anymore. Shoot.”

Your mouth began to dry as you cleared your throat in an attempt to hide your awkwardness, gaze pointedly averted from his prying ones. “You and I...we’ve known each other for a long time and we love each other. As best friends, of course.”

“Sheesh, friendzone much?”

“Would you please shut up and listen to me seriously for once?” you huffed, making him snicker, but nodded at you anyway to continue. “As I was saying – why don’t we kiss? It could be true love’s kiss.”

Toge didn’t speak for a good minute, the pregnant pause filling in the gap filled with tension. You taped his cheek, waving his hand in front of his eyes when he dazed out. When his gaze focussed back on you, Toge was surprisingly calm – although beneath that composed exterior, his mind had simply short-circuited. “If this is your way to get to make out with me, I’m going to sock you in the face.”

“Toge, I’m serious! Let’s kiss!”

“I don’t want to!” he shook his head indignantly, hiding his face by hugging you close to his chest instead.

“Why not? Don’t you want to swap back to your original body? Both of us haven’t showered in two days and I’m sick of the way you smell. You’re lucky I love you though, otherwise I’m going to cry. Come on, Toge, what’s holding you back?” you tried to fight back from his grip, but he’d surprised you both when he only squeezed you tighter, both your erratic heart rates matching the other.

“I said no.”

“Toge, it’s just a damn kiss, what’re you so afraid of?”

“I’m afraid that if we don’t swap back, then that means you don’t love me the way I love you!” he finally admitted, breathing hard before continuing. “Principal Yaga said it must be a kiss between lovers and not just platonic friends okay?” you attempted to scramble away from his arms again, and this time he let you, though he’d closed his eyes, cheek squished on the pillows as he murmured, “I don’t want you to reject me... even though I messed up already.”

“Wait,” you snapped your fingers to make him open his eyes, hesitant as you signed, “You...you love me that way?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because my face is staring back at me and it’s fucking awkward – I wanted to see your face when I confessed!” he sat up with a frustrated groan, childishly kicking off the sheets of the bed as he clutched his head in his hands. “I had everything planned, okay? Nobara and Yuuji helped me think of everything because Megumi is shit when it comes to love. Listen, I was going to ask you on a candlelit date and then maybe kiss the life out of you – if you feel the same way—”

“Kiss me.” The body he possessed a victim of his own powers, Toge was left with no choice but to grab your face before his mouth pressed against yours, fingers entangled into the other’s hair. You were smiling into the kiss the whole time, barely able to recognize when Toge had shifted your bodies until you were under him, his hands running down your sides lovingly the whole time.

Pulling away to get some air, you opened your eyes, unsurprised when Toge laid above you, his strong arms planted beside your head.

Both of you were breathing hard from the passionate kiss filled with so much sexual tension and longing, your tongue darting out to swipe at his taste on your lips. The laughter that bubbled out of you was pure, wholesome and swollen like your heart. “I love you too, idiot.”

“Salmon!” Toge peppered your cheeks with kisses, pulling out more gleeful laughter from you, his playful and loving attacks more of a gift than a punishment. Once you’d recovered from your happiness – although really, who could recover after that? – Toge unzipped his collar, his smile nothing but wicked when he commanded, “Kiss me again.”

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liriostigre · 3 years

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hey! I wanted to ask what your favorite poetry books are? I have a few but I want to read new and interesting stuff, and I trust your taste :D

hiii ♡

tbh i only started reading poetry collections like,, last year. i'm subscribed to poetryfoundation's newsletter (poem of the day) so i usually just read random poems

anyway, i'm not sure my recs could be considered new (cause i'm gonna start with Mary Oliver ♡) but feel free to message me if you want to know the themes, style, feeling (vibes, if you will) or anything you want to know about these collections. for now, i'm linking my favorite poems in each collection, i hope this helps you choose! ♡

here you go:

Dream Work —Mary Oliver (“Wild Geese.” “Dogfish.”)

Red Bird —Mary Oliver (“Summer Morning.” “Love Sorrow.”)

Blue Horses —Mary Oliver (“To Be Human Is to Sing Your Own Song.” “Loneliness.” “Little Crazy Love Song.”)

The Wild Iris —Louise Glück (“Sunset.” “Retreating Light.”)

Haruko/Love Poems —June Jordan (“On a New Year’s Eve.” “Mendocino Memory.” “Toward a City That Sings.” *under the cut)

Extracting the Stone of Madness —Alejandra Pizarnik (“Primitive Eyes.” “Summer Goodbyes.” *under the cut)

Ariel —Sylvia Plath (“Tulips.” “The Rival.”)

Prelude to Bruise —Saeed Jones (“Postapocalyptic Heartbeat.” *under the cut)

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth —Alice Walker (“Coming Back from Seeing Your People.” *under the cut)

I Must Be Living Twice —Eileen Myles (“Edward the Confessor.” *under the cut)

Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth —Warsan Shire (“Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre.”)

The Black Unicorn —Audre Lorde (“Hanging Fire.” “Sister Outsider.”)

Bright Dead Things —Ada Limón (“The Riveter.” “Glow.”)

Night Sky With Exit Wounds —Ocean Vuong (“Thanksgiving 2006.” “Logophobia.”)

Postcolonial Love Poem —Natalie Diaz (“Manhattan Is a Lenape Word.”)

Crush —Richard Siken (“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out.”)

Once —Alice Walker (“So We've Come at Last to Freud.”)

“Toward a City That Sings” by June Jordan

Into the topaz the crystalline signals of Manhattan the nightplane lowers my body scintillate with longing to lie positive beside the electric waters of your flesh and I will never tell you the meaning of this poem: Just say, ‘She wrote it and I recognize the reference.’ Please let it go at that. Although it is all the willingness you lend the world as when you picked it up the garbage scattering the cool formalities of Madison Avenue after midnight (where we walked for miles as though we knew the woods well enough to ignore the darkness) although it is all the willingness you lend the world that makes me want to clean up everything in sight (myself included)

for your possible discovery

“Primitive Eyes” by Alejandra Pizarnik

Where fear neither speaks in stories or poems, nor gives shape to terrors or triumphs.

My name, my pronoun — a grey void.

I’m familiar with the full range of fear. I know what it’s like to start singing and to set off slowly through the narrow mountain pass that leads back to the stranger in me, to my own emigrant.

I write to ward off fear and the clawing wind that lodges in my throat.

And in the morning, when you are afraid of finding yourself dead (of there being no more images): the silence of compression, the silence of existence itself. This is how the years fly by. This is how we lost that beautiful animal happiness.

“Summer Goodbyes” by Alejandra Pizarnik

The soft rumor of spreading weeds. The sound of things ruined by the wind. They come to me as if I were the heart of all that exists. I would like to be dead, and also to go inside another heart.

“Postapocalyptic Heartbeat” by Saeed Jones

I. Drugged, I dreamed you a plume of ash, great rush of wrecked air through the towns of my stupor. And when the ocean in your blood went toxic, I thought fire was what we needed: serrated light through the skin, grenade in the chest—pulled linchpin. I saw us breathing on the other side of after. But a blackout is not night; orange-bottled dreams are not sleep. II. I was a cross-legged boy in the third lifetime, empire of blocks in my lap while you walked through the door of your silence, hunting knife in one hand, flask in the other. I waited for you until I forgot to breathe, my want turning me colors only tongues of amaryllis could answer for. It owned me, that hunger, tendriled its way into my name for you. III. In a city made of rain each door, a silence; each lock, a mouth, I walked daily through the spit-slick streets, harbingers on my hands in henna: there will be no after Black-and-blue-garbed strangers, they called me Cassandra. (I had such a body then.) Umbrellas in hand, they listened while they unlistened. there will be no no. after

the world will end no.

you are the reason it no. ends

you no. IV. I didn’t exactly mean to survive myself. Half this life I’ve spent falling out of fourth-story windows. Pigeons for hair, wind for feet. Sometimes I sing “Stormy Weather” on the way down. Today, “Strange Fruit.” Each time, strangers find me drawing my own chalk outline on the sidewalk, cursing with a mouth full of iron, furious at my pulse. V. After ruin, after shards of glass like misplaced stars, after dredge, after the black bite of frost: you are the after, you are the first hour in a life without clocks; the name of whatever falls from the clouds now is you (it is not rain), a song in a dead language, an unlit earth, a coast broken— how was I to know every word was your name?

“Coming Back from Seeing Your People” by Alice Walker

Coming back From seeing your people You were So wonderfully Full Of yourself.

But now You have supped With vampires They have fed Feasted On you.

They arise Bright-eyed Fit.

You alone have lost Not only Your sleep But also Your glow The luster of Affection Heart welcome Your people Sent home With you.

Beloved You must learn To walk alone To hold The precious Silence To bring home And keep the precious Little That is left Of yourself.

“Edward the Confessor” by Eileen Myles

I have a confession to make I wish there were some role in society I could fulfill I could be a confessor I have a confession to make I have this way when I step into the bakery on 2nd Ave. of wanting to be the only really nice person in the store so the harried sales woman with several toned hair will like me. I do this in all kinds of stores, coffee shops xerox shops, everywhere I go. And invariably I leave my keys, xeroxing, my coffee from the last place I am being so nice. I try so hard to make a great impression on these neutral strangers right down to the perfect warm smile I get entirely lost and stagger back out onto the street, bereft of something major. It’s really leaning too hard on the everyday. My mother was the kind of woman who dragging us into stores always seemed to charm the pants off the cashier. She was such a great person, so human though at home she was such a bitch, I mean really distant. I imitate her and I don’t do it well. She didn’t leave her wallet or us in a store. I’m just a pale imitation it is simply not my style to open the hearts of strangers to my true personhood. I hope you accept this tiny confession of what I am currently going through. And if you are experiencing something of a similar nature tell someone, not me, but tell someone. It’s the new human program to be in. It would be nice for at least these final moments if we could sigh with the relief of being in the same program with all the other humans whispering in school. I can’t quite locate the terror, but I am trying to be my mother or Edward the Confessor smiling down on you with up-praying hands. I am looking down at the tips of my boots as I step across the balcony of the church excited to be allowed to say these things. Outside my church is a relationship. On 11th street this guy and this woman are selling the woman so they can get more dope. All their things are there, rags and loaves of bread and make-up. And there was— this was incredible. Two men lying by the door of the church giving each other blow-jobs. They were sort of street guys, one black one white. I said hey you can’t do that here. They jumped up, one spit come out of his mouth. If you don’t get out of here I’ll call the cops. Don’t call the cops we’ll go, we’ll leave. That was a shock. That was more than I expected to see in a day. Something about seeing the guy spit come out of his mouth. He didn’t have to do that. I guess I scared him. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was scared too.

#btw!!!! i'm sorry!!! SO SORRY it took me weeks to reply 🤕#hope you're having good days <3 #💌

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voidstilesplease · 3 years

Text

Swords and Arrows

or That Summer When The Ares and Athena Cabins Finally Allied For Capture The Flag part 1 of 3

⚔️🏹⚔️🏹⚔️🏹

(A Steo Demigod AU) || For @anonymous's prompt: "Scott as a Roman demigod instead of Greek" || word count: 2,647 || The Entire Demigod Series -> [AO3][Tumblr] (it's finally a working link tfg)

Stiles pulls back, "I was going to ask if you missed me," he says, face flushed and beaming. "But it appears I don't need to."

"You never need to."

🏹⚔️🏹⚔️🏹⚔️

"Why the long face, little brother?" Tara asks cheerfully, wedging herself on the bench between Theo and one of their half-siblings, and placing down her tray brimming with colorful food as opposed to Theo's bleak and half-empty one. She grins at Theo, but he's not in the mood to return the goodwill.

Theo pokes half-heartedly at the contents of his tray: a lonely sealed bag with a couple squares of ambrosia inside - the food of the gods - some cheese and two slices of wheat bread. "Don't call me little brother," he mutters with little heat, leaning to the table to whisper a request to his goblet, which immediately fills up with sparkling water.

Tara looks over Theo's head at Fred, their Head Counselor, sitting on Theo's other side. "He's not back yet?"

Fred shakes his head, wiping the bbq sauce at the side of his mouth. "Nope," he replies, popping the 'p' and catching on to the question without much elaboration. By now, there's only one 'he' that reduces Theo to a brooding and sulky man-child. "He hasn't answered Theo's last IM, too."

"Try the last five Iris Messages," Theo grumbles in annoyance. He turns to Tara, face contorted in a sour expression. "I mean, how difficult is it to take my call? He always has drachmas in his pocket exactly for this reason."

"He's probably busy disintegrating monsters," Fred says reasonably. Which, of course, makes sense. Monsters make the most infuriating and persistent roadblock of all. They make any journey twice as long for demigods - if they don't manage to kill you, that is. "Or, you know," Fred adds, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. "maybe he's being an accomodating companion to the Son of Jupiter."

Theo grinds his teeth hard and fixes his head counselor with a death glare. Fred only shrugs at Theo's reaction, obviously aiming for the exact response, and chuckling through a bite of ambrosia. Theo has half a mind to punch him in the jugular. He doesn't need a reminder of who Stiles is with, thanks. Spitefully, he harshly impales a piece of grape from Fred's tray with the tines of his fork and shoves it to his mouth in the most menacing manner he can project.

It only makes Fred guffaw, spraying bits of food onto the table. The campers across from him slide their trays away protectively, shrieking an indignant chorus of "Fred!" as they make sure no stray bits made it into their platters. Fred raps at his chest as he reaches for his goblet, still laughing his dumb ass off while trying to wave his hand in apology.

Their neighbors also share their opinion on the appalling table manners of the Ares brood - spitting out food may slightly be a common scene from their lot, unfortunately.

Brett from the Apollo cabin throws corn kernels at Fred, a strange display of solidarity if you can believe it, while Ara, the half-Korean junior counselor of Athena cabin, gives the Ares and Apollo tables a look of disapproval. She's a pretty terrifying 15 years old, which is why Stiles is extremely fond of her. With Stiles gone to New Rome the first week back to camp, Ara is doing a kickass job taking over the head counselor duty. (But, to Hades with it, Theo would much prefer Stiles to be scowling at their table.)

"Okay, first of all," Tara says over the little chaos. "Fred, you're disgusting. Second," she holds Theo's chin to compel him to look at her, then smirks, "Stealing a piece of fruit is not a cabin 5-worthy intimidation tactic."

Theo opens his mouth for his scathing retort, but at the same time, one of Stiles's younger siblings points in the direction of the cabins. "Hey, it's Stiles!"

Many heads look up, but Theo springs to his feet instantly, scanning the area for Stiles. He catches sight of him almost immediately, bounding to the Mess Hall in his orange shirt, face bright under the camp's enchanted borders, as radiant as the last time Theo saw him four long months ago. Without much thought, Theo finds himself carried by his feet towards Stiles.

Stiles sees him coming too, and his smile broaden. Theo sprints, forgetting himself and where they are. They meet halfway, by the entrance of the Mess Hall, with Theo knocking into Stiles's open arms strong enough that it's a surprise they're still upright on the ground.

Theo squeezes him to make sure his mind did not conjure a Spectre to appease his longing. Stiles feels solid under his hands, if a little sweaty, and he smells as if he was run over by monsters. But underneath the grime, he catches the scent of Stiles's favorite body wash. He feels himself sagging in satisfaction.

Stiles pulls back, "I was going to ask if you missed me," he says, face flushed and beaming. "But it appears I don't need to."

"You never need to."

Theo doesn't know how long they stood just smiling at each other, but they break apart at Chiron's pointed clearing of the throat. It's not even in Theo's head to be embarrassed by his actions despite the cackling and many leering faces of the other demigods. Mr. D merely raises an unimpressed eyebrow, though the twinkle in his eyes can only be from amusement.

Chiron is sitting on his wheelchair today, hiding his horse's ass behind the illusion of human legs - why he still does it is a wonder - and rolls forward to them.

"Stiles Stilinski," he greets merrily, the lines of his eyes crinkling when he smiles. "Welcome back." Chiron gazes a little behind them, then, nodding kindly towards another boy Theo only notices, is standing patiently at a distance.

The boy, Scott McCall, son of Jupiter and a praetor of the Roman demigods' army, the Twelfth Legion Fulminata, steps forward to bow his head in respect of the centaur. "Chiron," he also acknowledges Mr. D who didn't bother to get up from the head table. "Lord Bacchus."

"Hm," Mr. D hums without correcting the demigod, sipping on his diet coke dismissively.

Theo doesn't hate Scott, but he also doesn't like him - strongly, irrationally, dislikes him. Instinctively, he shuffles closer to Stiles as if his boyfriend is going to dissolve into the Mist if he isn't close enough to pull him back.

Theo's been agitated since Stiles told him, a week prior, that he was flying to New Rome in California where Camp Jupiter is, the Roman camp, for a 'friendly' visit. Everyone's allowed to cross borders, but no one has really done so just to tour around. After all, the camps are on opposing sides of the country and monsters don't pause to consider not killing vacationing demigods.

A couple of times before last week, when Theo visited Stiles in his Manhattan apartment, he'd, out of the blue, mentioned the varied courses and scholarships that New Rome University offered, as Theo laid his head on Stiles's lap while the latter read. Theo hadn't minded it at the time, as Stiles quickly dropped the subject. But another month passed and Stiles mentioned it again, randomly, during one of their IMs, adding that he might check into the enrollment requisites. Theo started to worry, then.

If Stiles goes to New Rome for college, Theo can't follow him. He never even got to finish eighth grade. And Scott, he's one of the Romans, their leader, and grudging as he is to admit, one of Stiles's friends now the more he visits Camp Half-Blood. He will eagerly encourage Stiles, telling him of the countless perks that Camp Jupiter has. He will be as big a hero there as he is in Camp Half-Blood, and he can rise to praetorship alongside Scott if the Legion so wishes it.

Scott is not a bad person per se, but he wears the color and insignia of the place Theo might lose Stiles to. And if Theo blinks the wrong way, he might not see quick enough that Stiles is being whisked away to the other side of the coast, leading a life without him.

⚔️🏹⚔️🏹⚔️🏹

After officially welcoming the son of Jupiter to the camp, feeding him, and getting him settled in Cabin One, the campers go about their daily routine of training.

The blade vibrates when it hits the shooting log, right on the marked spot. Then it disappears into thin air and reappears in Theo's hand only to be thrown back to the same spot. He does it repeatedly, unrelentingly, until Tara aims with his bow and hits his blade with an arrow to send both weapons clanging to the ground, a few meters away.

Theo heaves; he doesn't even know he's breathless just from throwing until then. Wiping beads of sweat from his forehead, he nods appreciatively at the bow in Tara's hands when his sister stands beside him with a smile. "If we aren't siblings, I'd mistake you for a daughter of Apollo."

"Please," she laughs, opening her palm, gesturing at the fallen weapons. Both her arrow and Theo's blade fly to her hands in a matter of seconds. "I don't want to light up like a glow stick while waxing poetry during a fight." Children of Apollo don't actually do those in the middle of a fight, but they do glow when they're healing, and they can make others speak in rhymes just for fun. Tara offers the knife back to his brother. "Also, we're children of Ares. By birthright alone, we should know to wield any weapon of war."

Theo takes the knife and snorts, "And yet, I suck at archery."

"I can't summon weapons out of thin air," She points out, grinning at him as she puts the arrow back to its sheaf. "I guess we just can't have it all or Zeus would be zapping us one by one."

Theo scoffs, leaning into position to begin throwing again.

"Speaking of Zeus," Tara says, a playful tone in her words. "Where's your favorite son of the Sky God?"

Theo spares her a glare before flinging his knife and burying it onto the battered practice log. He purses his lips before answering, "He's at the Big House with Chiron, Mr. D, Stiles, and the other head counselors." He clenches his fingers around the blade's hilt when it returns to his hands. "They're talking about a little orientation on New Rome University's scholarships and handing brochures and study guide for the DSTOMP." Theo doesn't bother hiding the acid in his voice from his sister. She'll recognize it anyway, even if he masks it with neutrality. He can't mask it with neutrality.

She quirks a brow, "You don't sound too eager," she notes. "Are you still jealous of Scott, little brother?"

"I'm not jealous of Scott," he says, gritting his teeth. "And don't call me little brother."

"Why are you so strung up, then, if you're not baselessly jealous?"

He finds his reply being interrupted for the second time that day, this time by a distant rumbling coming from the sky. All activities on the ground cease as everyone turns to the increasing volume of an invisible running engine. Theo scans the space above them, at first not grasping anything in motion, until a burst of light reveals a flying, glowing red bus coming down fast to the ground.

🏹⚔️🏹⚔️🏹⚔️

Someone goes to alert Chiron as the rest of them scamper to the landing site by the amphitheater. The bus landed surprisingly smooth, despite its breakneck descent.

"Is that a Ferrari bus?" One of the campers points out.

Sure enough, the logo at the front of the vehicle, a black prancing horse on a yellow background, is of the famous luxury sports brand. But why would there be a flying Ferrari bus at Camp Half-Blood?

"Oh gods," Lori gasps somewhere on Theo's left. "Is that dad's sun chariot?"

As if on cue, the bus door opens, and a teenager who looks about Theo's age exits, wearing what he can only describe as a hipster look. He flashes a blinding grin - and quite literally at that, since they have to shield their eyes momentarily from the glimmer of his teeth - clears his throat dramatically, and announces:

"Hello demigods

The sun landed on your grounds

I am so awesome."

There's silence at first, then a series of enthusiastic applause from Brett and the rest of cabin seven comes next. The teenager bows theatrically, although Theo finds nothing extraordinary about what he just said. But soon, the others join in with half-hearted claps, recognizing the powerful aura suddenly seeping into their skins that could only mean there's a god among them - well, another god, aside from Dionysus, their Camp Director. And with the terrible haiku, there will be no mistaking who graced their camp today. The last time Theo had seen him, during the almost war on his first year at camp, the god had worn the body of a muscular mid-20's blond man. Now, it seems he favors to look even younger despite his four thousand years.

"Lord Apollo," Chiron's voice drowns out the applaud as he trots forward, now in his form as a white stallion from the waist down. "It's a pleasant surprise. Welcome to Camp Half-Blood."

Mr. D isn't as warm. He snorts, rolling his eyes. "Oh, bother, what brought you here now?"

Apollo's bright persona doesn't falter as he gestures at the bus - that is apparently his sun chariot. Theo remembers the time when he almost drove Apollo's chariot, if the Hermes cabin did not snitch it from under their noses, and thus putting three cabins grounded after a severe prank war. He had to take Liam's dish duties and pay him just so his present for Stiles could be delivered in time for Christmas.

"I'm here at the request of my little sister." The god says proudly, as the door opens again, this time with grumbling teenage and prepubescent girls coming out from the bus. All dressed in the same outfit: silver jackets, silver camo pants, and black combat boots, and they carry at their backs a quiver of sharp silver arrows. They glance at Apollo with apparent distrust, standing as far away from him as possible, as the god continues, "To deliver her hunters safely while she's away on a personal errand."

Several demigods groan in displeasure at the news, and even Chiron's lips form a thin line, though he tries to smile through the tension. Mr. D seems to be delighted now, though, happier to see the strange, vicious-looking ladies than his own brother. Personally, it feels like an omen of danger. Mr. D is never happy unless something perilous is about to descend upon his campers - even if his own daughter, Malia, is among them.

"Thank you, Lord Apollo." One of the hunters says albeit she looks physically pained by her words. She stands at the front of the group, a silver ring headwear around her head, with bouncing black curls, a pointed nose, and a strong chin. The other hunters also look at her when she speaks. It's easy to recognize her as the group's leader. "And thank you, Lord Dionysus, Chiron, for accomodating the hunters of Lady Artemis."

Chiron nods at the girl, eyes softening with kindness born out of familiarity, "You're always welcome, Allison."

Mr. D laughs boisterously, then. Like his punishment has just been lifted and he can go back to Olympus and away from the brats, celebrating by getting drunk on wine after years of prohibition. "Well, at least, Capture the Flag this Friday seems more enticing now, don't you think so, Chiron?" He gives a wicked grin at his campers, not waiting for a reply, his change in demeanor promising a torturous next few days for the demigods. "Ready to lose the Camp Half-Blood banner to these little girls for the 58th time in a row?"

~•~

#steo #steo fic #demigod au #teen wolf #stiles stilinski #theo raeken #stiles x theo #so idk what the heck happened #but i wrote 1k words more than my target word count #ahdbdjdjskxb idk #also for the demigod anon here's a response to one of your prompts!!#it took a hot minute but i hope you see this #scott mccall #brett talbot #tara raeken #allison argent #fics tag #demigodseries

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mxvladdy · 4 years

Text

A Break- Chapter 5

Oh lord this took too long and ‘bout killed me. I hope my edits are good!

It’s a biggen so it’s all under the cut!

Hope y’all like it! I know it was long over do :/

He dreams of dragons. A swirling blur of purples, reds, and yellows. His mindscape was a rich profusion of colors. Two become sharper standing out in the sea of hues. His father’s dragon emerges from the mass. The great black dragon floats ethereally around him, judging him. But, unlike the years spent under his father's tutelage, all he got were stern looks and cold words of praise. Now, he can feel a warm sense of- pride. Was his father finally proud of him? How? Of what? Next to him, another dragon appears. His mother’s dragon wove around the long form of his father. Black and pearly pink twisting and revolve hypnotically around his body. They radiated peace, and rest. An urge to join them began to overwhelm him. A break sounded nice. He deserved one, didn’t he?

When was the last time he had felt this at peace? There were a few times perhaps in recent memories. A blurry face comes to mind. A sweet smile and a laugh that is so warm and bright. He remembers the feel of soft fingers scratching along his goatee. He felt at peace then, safe and loved. It gives him pause- the urge to slip away waning. His paternal dragon stops its coiling, eyes locking with his partner. He pulls backs, separating from his mate. His mother’s dragon chirps, drifting closer and closer, she tries to touch her son. Her whiskers mere inches from his floating hand. Obsidian claws stop her from touching her eldest. His father’s dragon huffs once in warning, shaking its great head. His mother snaps at the claw, stubborn in her convictions. She wanted her son back, safe within her clutches in the afterlife. Had he not gone through enough? From the clan to his own penances? She had been so close to getting her youngest back years ago. Yet she had been robbed then too.

She wouldn’t be denied twice.

Hanzo watches helplessly as the two beasts argue in a language he does not know. He is torn between a want to be here with them, and the warm thoughts trickling slowly back into his mind. The pearlescent dragon rears back with a cry of anguish, nostrils flaring at whatever the black dragon had said. She makes eye contact with him once more. The dragon’s eyes were the same color as his mother's before she turned from him leaving his line of sight. His father gave him one last look filled with, pride? Before disappearing too. He shouts for them, crying out for his mother. To not be left alone again. But they were silent in the void. Not even in death was he good enough.

He floats again, or lays? He truly cannot tell what axis or plane he was on. But he could still feel. He felt cold and so so tired. Where were his dragons? If his parents were here surely his dragons must be too. He calls for them, but he gets no answer. The seal on his arm was horribly quiet.

He can do nothing but drift now.

He hears things sometimes, a soft sweet voice reading to him. Other times it’s a smooth accented voice walking him through something they were about to do. Hallucinations or reality he couldn’t tell. They get stronger though. Soon he begins to feel a warmth on his face. Like he was basking in the heat of the summer sun. Other times it’s the brush of something cool and wet on his neck and arms. The fingers were too smooth to be human but dexterous like them. They were humming, the tinny and augmented drone familiar. Hanzo knew that melody, he knew that voice, but he just couldn’t place it. Hanzo listens for a while, floating on the melody before it too disappears. They leave him, only an incisive beeping echoing in his head for company.

His dragons come to him after what felt like an eternity. Akuma approaches first, his massive body colliding with Hanzo’s. The archer clings to the great beast burying his face into the fur. Hanzo cares little for the claws puncturing his skin and scratching him as Akuma clicks and coos in delight. Ibuki wraps herself around them both, quiet but vibrating with relief. Hanzo opens his mouth to speak. His throat clicks, dry and inflamed. Something is choking him.

No-rest. We will get you out soon. Out? He stiffens in their warm embrace. He didn't want out. It was nice here, quiet. He didn't feel pain or much of anything in here. He could stay like this... No. Akuma nips his cheek in aggravation. Family, they need you. She needs you-

It comes back to him hard and fast. His last kiss with you before leaving for the terminal. The video before bed. Him whispering goodnight to your sleeping face ending the call before turning in himself. To the security breach and his fight. He needs to get back. If his parents left him here then he should wake up. Why wasn't he waking up? We will protect. His dragons nuzzle him once more before they push away returning to the great beyond, promising to take care of you while he gets stronger. Their determination fuels him to fight, to survive.

He trains his mind to pick up on the noises and touches happening around him while he waits. He picks up the tick of a clock and the sound of waves by his side. Their constant background noise soothing and grounding. Genji comes daily to hum and chat in their native tongue. He spoke of idle, sweet little things. The weather, who was on kitchen duty that evening, the training schedule. He sounded so hopeful every time he visited. Like his big brother was going to wake up at any moment and respond. After Genji came Mei and Ana. The two mostly acted like he was with them and discussed whatever book they were reading while waiting on him. They would come in the evenings and read passages aloud for him. It was a welcomed break from the monotony of silence. Ana came more often than Mei. He could smell the tea she would bring in when she sat by his side reading aloud in Arabic. Ah- her favorite book of poetry. She never translated this book for him, but between her cadences and phrasing, she wove the beauty of the verses nonetheless.

Ana was interrupted today though. Midway through a verse, she stopped. Her tongue stumbling over itself uncharacteristically. Hanzo felt her shift and rise without another word. He recognized Baptiste and Angela's voices talking to her, their voices low and hurried. He hears Ana laugh gently and the door to his room snaps shut. His doctors bustle around him for a moment though he senses another person in the room with them. Odd- unless his brother came back. No, much too quiet to be him. Angie and Baptiste leave quickly, their check-up done, leaving him alone with the new visitor.

"Hey, Hanz." A soft voice brushes his cheek. "How are you today?" Hanzo’s heart hurts. How did- when did you come here. He wanted to be angry, to yell at you for coming to such a dangerous place. He wanted to hunt down whoever found you and throttle them. This was putting you in harm’s way. Yet, at the same time, he wished he could see you. He wished he could tell you how much he missed you and that he was there. Instead, floats in his own subconscious. “I-Angie says that you might hear me. Something about your brain scans?” You squeeze his hand with a light chuckle. You trail off distracting yourself by rubbing soothing patterns in his palm. “If-if you can, know that I know. Not everything, your brother has been so kind to me.” You squeeze his hand, bordering on almost uncomfortable. “But I need to hear the things he said from you. So-so get better soon, please? I miss you.” Now more than ever he wishes he could comfort you. Why hadn't he just swallowed his pride early? This could have been avoided. He hoped at least.

The rest of your visit passes too quickly for his liking. The scant bit of privacy he had with you was filled with your tender voice and gentle touches. He felt your fingers brush along his smooth jaw, stroking it like you did whenever you would lounge in bed sweaty but happy after a lengthy reunion. The kisses you placed on his brow were just as sweet too. You only left after one of the doctors came in to force you out to get dinner and stretch.

You poke at the warm meal Ana had plated for you in the mess hall. The steaming rice and tomato covered lentils sitting comfortably in your stomach. “Eat, dear. Then I think it’s best if you take a nap. When was the last time you slept horizontally?” Ana winks at you over her shoulder stirring a pot filled with browning onions and spices. The elderly medic had lost count of the number of times she had walked in on you sleeping in the chairs in the medical wing.

“I’m fine-really.” You smile rubbing at your sore neck. The hospital chairs here were soft, sure, but not meant for daily sleeping. Ana snorts but doesn’t say anything more on the matter. Instead, she distracts your haggard mind with recipes and tea ideas, sprinkling in little stores of her childhood. You find yourself relaxing more and more; the time between when you wanted to get back to Hanzo’s side and since you sat down for dinner growing longer and longer in between. You yawn widely, failing to cover it with your mouth with your hand. “Shit- sorry.” You flush. The other woman waves it off.

“It’s fine sweetheart. Just means my food and company did its job.” She smiles collecting both of your dishes to place them in the sink. “Come-let me escort you to your room.”

“You really aren’t going to let me go back huh?”

“Not a chance child. He isn’t going anywhere trust me.” She grips the back of your shirt to lead you in the opposite direction of the ICU. You scowl but follow along, dragging your feet along a little in the process.

You had been offered Hanzo’s room when you landed last week. It had been untouched since he had been transferred to the Ilios base. But you couldn’t, it felt almost rude to. He hadn’t consented to any of this. It just felt wrong. His room was what you had always imagined. Clean and tidy, the few items he had well loved and maintained. Some looked pricy, but most were homey little things that must have reminded him of Japan. You ask to stay in a vacant room but still find yourself in his room from time to time, dusting his heavy bookshelf or to vacuum his rug and shake the linens out. You only broke down once in his room, but it was enough for you to never want to go back in there. Not until Hanzo was back living in it. While mopping one day you stumbled across a little box, it was your box, the old thing was filled with letters. The creases in the paper thin and tearing from constantly being opened and reread over and over again. The trinkets you had sent him over the years were worn, but clean. The metal pins and coins shiny and discolored from fingers rubbing them lovingly. You put the box back where you found it and leave. Athena could clean from now on.

Genji and Angie had discussed a lot with you since you took up residence. You were grateful for their updates and check-ins. Baptiste even gave you some reading about what to expect when Hanzo is up and going through physical therapy. He emphasized that the longer he was in the ICU the longer recovery could be. “But don’t stress,” He pats your hand warmly. “That man is as stubborn as an Ox. He’ll bounce back in no time!”

You hope so. From the bits Genji told you after they found him...it had been- disparaging. The road had been rocky, though they wouldn’t disclose all the details to you. The first few weeks were touch and go before Angie finally could sign off on putting him under medically. She spoke as simply as she could but it was still a lot for you. But she was certain he would pull through, and that as soon as he could breathe on his own again she would begin the process of waking him up.

How long that would take no one knew.

You met quite a few interesting characters while you sat vigil by his bedside. Mei is a riot. The plucky young scientist is a delightful conversationalist and had many stories about Hanzo. When she talked about him you could immediately understand why they were friends. Both mathematically minded and sentimental to a fault.

Satya was more pensive when she visited at first, but warmed up to you gradually over talks of your business. Her eyes lit up when you told her your struggles with tin designs. “Let me design some for you. Your tins are wonderfully shaped, but ultimately boring.” She looks down at Hanzo’s resting form. She strokes his head lightly. The stubble growing on his crown had been recently washed. Baptist came in earlier to remove the stitches around his temporal lobe. “I’ll send you some designs tonight.” She nods curtly before leaving you alone again. Over the next few weeks, you gradually met the rest of the agents. Whether it be them coming to say hello and check up on their comrade or in the kitchen, welcoming you to a warm meal, and thousands of questions about how you met.

It wasn’t until the second month of your stay did you meet Hanzo’s dragons. It was late, later than any of the medical staff would advise you to stay up. But, you could only stay away from work for so long and it was finally quiet. You were working by Hanzo’s side, the beeping of his monitor lulling you into a trance while you read over your spreadsheets. At first, you didn’t notice, the rhythmic beeping of his machinery was white noise to you at this point. The first few hitches you missed, too preoccupied with moving numbers and shipments around. The skips steadily grew faster and more erratic, it pulls your focus from your screen. “Hanzo?” You toss your laptop to the side, ready to buzz for help. He doesn’t move, not even a flicker behind his eyelids. Nothing was out of place until you touched him. His arm is warm underneath your fingers. Too warm, near scorching. You yelp in pain falling back at a sudden blinding light that erupts from his tattoo. The room fills with a blaze of blue and gold, the energy of the blast knocks you to the floor. You scream as two massive dragons irrupt from him. They swirl around the tiny space, scleraless eyes scan the room for something.

That something just happened to be you. Two sets of eyes lock with yours. Large fanged jaws open wide, hackles raised. You sit frozen in awe and terror. Were they going to kill you? No-surely not. Genji said they would recognize you-hypothetically. They were an extension of their master's souls. The two lunge for you, three-clawed feet open wide like birds of prey. Squeezing your eyes shut you wait for the impact of scales and teeth.

Two small projectiles collide with you. The force of which knocks the air from you. “Oph!” You wheeze arms wrapping instinctively around the squirming warm creatures clinging to your chest. Two thin dry tongues flick out and tickle your jaw and cheeks.

“I heard a scream! Are you-” Genji burst in looking about frantically, his wakizashi drawn and at the ready. Angie and Baptist barge in behind him, both armed as well. “Oh.” Genji gasps, his sword drops limply to his side. “Aniki.” You look up from your prone position, still dazed and confused by the now tiny blue dragons nestled on your stomach.

“Are you alright?” Genji asks, helping you up back to your feet and righting your upturned chair. His eyes never leave the two spirits in your hands. You nod meekly. “Come, let’s give them room to work.” He takes one last look at his brother and the doctors before leading you out with him. “What happened?” He asks in the hallway eyeing the two blue dragons now wrapped around your upper body. He punches in the code for his room and lets you in.

“I-I don’t know.” The larger of the two dragons chirps as it loses its grip on your sweater. You scoop it up to nuzzle your neck like you would an infant. It coos, wrapping its fluffy tail around your wrist. The slimmer smaller one squawks indignantly, jealous of its partner's attention. It too nuzzles at your neck, draping itself around you like a scarf. “One minute I was balancing my checkbooks, and the next I heard the heart monitor going crazy. Then these two jump me.” You glanze up at Genji. He looks so hopeful. A small sigh of relief escapes him. “Is this good?”

Genji sighs heavily and flops onto his bed. He rubs at the synthetic skin of his chin thoughtfully. He points at the two dragons. “Look at how translucent they are. It takes a lot of energy to summon them to our realm.” You clutch at the squirming reptiles taking a good look at them. The two look at you with large innocent eyes. What he said was true. You could see your hands through their bodies. Their scales were dull and lacked the luster of Genji’s dragon. The larger one’s left antler was chipped and flaking onto the floor. The smaller one was very thin and hollow looking. Genji sighs looking miffed. “My best bet is they told Hanzo you're here and he sent them out to look after you. Which is sweet, but foolish. Summoning when we are mentally or physically weak could kill us if we are not careful.” He drags his fingers through his hair in frustration.

“What happens now?”

He shrugs. “I can’t say. It’s up to him now. But, I believe this is a good sign.” Genji reaches out and scratches behind one of the dragon's ears. “Thank you for coming out to us.” He speaks directly to the dragons, bowing his head low in respect. They preen, clicking and cooing in delight. Genji’s little dragon appears shortly after jumping into the fray of blue and gold. You sit in the cyborg’s cozy room watching Hanzo’s dragons play. For the first time in ages your chest cliches with something other than fear.

It takes another 3 weeks for Hanzo to open his eyes. Of course, he had to do it the one night you decided to sleep in a bed. Your back had been pleading for days for a normal night's rest. It felt like your head had barely hit your pillow before his two dragons woke you. Tiny claws kneading your stomach and chest. They were solid and heavy. Their scales are bright and iridescent. The larger one, Akuma bumps your face hard with his antlers. Huge, arching healthy antlers. He trills at you expectantly.

Genji beats you to the medical ward by seconds. His exhaust vents pumping steam out like a geyser. He speaks quickly, his words fast and agitated. He switches languages rapidly, getting more and more agitated at the blank look the assistant barring the door gives him. He is getting flustered and quickly. His green lights blazed brighter and brighter with agitated arm gestures.

“Genji-Genji!” You rest a gentle hand on his cold shoulder. He rounds on you blindly, eyes electric. The hairs on your arm begins to rise as his dragon begins to awaken just under the surface. His temper cools when he recognizes just who was trying to calm him. You glance over to the trembling medical assistant. “Come- we’ve waited this long. They will get us when it’s safe to.” You assure your friend. Genji nods jerkily, taking your offered hand. He follows you down the hall back to his room. You were both tense and vibrating with nervous energy.

You lead Genji to his room, much like he did weeks ago. Punching in his room code you collapse onto the mountain of pillows he had on the floor for a chair the moment the door closed. You hug his pillows close, trying to quell the butterflies in your stomach “He’s up.” Genji spoke in awe. You crane your neck to look as Genji paces around you. His tone was tight but hopeful. “He’s up- He’s ok.” He smiles down at you, his face the brightest you had ever seen it. He wipes at his eyes and exhales a curse of joy. Dropping down next to you, he sits cross-legged by your side.

“Yes-” It was all you could manage to say. You squeeze his knee in reassurance, your own eyes prickling around the corners. Hot tears threatening to overflow. You didn’t want to admit it to him, to anyone, but you had started to lose hope. How many times had you sat there painstakingly etching each and every angle and blemish on Hanzo’s unconscious face into your memory, just in case it was to be your last time with him? How many nights had you held your breath, eyes locked with the complex monitors and pumps looking for something, hitch in his breath, or a twitch of a finger. Something to tell you he was still there. A wave of guilt washes over you just thinking of how he had woken up alone, how you weren’t there for him.

It’s not like he knew you were here, but it hurt your heart regardless. Doubt hits you. Would he even want you here? He clearly had no intentions of telling about this part of him. He had his crew to support him, and his brother here. “What are you going to say?” Genji asks gently. You feel his warm human hand land on top of yours giving you a comforting squeeze.

“What are you planning to say?” You parrot.

Genji thinks on it for a second, biting the synthetic skin of his lower lip. “Ugh- that’s why I asked you first! I don’t know if I want to punch him for making us all worry, or hug him.”

“I wish I had an answer too.” You confess. “I don’t even know if I should go see him.”

“What!” Genji gasps. “You have to! He’ll be so happy to see you.”

“Genji,” You roll on to your side. “I’m not even supposed to be here.” You nestle into the multicolored pillows rubbing at your eyes wearily. “Maybe it would be best if I went back home. Give him some space to recover. Give whatever this is time.” Your conversation partner goes quiet. His dark eyes, so expressive like his brothers bore into you. It wasn’t judgment. Nothing of the sort. It was understanding and flickers of sympathy.

“Do you want to leave?” He asks. No. Deep down you didn’t, but the high of hearing Hanzo's condition was slowly being replaced with the reality of the situation. The reality of what now? You shrug hiding your face in your arms too ashamed to admit. He lets you stew for a moment. “My brother-” He starts slowly. “My brother is many things, he is prideful and arrogant. Sometimes to the point of being unbearable to deal with. He can be as immovable as a mountain, as you might say bullheaded. ” Genji chuckles. “But, he is incredibly patient, I never noticed it as a child…but now, it’s a trait I envy.” He rubs at his eyes thinking back to the box he found in his brother’s room, the hidden pictures of you and him. He had never seen his brother so relaxed before. He would do anything to keep seeing that smile on his brother’s face. “I guess what I’m trying to say is,” Genji continues. “ just please try to see him once? If you're able to talk to him, do. I can tell you’re special to him, he will do what it takes to make this work.”

You bob your head in understanding, working to swallow around the lump growing in your throat. “I’m scared.” You admit timidly. Genji gives you a gentle pat on the leg.

“It is a scary situation, but trust me when I say you have nothing to fear from Hanzo.”

Genji leaves you at that, you both decided that when they were given that all clear to see Hanzo he should go first. He tries to object, but it was merely a formality. You could see how desperate he was to go. You spend your time waiting in his room, with his dragon Mizuki and her siblings. They could tell you were in distress and tried their hardest to comfort you. Their warm bodies blanket yours, their purring helping drift you off to sleep.

A sharp knock wakes you and your three dragons. They all perk up, ears all twitching towards the door. Akuma growls low in his throat. You open the door to Angie. She beams at you, hand hovering mid-knock. “Ah good! Sorry if you were resting.Hanzo was asking for you.” She steps back to let you out. Mizuki yips shrilly and leaps at the doctor. She catches them gracefully and strokes their head. “You can visit briefly. I am still monitoring him.”

“Right- thank you Angie.” You turn to go.

Angie stops you with a firm hand on your shoulders. “His larynx and trachea are still healing. Talking on his end is strictly forbidden, understand?” You nod. “I’m keeping him for observation for the next week- you are welcome to visit whenever he is feeling up to it.” With that she gives your shoulders a firm clap and lets you go. You walk slowly to the medbay, Hanzo’s dragons quiet and contemplative on your shoulders. For all your anxiety your mind was completely blank. Where would you even start? Knocking softly on the door to Hanzo's private room you enter.

The sigh of relief that escapes is loud in the open space. He turns to watch you from his inclined position on his hospital bed. He looks better. The tubes and wires helping him breathe and heal had been condensed down to just a heart monitor, IV drip, and oxygen. You take in the muted colors of healing bruises on his face and chest. He hardly looked like himself though. His face was clean shaven from surgery and his hair buzz cut short. It wasn’t him, but it didn’t matter. The fire was still there behind his dark eyes. They still screamed strength and perseverance. It was the same look that had attracted you from the start.

Hanzo regards you heavily, his expression gives nothing away as you come to sit by him. His fiery eyes flicker for a moment when he notices the unshed tears threatening to spill down your cheeks. He opens his mouth to speak and winces. Each breath felt like fire in his lungs. Hanzo rubs at his bandaged neck in agony. “You know you’re not allowed to talk.” You chastise him rushing up to grab his water and straw. He waves it away with a frown and sinks back into the thin pillows of his bed. You sit back down, playing with the metal straw between your fingers. “We have a lot to talk about huh?” You ask to break the silence. Hanzo huffs at the understatement of the century. He rubs his sweaty palms across the sheets covering the stumps of his legs. You watch him, he always rubbed at his knees when he was nervous. You reached for his hand not filled with wires and tubes, but stopped. Hanzo grabs your hand before you could pull it back. His large hand covering yours, he was so warm and safe. “I’m sorry.” You can feel yourself falling apart at the seams. A mix of relief and anxiety creating an indescribable feeling in you.

Damn, what were you even apologizing for? Knowing his secret? Learning about the Shimada clan without his consent, especially since he made it clear he had no intentions of telling you himself. Genji hadn’t told you everything, but it was enough to add fuel to the fire of nightly rants with his dragons. You wipe at your face hating how hot your skin felt with tears. Hanzo tugs at your hand to get your attention. “Wha-” He grunts pointing to the side table by the door and mimes writing on his palm. His com and phone sat innocently alongside his gold ribbon and a few get-well cards and dried flowers, all gifted to him by the team. He takes the phone from you eagerly and opens up to his notes app. He writes out something quickly and trusts it at you without hesitation.

I love you, I’m sorry

What little resolve you had left breaks at his admission. You pepper his waxy skin with tear streaked kisses “I love you too- truly.” You whisper into the bandages on his skull. The strong smell of antiseptics not deterring you in the least bit. He catches a stray kiss and turns back to his screen with vigor.

I know I have much to explain, secrets that I’ve held for too long and for no reason. You were never at fault for any of this, I trust you implicitly I have for a while.

Hanzo swallows thickly, thumbs hovering over the keyboard while you read in silence.

I know I have damaged what trust you must have had in me. If this is too much, if you deem this unsalvageable… I cannot blame- I would never blame you for wanting to step back. If you desire a clean break.

“Hanzo-” He wouldn’t-

But, if you are willing to give me a chance- I will give you everything. If you are willing to wait…

He looks to you waiting. You would either stay or leave, it was up to you. You read and reread his words, both of you trying to ignore the uptick on his heart monitor. You click the phone off and put it on the windowsill. Breathing deeply you stare blindly out the window. You don’t answer with words. Truthfully you think you had any that would express what you felt in that moment. Instead, you take his hand in both of yours. You kiss along his knuckles, brushing your lips along each scar you see, both old and new alike. You knew them all by heart. They had been a calendar of sorts, the mending of torn skin and removal of stitches, your anchor. They were what kept you going on the hardest nights, they kept you knowing that the wait was worth it. You couldn’t think of stopping now, fear be damned. “I’ll be here as long as you need.”

The smile that graces his face was well worth the wait.

#Overwatch #hanzo shimada x reader #hanzo shimada #f!reader

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greenninjagal-blog · 4 years

Text

Loop Number Three Hundred Twelve

Hello who wants a quick one shot about Time Loops!

Summary: Patton is having a really bad day, and Virgil and Janus might just have a fix. He just wishes he found them three hundred loops ago.

Word Count: 5453

Quick Taglist: @alias290 @chelsvans @coyboi300 @dante-reblogs @dwbh888 @glitchybina @faithfulcat111 @felicianoromano @harrypotternerdprincess @holliberries @jemthebookworm @killerfangirl3 @mrbubbajones @musical-nerd18 @nonasficcollection @stricken-with-clairvoyancy @the-sunshine-dims @themagicheartmailman @themultishipperchild @thenaiads @treasureofpriam @vianadraws @welovelogansanders

Read on AO3 || My General Writing Masterlist

Janus is folding origami snakes when Virgil finds him.

Which, in itself, is not new or unusual. Janus has been making origami creatures since before Virgil had ever met him: cutting perfect squares of papers, folding along invisible lines, creating something new from the boringness. Some people like making tiny stars, but Janus turns squares of paper into pocket sized friends. Some of Virgils’s favorite presents are books in which he found little purple and gold paper spiders tucked between the pages, or the cranes that he unfolded to find little sweet and sappy messages for him, or when he was emptying out his school bag and found butterflies hidden in the depths, left there with care and love and waiting to be discovered on a rainy day.

Janus folds origami and Virgil keeps every single one he’s ever gotten his hands on-- sometimes even going as far as to dig the few Janus recycled out of the bin and keep them in his collection.

So the origami isn’t necessarily new or weird or confusing.

Finding him behind the school building, cutting class to fold them is.

Janus is, despite his outward appearance and his claims to the otherwise, a huge nerd. Virgil finds that adorable about him: the way he gets excited to go to school and learn something new, the bounce in his step when he was heading towards his psychology class, the rumbling of his words when he forgot to take a breath while describing history to him. He’s a nerd who reads autobiographies with crappy romance novel covers strapped on them and begs Virgil to watch the new Netflix documentaries with him.

When they had been seven, Janus had been very adamant about being a host on the History Channel. Virgil had been interested as long as he got to be the guy that went out and found Mothman to invite on to Janus’s show.

(Sometimes Virgil finds himself missing the simplicity of being seven-years-old and knowing what he wants to do with his life.)

Still Janus isn’t the type to cut class usually. Playing hookie was Virgil’s game, not his. But Janus hadn’t shown up to meet him outside his locker at the break between their classes, and Virgil had made the decision that locating Janus took priority over Personal Finance.

Its nice outside, far nicer than it has any right to be. The sun is shining, with just enough heat to make Virgil consider taking off his jacket (he doesn’t), a breeze carries through the air playing with his bangs, and the bells had just rang so everyone is in class and not outside. There’s barely any noise out here: a zombie apocalypse picturesque scene. It used to unnerve him, but now it just gives him peace of mind.

Behind the school is his fifth place to check, right behind: the far corner of the library that Janus likes to power nap in during lunch, the stairwell to the roof that is supposed to be locked but they’d jimmied open last year, Janus’s actual class where his seat was empty and several kids glanced at Virgil as he had scurried by, and the parking lot where Virgil checked to make sure that Janus hadn’t just driven away and left him in this hell alone without even a text message goodbye.

Janus is, in fact, still at the school, sitting in grass against the wall of the school that faces the parking lot. If Virgil hadn’t been looking for him, he might have mistaken him for a dark shrub or the Art Club's newest modern art installation. His bag is next to him, half his books spilling out into the lawn and at least a whole tree’s worth of folded paper around him. The piles of origami snakes remind Virgil of noodles, a mixture of colors and then twice as many in just plain white.

“Hey,” Virgil says, approaching slowly in case this is one of those times when Janus wants to be alone more than he wants to feel alone.

Janus folds another crease with the edge of his thumb nail and throws his sloppily made friend into the pile with the others. There’s a stack of pre-cut paper next to him, but it's all loose leaf paper. Which meant that he had folded his way through his stash of actual origami colored paper, which meant that he had been doing this since a lot longer than before second block, like Virgil feared.

Janus sighs thumping his head back against the brick walls and picks up another sheet. Virgil takes that as a sign to sit down next to him. He drops his bag off at his feet and reaches around the assortment of pins (Xmen, Marvel, gay flag, banned books week, one from a video game he liked the art of but had never played, etc) to unzip the smallest pocket. He pulls out another stack of the thin paper in an assortment of colors and places it on top of Janus’s current stack.

“So,” Virgil says, picking a snake off the ground. “Wanna talk about it?”

Janus flips the snake over and begins the process of folding the tail, ruthlessly. “Do I want to talk about it,” He echoes sourly, pressing each fold like it was a matter of life and death. “No, I do not want to talk about it. Because its stupid and a waste of time and I shouldn’t care but I still do and you have so many better things to do than listen to me whine about Patton Hart, yet again!”

Janus folds the head down and then stars into the empty eyes with a glare.

Virgil points his own snake at Janus and wiggles it a bit, “If its bothering you this much, then it can’t be stupid. And besides I love hearing about how much you hate Patton Hart. What did he do this time?”

“I don’t hate…” Janus lets out a sigh, “He didn’t do anything. In fact he didn’t even show up to class today. I heard a couple sophomores say he was acting funny earlier so I assume he went home early.”

Virgil frowns at that, trying to think back to the morning. He’d been running late and preoccupied with a Spanish test that he had forgotten he had first block, but he does remember seeing Roman and Patton in the halls. They hadn’t been holding hands like usual, which is probably why it stuck in Virgil’s head. They were the most lovey-dovey couple in the whole school: holding hands, kissing, flamboyant declarations of love... Virgil has nightmares about the way that Roman had asked Patton to Prom Junior year and had made Janus swear that if he ever plans on taking Virgil to a dance, he wouldn’t do it with glitter, the marching band, and in front of the whole school.

Patton had also looked different, Virgil remembers. Less cheery, more despondent. He had a smile on his face, but it looked forced and his eyes were glazed over like he wasn’t listening to anything at all.

Which, okay, fair. Roman tended to say the same things every day but phrased them differently. There were really only oh-so-many ways to say the words “I love you” and Roman had used up all of them in freshman year.

“So he wasn’t there,” Virgil says, shrugs, and takes a moment of silence to hope that Patton is getting some well needed sleep: Patton is one of those guys that just...finds a way to be involved with everything. Bake sales, choir, poetry club, talent show, office runner, treasurer of the student council-- if there’s something anyone needs to get done, Patton probably can do it. Not to mention he’s the nicest person Virgil has ever met. He honestly sees the good in people and its a shame that he’s dating Roman, because otherwise he and Janus would have invited him into their relationship a while ago.

(Roman isn’t exactly someone Janus or Virgil could stand on a weekly basis, much less daily. Virgil is pretty sure if Roman ever tried any romantic shit that he pulls on Patton, on Virgil he’ll spontaneously combust. Janus gets hives from being in close proximity to the gooey lovefest that Roman brings around any time he opens his mouth. And of course, Roman isn’t the type to share anything.)

((Ninety percent of their relationship these days is locking eyes while Roman did something and fake gagging like the mature adults they were.))

“What’s the big de--” Virgil stops, “Wait, isn’t debate today?”

“And take a guess who was my partner,” Janus summarizes. He tosses the snake to the ground and picks up another sheet of paper. “He...The Dragon Witch immediately failed me because he didn’t….and I couldn’t…”

He messes up the fold because his fingers are shaking too much. Virgil gently reaches out and takes the paper from his fingertips. It floats down to join the other snakes, and Virgil gives Janus’s hands a squeeze.

There’s a welt of anger in his chest, bubbling up in a nice simmer. He hates the Dragon Witch, although he’s never had her class or even knows her real name (Roman had coined the title in freshman year back when he had been a benchwarmer for the football team and it had caught on until the whole school used it). She’s known for being generally awful to every student that came in, a little unhinged, and even her own daughter-- a girl in the grade below them-- agrees that nobody wants to be in her class. Unfortunately, despite the many protests held by small pockets of students, the Dragon Witch has tenure and the school board’s stance is “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. Ergo, she still lives on this plane of existence and Virgil thinks about egging her car often. Probably too often.

“Its stupid,” Janus repeats and the cavity where Virgil’s heart should be aches a little for him, “I know she’s had it out for me. Ever since that first day when I pointed out all the books on the syllabus were written by rich white men. But it was just… I felt really good about this one, Vee.”

Virgil knows this. Janus had been practically vibrating since the assignment had been given out. He’d gone above and beyond with his research for the topic-- something about selflessness that had gone straight over Virgil’s head when Janus had been talking about it. Patton hadn’t even been that bad of a partner, Janus had said, despite never having time to practice for it. They had exchanged numbers and texted details and notes to one another all week.

If Virgil hadn’t spent most of the afternoons lying next to Janus playing League of Legends and listening to Janus’s black pen scratch out preparation notes, he might have been jealous of how much attention Janus had been giving Patton. (and vise versa.)

“We were going to win,” Janus says softly. “And then Patton decided to just not show the fuck up! Why can’t I count on anyone but you? Why must I suffer in a world full of idiots?”

“Hey, at least he’s cute,” Virgil says.

“At least he’s cute,” Janus agrees, resignedly. “Do you think he’s going to break up with Roman?”

Virgil shrugs, “Do you want to ask him to join us if he does?”

“I would never pass up an opportunity to spite Roman like that,” Janus says, which is actually code for “I would never pass up an opportunity to dote on Patton and Virgil, do you think he’ll let us paint his nails, I have the perfect shade of blue to match his shoelaces--”

(They’ve had this conversation at least once every season since Janus had caught Virgil sighing at the smaller boy in the halls midway through freshman year.)

Janus wiggles his hands from Virgil’s and picks up the unfinished snake but its softer now, less angry and more care. When he completes it, he points it at Virgil and offers a guilty half smile.

“Sorry for making you miss class.”

Virgil wants to laugh because really that was the last thing on his mind right now. He shuffles through the snakes on the ground picking out his favorites to add to his collection. “Nah, its cool. You can just do my taxes and budgeting in the future and we’ll call it even. What are you gonna do with all of these?”

Janus hums, looking at all of them, “Maybe we can hide them around school to confuse people.”

“Can we write “you’re next” in a red pen on the inside of them?” Virgil asks with a grin, “like some horror movie shit?”

“Whatever you desire, darling,” Janus says and Virgil is incredibly grateful that he’s in love with his best friend. Virgil doesn’t usually count himself as lucky, but Janus had to be some kind of miracle: a person who understood Virgil the way that no one else ever bothered to. Janus has the type of laughter that makes everyone else want to laugh as well, the type of smile that begs for mischief, the type of loyalty that reassures Virgil no matter what happens they have each other’s backs.

Also he’s pretty, and Virgil likes staring at pretty things.

Janus leans forward and gives him a peck on his cheek. “Thank you.”

“You missed,” Virgil says with a stupid ass smile, because he’s stupidly in love and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Janus rolls his eyes very fondly and leans in again, until Virgil can see every shade of brown and green in his mismatched eyes, until he can feel Janus’s breath on his face, until Virgil loses track of the nanometers between them. Virgil’s eyes are half closed already, anticipating how the rest of their newly established free time is going to be spent and not feeling a speck of embarrassment or guilt about it--

And then he sees the movement out of the corner of his eyes and freezes up. He’s certain without looking that it is a teacher and oh god they were going to get expelled for something. There’s too much stuff around them-- their bags, the millions of snakes, their own bodies-- and even if they left everything there they’d surely get found out from that stuff, and then the school would call his mom and Virgil did not want to have that conversation with her again.

But then he does look and its not a teacher at all. Virgil blinks, once, twice to make sure he’s seeing things correctly.

“Virgil?” Janus says, still several centimetres away from kissing him and obviously aware of how Virgil had tensed to high hell.

“I thought you said that Patton went home sick,” Virgil says absently.

Janus sits back, following his line of sight to the corner of the building where-- sure enough-- Patton Hart was walking without a care in the entire world. He was dressed differently today than Virgil remembered him ever dressing: the memories of his polo and his cardigan give way to the reality of sweatpants and a soft sweater that cannot be comfortable in the heat of the day. Virgil tries to remember if that’s what Patton had been wearing earlier and… yeah it was. From this distance Virgil can’t tell the look on his face, but he doesn’t look like he’s worried at all.

He’s walking with a purpose. And that purpose looks angry.

“Does Patton have a car?” Janus asks.

“I don’t...think so…” Virgil says tracking Patton’s progress across the lawn.

“Then who’s keys does he have in his hand?” Janus says not entirely rhetorical.

With barely a nod between the two of them, they scoop all the paper snakes into Virgil’s bag and take off after him.

Its extremely weird, Virgil thinks. Because its so quiet that their footsteps sound like slaps, and they have to duck around a red truck to avoid Patton’s glance back. Janus crouches delicately, slinking between the cars and Virgil wastes a moment watching how gracefully he moves.

He’s like water flowing, controlled and effortless and an undercurrent of power. Virgil doesn’t doubt his ability to fight right this moment, doesn’t doubt his killer left hook, or his dirty fighting tactics that Janus picked up in the name of self defense and preservation. Virgil’s body hums with adrenaline as he watches Janus follow after Patton.

He leans against a jeep that doesn’t actually have a parking pass but no one’s complained about it and Janus peeks around the bummer to see where Patton was heading.

For a second, Virgil thought he was going after Janus’s car-- the little gold mazada 3 thats a year and a half old and a gift from his parents. He’s just about to yell, to scream, to ward Patton off, because it was already shitty of him to not show up to the debate, but touching Janus’s car? That’s like super assholeish and Virgil has never once wanted to call Patton an asshole.

Janus, however, is quicker and covers his mouth with his hand. “Look, I think...he’s crying,”

“What?” Virgil whispers, squinting-- oh shit, he should probably get an appointment to update his contacts soon -- and Patton is crying. Its the silent type of crying that's born from using a smile to hide the hurt too much and Virgil immediately decides that Patton doesn’t deserve that ever. He feels each one of those tears like a punch to the gut, each soft barely audible gasp like a knee to his jaw, each sniffle like an elbow to the back of his head.

Patton storms past Janus’s car and goes straight to the fiery red Prius that Roman (and his twin Remus) share.

“Oh my god,” Virgil breathes at the same time as Patton takes the blade of a key to the side of the car.

The noise is awful. Janus flinches curling into Virgil as they watch with morbid fascination: Patton doesn’t waver, doesn’t hesitate as he carves deep into the paint and the metal, perfecting each and every letter.

By the time he’s finished, he’s bawling big fat crocodile tears that soak all turn all his cheeks puffy and soak the collar of his sweater and Virgil’s stomach is a twisted knot of emotions he doesn’t know what to do with.

“FUCK OFF” written on the side of Roman’s car explains things very well, anyway.

Patton drops the keys on the ground and then follows after in such a dead weight fall that Virgil feels the shockwaves from where he is. He curls in on himself, sobbing horrible, gut-wrenching howls of pain.

Janus leaps around Virgil to run after him, and Virgil only stumbles slightly trying to come with him.

“I didn’t…” Janus says, loudly--loud enough to make Patton jump and Virgil flinch and the empty parking lot feel crowded, “I didn’t know you were into Modern Art, Patton.”

Virgil thinks that if it were any other situation, he might have snorted. But when Patton turns to them with his blue eyes so full of tears that Virgil thinks he might drown in them, he forgets every other thought he has had.

Its just...rage.

“I’ll kill him.”

And Virgil means it, the same way he says that the sky is blue, or that he won't take off his sweatshirt, that he loves Janus with all his soul. He means that he will go right back into that building and search through every single fucking classroom until he finds wherever Roman spends his third class of the day and then he’ll drag him out to the parking lot by his stupid perfect hair and run him over a couple hundred times.

Virgil will go to jail for manslaughter and he wouldn’t even feel sorry.

Patton lets out a shuddering sob and frantically tries to wipe away his ugly tears, making noises that Virgil assumes are meant to be words but they come out scrambled and grated and wrong. And Patton who’s never done a single mean thing in all the time that Virgil has known of him, does not deserve to feel a hurt that bad. How dare Roman make him feel a pain that bad.

Virgil rolls up his sleeves and spins on his heel to go take care of the issue-- but Janus catches him by his hood and yanks him back.

“Patton,” Janus says softly (a tone that's normally reserved for two AM sleepovers and lazy saturday movie marathons and sad boi hours that come and go like the seasons), “What can we do?”

Patton lets out a shriek, and when he looks back up there’s no sadness. Its a fury, an anger, its frustration that boiled into a suffocating gas and Virgil guess that he’s not going to need to end Roman’s life because Patton is perfectly capable of doing himself.

“You can shut the hell up!” Patton screams, “And Leave me the fuck alone!”

Virgil and Janus share a look.

And well...Virgil has been breaking rules since he was a kid and Janus isn’t the type of follow orders simply because. Without discussing anything they both sit down next to Patton, and Virgil starts pulling out the origami paper again.

“What are you doing?” Patton hisses in a way that Virgil has never once seen him do. His fingers shake, but he keeps himself calm and cool and collected.

“Its called origami,” Janus says, although he knows very well that’s not what Patton was asking. Virgil watches his fingers flick in the air, a mesmerizing dance that once Patton looks at he couldn’t look away from.

Patton’s tears drop, his face is still puffy and dangerous, but Janus says nothing about it. Virgil holds his breath and watches as Janus folds, unfolds, pinches, twists the paper into a jumping frog. He sets it out on his palm and lets Patton stare at it like it holds the secrets of the universe.

“I like making things when I get upset,” Janus says. “Would you like me to teach you?”

“I…” Patton sniffles, rubbing away his tears again. He sounds so small and insignificant that Virgil wants to wrap his arms around him and protect him from everything. “Why…?”

“I know how to do many animals,” Janus continues on, “frogs, snakes, spiders, cranes… Or we can just fold paper in any way we want to, too.”

Patton is silent. Janus picks up another piece of paper and begins folding it in half. There’s a breeze through the parking lot, colder than before, bitter and smarting. Virgil tugs the sleeves of his jacket over his hands and tries not to wonder what happened to the sun.

“The motion is calming to me,” Janus explains, “I like the creation of something new and different, the repetition--”

There’s a huff.

A snort.

And then...well then Patton is laughing a terribly wet, mean laugh. Janus pauses halfway through folding the head of the frog to make sure Patton hasn't been replaced by a skinwalking alien wearing Patton’s face, and Virgil can’t really blame him at all. The small boy kneels over laughing so hard he ends up gasping for breath and Virgil shivers at how the noise steals all the warmth from the air.

“Fucking stupid,” Patton manages, through gasps that sound suspiciously like whimpers. “Everything is so fucking stupid.”

“I see someone taught the five-year-old a new swear word,” Janus says. “Who was it? Remus?”

“Just go away, Janus,” Patton says, laying his head on the asphalt.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Janus tuts finishing off his second frog, “You really don’t know where that piece of road has been.”

“Actually I do!” Patton bolts upright, “I do know! Its been right here! Its been here no matter what’s happened, never moving, never changing, and even if I marked it with chalk or paint or took a jackhammer to it or blew it the fuck up it will still be here when I wake up tomorrow! Now fuck off!”

Virgil blinks, tilting his head to the side ever so slightly.

“I am learning so many things about you today, Patton,” Janus says without missing a beat. He picks up another sheet of paper, “You’re into modern art, you’re passionate about parking lots...my, my, my. Perhaps we should have done our debate on road construction instead. Would you have bothered to show up then?”

“Like it matters.” Patton says, even more unlike himself. Virgil thinks he’s seen Patton overbook himself for commitments more times than he can count and apologies are nearly always coupled with food of some sort: cookies, fudge, pasta salad. Sometimes even to things he never even said he could be there for. Patton is more apologetic than Virgil ever has been, and Virgil likes to apologize for existing.

But here is a Patton, or a version of him, that seems so defeated, so angry, so sad and upset and miserable that he’s just...given up. Consequences be damned.

“We lose,” Patton says looking up at the sky, “We lose because Mrs. Hydrus hates you, Janus, and so she makes us do it without any notes, then every time you stumble, she interrupts and asks for clarification despite being the moderator, and she cuts down our time by a whole minute. And when you say anything back to her she sends you to the principal's office and gives us a zero for the assignment, anyway. We lose. But its fine because you never remember anyway and then you get to wake up and be humiliated all over again. And it doesn’t matter what I do! Okay? We lose!”

Janus stops folding his frog and turns to look directly at Patton. Virgil is too, and he can scarcely breathe.

“What did you just say?”

Patton turns to face him swiping away another round of tears. “Go ahead, Virgil! You’re just like everyone else. Go and call me c-crazy! Tell me I’m insane! T-take me to the doctors! Whatever! I’m so t-tired of this and I can’t even die.”

Virgil swallows hard. There’s a lump in the back of his throat, a lump that’s growing until he can barely breathe around it. Janus brings a hand up to his mouth like he might be sick right there on the concrete.

“Patton…” Virgil breathes. “Are you a paper frog?”

Patton stares at him like he’s stupid so Virgil reaches out with shaky hands and picks up one of the finished frogs from the ground. He carefully unfolds it, piece-by-piece, until its back to the original square. Then he holds it up for Patton to see, and begins to refold it the way that Janus had.

“Are you,” Virgil asks, “being refolded like a paper frog?”

Patton’s face says everything.

“H-how,” Janus asks, “how many times?”

The other boy blinks long and slow and sniffles. “I-I don’t know. Around three hundred twelve? Maybe? I lost count so long ago.”

“Three hundred twel--” Virgil repeats, “Holy shit, Pat! That’s almost a year.”

“Why didn’t you come to us?” Janus asks, although they all know why really. Despite them being debate partners, Patton and Janus don’t talk. Janus and Virgil admire him from afar, and only talk to him in passing. For the longest time Virgil didn’t even know if Patton knew his name, and now they’re sitting here wondering why strangers would ever interact with one another?

“What about…” Virgil motions to the car, the keys, the fun words written in the red paint.

Patton shakes his head so hard his body trembles. “He doesn’t...he never...I tried so so hard but its so much easier to leave him be. It takes so much to convince him and then… then its not a true love’s kiss solution.”

Virgil’s gut twists just thinking about that. About how many times that Roman made him prove that he had seen everything before, and then for a kiss not to work when they both were head over heels in love with each other and then waking up again, convincing Roman again, then telling him the kiss didn’t work? Virgil could guess it didn’t go over well at all.

Knowing Roman it had probably dissolved into a “we’re not meant for each other?”, followed by a “i will always love you no matter what.” , and finished with a “If it will save you from this loop then we’ll have to break up”.

From the sight of the keys on the ground, Virgil can guess how far it went this time.

“I do love him,” Patton says almost desperately. “I do, I do, I do! I swear I love him so much--”

Janus puts a hand on Patton’s shoulder and he falls silent immediately. “I believe you,” Janus says, “I’ve seen the way you look at him, Patton. No one here thinks that the two of you aren’t perfect for each other.”

Its a pain to admit because its friendzoning both of them right now, but Virgil would weather that if it meant Patton wouldn’t sound so heartbroken. Janus meets his eyes over Patton’s shoulder and gives him a nod. At least they’re on the same page for this.

“Three hundred twelve time loops,” Virgil says, “does not sound like it was fun at all.”

“Are any loops fun?” Janus asks.

“Fruit loops are fun,” Patton sniffles again. He rubs his eyes and hunches over in his sweatshirt. “Do you guys...do you guys really believe me?”

Janus’s lips curve into a wry smile, “Patton in all the time that I can remember, I’ve never seen you have the guts to key someone’s car. And now you’re saying fuck? And telling me off? That's a whole lot of character development to happen without me noticing, unless it was a time loop.”

Patton giggles, just a bit. It's still weepy but it makes Virgil feel like he can breathe for the first time.

“Don’t worry, Pat,” Virgil says, “We’ll figure this thing out.”

“H-how?”

Janus sighed leaning back a little, “Well we could ask Logan.”

“Logan?” Virgil echoes, “you mean Remus’s boyfriend? You think he’s got something?”

Janus shrugs, “He is a witch.”

“A what now?” Virgil says. “Since when was he a witch! You never told me that!”

Janus grins sheepishly, and rubs the back of his neck, “I forgot? I love you?”

Virgil blows a raspberry at him. “Just like how I’m gonna forget to mention you when I find Mothman. But I love you, too.”

“Its a cruel love, this thing we have.” Janus says rather poetically and Virgil reaches over to shove his shoulder. Janus laughs sways so he falls onto Patton’s shoulder. Patton for his part smiles, bright and blinding and it takes both their breaths away when he laughs again.

Virgil can’t imagine having to redo the same day twice, much less three hundred times. He wonders vaguely if Patton has any idea how strong he is, how amazing, how inspiring he is to keep that glow inside himself despite everything.

He’s smile fades for a moment and he perks up all of a sudden. “Oh My Gosh! Logan’s a witch!” He makes a flurry of arm movements that forces Virgil to duck, “Oh my gosh that means--!!”

“Deep breaths, dear,” Janus suggests, although it goes ignored.

“Yesterday--like actually yesterday, your yesterday, not the last loop, Logan and Remus got into an argument over a bottle and I thought it was gatorade! Remus was trying to drink it but Logan wouldn’t let him and they ended up spilling it on the floor! I helped them keep it up but I got a little bit on my hand! I didn’t think too much of it but what if it was like some sort of potion?”

Janus considers it, “Hmmm, its a good starting place. Let’s go ask him what it was.” He stands up and offers a hand down to Patton and Virgil each. Virgil takes it and turns back to also offer his own hand to the smaller boy.

“Come on, Hart, this is going to be your last loop.” Janus says.

Patton stares at their hands almost as if he was afraid to take them. He glances down at the origami frogs, at the keys, and their bags, then back up at them with an fearful expression. “You...you promise?”

Virgil laughs, “Yeah, we got you, Pat. Promise.”

Patton shakes from head to toe, but he grabs both their hands and smiles like he has hope for the first time in three hundred twelve days.

#sanders sides #Virgil Sanders #Patton Sanders #Janus Sanders #sympathetic deceit #anxceit #roman sanders #logan sanders #remus sanders #royality #moxceit #highschool au #time loop #Patton says fuck #but he's earned that right #Janus and Virgil are bffs #you can tear that from my cold dead hands

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Sopranos’ Best End Credit Songs

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There are so many legendary aspects of The Sopranos that it’s hard to pick just one. Between masterful storytelling, deep character development, and uncanny acting, everything comes together to create a show that has been enjoyed for over two decades now. The most artistic aspect of the package, however, may just be the use of music, specifically the unique songs curated personally by creator David Chase that run during each episode’s end credits.

Ranging from oldies, foreign ballads, jazz compositions, and pure instrumentals, the variety is stunning and can keep you exploring the track list of the series for days. We’ve decided to narrow all of the end credit songs down to the best 15 in the series, listed in chronological order of airing. Enjoy!

Season 1 Episode 4: Meadowlands

“Look on Down from the Bridge” by Mazzy Star

The nice father-son moment between Tony and A.J. at the closing of this episode is accompanied by this beautiful track from Mazzy Star. A.J. sees his dad in a whole new light after Meadow tells him that he’s in the mafia, but a simple smile and wink from Tony reassures the youngest Soprano child that he certainly will still “look on down from the bridge” and see his family as the only priority in his life, no matter what criminal occupation he tries to hide on a daily basis.

Season 1 Episode 7: Down Neck

“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane

This one follows the pattern of the show choosing to play a song earlier in an episode and then again during the final scene and credits. The Jefferson Airplane hit refers to drug use and being intoxicated, therefore changing as a person in the process. The song plays when Tony is taking prozac mid-episode and during the final scene in which Tony and A.J share an ice cream sundae and some whip cream together. No matter how much the therapy and the meds try to alter Tony’s life, he’ll remain the same man: a depressed mobster and a father who softens for his children.

Season 2 Episode 10: Bust Out

“Wheel in the Sky” by Journey

If you haven’t noticed by the time you’re done watching the show, The Sopranos loves to point out how trapped all of the characters are in the lifestyles they have either chosen or been forced into. Tony has betrayal surrounding him at every corner at the end of the second season: Richie and Janice plotting his removal, Carmela falling for a painter who is working in the family home, and Pussy’s FBI informancy reaching a climax. Still, the “wheel in the sky keeps on turning”. Tony finishes the episode having some fun with A.J. on the Stugotz, and he doesn’t “know where he’ll be tomorrow” but he’ll enjoy the time he has in the present.

Season 2 Episode 12: The Knight in White Satin Armor

“I Saved the World Today” by the Eurythmics

Tony returns home after disposing of Richie Aprile’s body because Janice shot him to death over a domestic dispute. After informing Carmela of the night’s bloody events, she quickly moves on to the list of chores and homemaker responsibilities she is going to lay at Tony’s feet for the next week while she goes on vacation with Ro Aprile. This apt song from the Eurythmics exemplifies everything Tony has to be in the lives of friends and family around him: always there to save the world for them.

Season 3 Episode 4: Employee of the Month

“Fisherman’s Daughter” by Daniel Lanois

This Dr. Melfi-centric episode is one of the most deservedly acclaimed hours in the drama’s history. When the final scene gives her a chance to let Tony loose on the monster who assaulted her, she powerfully takes the moral route and declines his services. The camera pans to black solemnly with this haunting instrumental track by Daniel Lanois, a perfect backdrop to allow the audience to ponder everything that just happened and why Melfi was able to maintain strength that so many others wouldn’t have mustered. Anything with singing would have detracted from the environment the writers were trying to create, so this is a great song choice.

Season 3 Episode 12: Amour Fou

“Affection” by Little Steven and the Lost Boys

The penultimate episode of the third season features the climax of the relationship between Tony and Gloria, in which the crazy affection that they have for one another boils over into violence. Yet another of the brilliant musical choices this show made was to use the same song twice: once earlier in an episode, and then again in the final scene and credits. This tune, sung by Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) himself, plays with Tony and Gloria spending time together mid-episode and then again at the end credits.

Season 4 Episode 4: The Weight

“Vesuvio” by Spaccanapoli

Another example of double dipping on the same song in one episode. The above scene between Carmela and Furio dancing and falling in love right underneath Tony’s nose uses this romantic Italian track by Spaccanapoli, and then uses it again in the final seconds when Carmela is daydreaming about Furio while having sex with Tony. So sensual and heavy, the audience knows that Carmela is going down a path she can’t see through to the end, but the music signifies the passion that she will inevitably entangle herself in for the time being.

Season 4 Episode 7: Watching Too Much Television

“Oh Girl” by The Chi-Lites

When an assemblyman starts an affair with Tony’s ex-lover, Irina, there is quite a bit of jealousy and ownership that exudes from the mob boss. This classic from the Chi-Lites plays in the car on the way over to the assemblyman’s house as Tony drives over to confront him about “taking” his mistress from him. It is a song which causes deep reflection and nostalgia for a lost love, and prompts Tony to get emotional listening to it. Wonderful acting by Gandolfini and superb use of in-world music that plays over to the credits, something the show got down to an art and a science simultaneously.

Season 5 Episode 10: Cold Cuts

“I’m Not Like Everybody Else” by The Kinks

No, Tony Soprano is certainly not like anybody else. He insists that Janice see anger management counselors at the beginning of this episode, and when she actually improves her mood because of it, his narcissism makes him antagonize her until a typical Soprano family fight breaks out at dinner. Tony walks out of the house with a despicable smile on his face to the tune of this intense rock anthem.

Season 5 Episode 11: The Test Dream

“Three Times a Lady” by The Commodores

In an episode in which Tony spends 20 minutes literally dreaming about past and future problems in his life, culminating in the murder of Billy Leotardo by Anthony Blundetto, The Commodores soft romance hit plays us out. Tony calls Carmela to report about said dreams, part of which were repeat ones that have happened previously in Tony’s life. It’s nice for the audience to see these two having a tender exchange rather than the tense arguing that normally characterizes their marriage, especially because this was when the two were still separated previously throughout the fifth season.

Season 6 Episode 4: The Fleshy Part of the Thigh

“One of These Days” by Pink Floyd

Paulie Walnuts is a fan favorite for a myriad of reasons. Between his gray-haired wings and his immature one-liners, many forget that the mobster had one of the scarier violent streaks in the show. After discovering that his mother was actually his aunt, Paulie gets jealous of Jason Barone’s mother trying to protect him from the mafia after selling the sanitation business that serves as a front for the DiMeo crime family. This psychedelic, hard-rock snippet from Pink Floyd that blares in the credits after Paulie threatens Jason’s life at the end of episode is a strong reminder to the viewer that this is a character who borders on sociopathic most of the time.

Season 6 Episode 12: Kaisha

“Moonlight Mile” by The Rolling Stones

Unlike other iconic dramas, The Sopranos loved ending their season finales (and “Kaisha” is technically a season finale with season 6 split into two parts) with relative closure and absolutely no cliffhangers. The family has an enormous Christmas gathering at the Soprano residence, marked by A.J. bringing over an older girlfriend and Meadow’s rare absence from family time. This classic from The Rolling Stones that describes the feeling of trying to get back home off the road fits lovingly with the rare moment of calm before the storm that is the final season of the show.

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Season 6 Episode 14: Stage 5

“Evidently Chickentown” by John Cooper Clarke

This closing piece by John Cooper Clarke is actually considered a poetry performance, and the anger and fury that it inspires as Phil Leotardo laments being taken advantage of a few too many times is palpable. This is when we knew that war in New York was going to be bloody. The song also symbolizes the perpetual frustration both Christopher and Tony have with one another when they hug at the former’s baby’s baptism. The final season was certainly kicked up a couple notches as these final credits rolled.

Season 6 Episode 17: Walk Like a Man

“The Valley” by Los Lobos

This somber piece plays alongside Christopher picking up a tiny tree in his front yard after Paulie had attempted to destroy everything on his property as revenge for a violent incident. After Christopher thinks they’ve made up, Paulie and the gang start making fun of his infant daughter and laughing in his face. It is at this point that Chris understands he is forever an outsider, not loved by a single person on the planet. He will just trudge along and try to keep upright, which are themes displayed in this chilling and melancholy song of choice.

Season 6 Episode 21: Made in America

“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey

The most famous song in the show is also the final one that plays right before the screen goes to black and Tony Soprano’s fate is left up to our own imagination (kind of). It’s technically not an end credits song, but there’s no way it can be excluded from this list. The song represents the nostalgia of sharing one final family meal together, the simplicities of the Soprano family when you strip away the mobster lifestyle and the murder, and it encourages the audience to never stop believing their favorite mob boss is still alive if that’s what they so choose to desire. A special ending to a legendary show!

The post The Sopranos’ Best End Credit Songs appeared first on Den of Geek.

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Kyoto, the imperial capital of Japan, spring 1608. A merchant by the name of Suminokura Ryōi is given the contract to supply building materials for the renovation of Hōkō-ji, a temple in central Kyoto designed to rival the famous temples of nearby Nara. The Suminokura family had made a name for themselves in finance, medicine and overseas trade, with offices as far away as distant Annan (the Japanese name of the country today called Vietnam).

Suminokura1 soon realized that transporting goods into Kyoto was a difficult and expensive business. The Kamo river which runs through Kyoto was too irregular for transports, so goods arriving by boat mostly had to be unloaded at Fushimi, a town about ten kilometers south of Kyoto, repacked to ponies and transported on roads through the southern neighborhoods of Kyoto before spreading out to their final destinations. The daily comings and goings of men and animals, more or less non-stop, wasn’t popular with the locals either.

There was an opportunity here. In 1610, the Suminokura family got permission from the government, and using their own money they contracted teams of workers to dig out a canal parallel to the river, connecting the port of Fushimi with central Kyoto, to be lined with stone from local quarries. It was built for a continuous water depth of a mere thirty centimeters, about twice the minimum needed for the boats they wanted to use.

…

For over three hundred years the canal was in daily use and benefited the people of Kyoto, until transport on the canal was finally banned in 1920. During its three centuries it needed virtually no maintenance, it relied on no engines or fuel, no mining, no metals, no chemicals. There was no pollution, the boats could be hand built by any carpenter from most any kind of wood. The canal never broke down or got stuck. It did not cause any emissions or erosion, it saved millions of man hours otherwise spent on maintaining roads and road surfaces. There were no accidents: at walking speed and thirty centimeter depth it was safe enough to have children playing in the middle of it with boats coming and going. It could transport anything right into the heart of the city without noise or smell or toxic fumes and the operating costs were negligible. It helped cool the city down during hot summers. It was even a popular sightseeing spot. People would mention it in poetry. It brought with it neither pests nor weeds.4

It was a perfect piece of infrastructure without unforeseen problems or accumulating debt—paid in full from day one—or waste. Completely human scaled and operating on nothing but gravity or human muscle power.

…

A network of trucks and roads, oil tankers, and the regular application of gun boat diplomacy is probably a system many dozens of times more efficient—if your only metric is the ability to deliver toilet rolls and pallets of cereals to supermarkets—than a system of shallow bottomed canal boats. As long as everything keeps going for the foreseeable future at least some of us should be fine.

But it isn’t sustainable, at all.

And if it is one thing we know, it is that what cannot last, will fall. Maybe not in our generation. But in our children’s, or our grandchildren’s. Why would we wish that kind of catastrophe upon them, just so that we right here right now will be able to—for example—order a tomato salad in the middle of the winter at a fancy downtown lunch restaurant? Do we really need breakfast cereals that badly?

…

At the very least, if we can’t build infrastructure to last we should build infrastructure that can be repaired using materials, energy and skills that are likely to be around when it inevitably fails, at some point in the future. Serious people are seriously doubting whether we will have the oil and energy necessary to maintain existing roads in the coming two decades (let alone expand them to match the never ending growth of our urban sprawl).

We will never run out of cobblestone.

On a more personal level, what about the gadget that controls the ventilation in your modern eco-home, will it be around in twenty years? Or will the lack of spares make your home uninhabitable? Our ancestors at least were never lying awake at night worrying about running out of windows that open. The suburbs and the systems that keep them habitable—the increasingly over worked power, water and sewage grids, all taken together it is nothing but a nation sized ticking time bomb.5

…

What cannot last, will fall, and when that happens it will be too late to regret all the things we did not build, while we had the chance. While the lights were still on and the oil tankers where still arriving on schedule.

#substack #wrath of gnon #japan #kyoto #infrastructure #environment #sustainability

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“Middle-class girls who no longer spent their days as their mothers’ apprentices in domestic maintenance and manufacture were not left to their own devices. Just as their mothers’ responsibilities reoriented from home industries to the rearing of children, girls’ own primary goals shifted from the manufacture of cloth and the preserving of foodstuffs to the culturing of themselves. Self-culture was a broad-based project in the nineteenth century which was central to the emergence of a middle class.

In the increasingly fluid and unpredictable climate that accompanied the emergence of a market economy, young men and women were urged to form regular habits of restraint and self-control as their best protection against future disasters. A self-regulating man could chart an even course for his family; a self-cultured and refined woman could safeguard her family’s standing whatever economic circumstances should befall her. Self-culture was especially critical for girls for whom freedom from domestic labor left a good bit of free time during their impressionable years.

The advice writer William Thayer, who at midcentury had worried that for some girls the result might be ‘‘a study in how to kill time,’’ offered an alternative: ‘‘What an opportunity for mental culture and religious improvement!’’ Thayer’s proposed means to these ends was significant. He proposed that girls accomplish their goals through reading, ideally a hundred pages a day. The elevation of reading to a central and defining aspect of bourgeois girls’ lives helped to define a specifically Victorian adolescence.

Many girls followed Thayer’s advice and read for several hours a day, often supplementing their reading with the writing of letters or the keeping of a journal and diary. Reading and writing, the twin activities of literacy, became the vehicles to self-culture and the central activities of many privileged Victorian girls’ lives. They reinforced each other abundantly, as girls read and then wrote about what they read—time profitably filled twice over.

Although Victorians came to debate the influence of various kinds of sensational reading material and the health of the practice of writing gushing prose, the activities of literacy had much to recommend them to adults over other occupations. As pastimes which took place in the imagination, they had a provisional quality which allowed for the displacement of desires for drama. In the best of circumstances, the cautionary tales of Victorian moralists and even the passionate dramas of romance would be processed through a girl’s writing and help her to grow into an understanding woman of character, restraint, and refinement.

Many middle-class girls read voraciously—their reading often limited only by supply. The diaries and journals they left contain lists of books read over the course of a year and descriptions of time spent in reading over the course of a day. The advice writer Heloise Hersey estimated in 1901 that in the years between age twelve and twenty-one, ‘‘the average young gentlewoman reads a novel more than an hour a day. Thus she gives one and one-third years of solid working days to this occupation.’’

It was common for reading, scattered through the day, often accompanied by writing, to be the single most time-consuming activity mentioned in girls’ diaries. One girl reported reading in four different books through the course of a day, and sometimes reading straight through (over the course of several days) such massive volumes as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Another noted that on July 14, 1864, ‘‘I believe that I have not read a bit today—such a singular thing that I must record it.’’

Girls read by the window, in the hammock, on the horsecars, as well as in the parlor. Not all of girls’ reading was for the same purpose, of course. Some of it was dutiful and dull; some of it was romantic and dangerous; some of it was inspirational. But it is clear that in comparison both with the eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries, nineteenth-century Victorian girls of a certain class came to spend much of their lives—and perhaps also do much of their living—on and through the written word.

The dominance of the Victorian culture of reading and writing was sufficient that even girls who had other substantial chores often used their curtailed discretionary time engaged in literacy. Thus Hannah Davis, who at the age of twelve in 1851 appeared to be living out as ‘‘help’’ in Ohio, reported one day’s activity: ‘‘I got up eat my breakfast washed the dishes and read till noon then washed the dishes after dinner and read till supper eat supper washed the dishes and went to read a while then Milton Elvira Sarah and me told some tales and went to bed.’’

Of course, we know about these reading regimens only because they were accompanied by writing regimens. Like reading, writing was a plastic medium which filled various needs and purposes. As witnessed by numerous late Victorian portraits, girls frequently spent hours at desks, composing poetry, writing letters, pasting scrapbooks, keeping diaries or journals. The youth magazine St. Nicholas received a poem from one girl not yet ten and cautioned her, ‘‘Don’t write verses yet, cleverly as you do them for one of your age. There is time enough for that’’—time which would come when she reached her teens.

This time came not only for girls in the city, who could not ‘‘frolic’’ in the open air, as the little poet was advised to, but for rural girls as well. Like Mark Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford, who lived on the banks of the Mississippi and wrote mournful poetry that she kept in a scrapbook, actual girls from the hinterlands, too, kept diaries and wrote poetry, and intermingled their descriptions of household chores with locks of hair, autograph albums, and florid poetry.

Writing was sometimes a solitary act, as we envision it today, but it often had an important social component. Girls formed clubs to write stories together, wrote poetry for each other, and often described writing their diaries together. Writing was not simply an activity for moments of solitude and silence, but one which compelled attention even among friends and in company. This ‘‘crescendo of verbal activity’’—a fascination with both the power and the possibilities of literacy—played a variety of roles for girls in the process of becoming women.

In particular, girls’ writing was an arena of contest between parents and daughters. Girls came to use their writing, especially their writing of diaries, not as an escape from the Victorian family, but as a way of discovering self within it. Girls wrote in a variety of genres and hands, often composing notes and letters to friends within the same city. They were particularly encouraged to occupy themselves by keeping accounts of their lives in the form of diaries. Diaries filled a variety of functions for the girl diarist.

Arising from an empiricist desire to record events accurately, diaries served to store a range of information, from financial accounts to observations about the wind and the weather. Private writing had religious roots as well, in the spiritual autobiography or conversion narrative of earlier days. Parents encouraged diary writing for their daughters as a means of spiritual reflection and to promote good character and virtue. Parents had always encouraged virtuous conduct among their offspring, of course, but in eighteenth-century New England, sustained good behavior was secondary to a conversion experience as the mark of a good Christian.

Unlike tales of conversion, however, which recounted the one-time odyssey of the soul to God, the nineteenth-century diary made religious virtue a daily affair to be demonstrated through repeated good deeds and regular habits. With the disestablishment of the church and the dislocations occasioned by urbanization and industrialization, internalized character and steady habits assumed new importance. This function of the diary is captured by the term used by the modern theorist Michel Foucault to describe the ritual practice of the Catholic confessional: parents hoped that girls’ diaries would be ‘‘disciplines of the self,’’ which would encourage them in their pursuit of a reliable and steady goodness.

Parents and advice givers suggested journals for girls and boys, but the conventional wisdom was that girls took to writing and diary keeping more naturally. Agnes Repplier, who wrote a piece on ‘‘The Deathless Diary’’ for an 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, repeated this common assumption: ‘‘Even little girls, as we have seen, have taken kindly enough to the daily task of translating themselves into pages of pen and ink; but little boys have been wont to consider this a lamentable waste of time. . . . As a rule, a lad commits himself to a diary, as to any other piece of work, only because it has been forced upon him by the voice of authority.’’

Repplier had good reason to know about the affinity between girlhood and writing. As a convent schoolgirl in the 1860s, she was one of a band of friends who were ‘‘addicted’’ to poetry and spent long hours copying it into blank books. There were structural reasons for the popularity of diary keeping among girls, as we have seen. The affluence of middle-class urban families marginalized daughters’ work within the household, yet the constraints of propriety at midcentury discouraged outside employment. Advisers encouraged girls to devote themselves to the development of order in all features of their lives.

Once one’s room was cleaned, there was one’s own life to systematize. In 1878, when the children’s magazine St. Nicholas published a piece on keeping a journal, it gave as the first reason that it taught habits of order and regularity. Because the purpose of a journal was to train a girl in orderliness, clearly the entries themselves ought to be orderly and reflect an ordered life. Ideally, therefore, a diarist wrote daily, and often drafted her entries first before copying them into her diary. The diary was to be a credit to a girl’s accomplishments, and those included her penmanship.

The diary entry, like the constitutional walk, was usually a ritualized part of the day; often the girl wrote it in the bedroom immediately before retiring. It was considered less stressful than schoolwork by both parents and their daughters. The St. Nicholas adviser, W. S. Jerome, suggested a routine recording of the weather, letters received or written, money paid or received, the day of beginning or leaving school, visits, books read, all set down in the correct order of time. The end result would be a useful family history. As he wrote, ‘‘Perhaps, some evening when the family are sitting and talking together, some one will ask, ‘What kind of weather did we have last winter?’ or ‘When was the picnic you were speaking of?’ and the journal is referred to.’’

Clearly, the journals Jerome had in mind were semipublic family records rather than personal confessions. They were also designed for self-grooming along prescribed lines rather than experimentation. Of course there was another, romantic use of the diary more familiar to modern Americans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau borrowed from Catholic ritual the title of his revolutionary Confessions, which were designed less to appease an angry God than to explore an individual life history. As such they represented less a ‘‘discipline of the self ’’ than a ‘‘technique of the self,’’ in Foucault’s terminology.

Rousseau’s romantic exercise in self-construction provided one model for the nineteenth-century diary, but it was not one that most parents had in mind for their daughters. Although they often encouraged their daughters to use diaries for self-exploration, they remained ambivalent about girls’ rights to a self separate from family duties and responsibilities. The advice literature describing the practice of diary keeping rushed to close off romantic possibilities. It was better for a girl to have no diary at all than to have one which encouraged fantasy and ambition and distracted a girl from her domestic priorities.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Writing and Self-Culture: The Contest Over the Meaning of Literacy.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#how young ladies became girls #jane h. hunter #history #victorian #american #class

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Andrew Forell 2020: A Year in Music

Irreversible Entanglements. Photo By Bob Sweeney

Suffice to say it’s been a time. Between the pandemic and its attendant toll of illness, death, isolation and unemployment; ongoing state violence against black and brown citizens, immigrants and refugees; the legitimization of white extremism; the utter cruelty and incompetence of the powers that wannabe and the fool on the hill dynamiting what’s left of the adjacent beacon before skulking off, music has been a vital salve during the dog days of this benighted, multi-plagued year. Whether it spoke directly to the issues of the day or not, it seems everything was filtered through the quarantine, the daily shenanigans in DC and the Black Lives Matter movement. Without live gigs, clubs and physical records listening was an even more solitary and disconnected experience than usual and yet felt more important as a connection to the world. Working alone onsite throughout this year meant IPod and headphones on the subway and streets, then blasting through speakers at work. In early March I started listening to the 15,000 some tracks on the pod in alphabetical order; as I write this we’ve reached “Towers Of Strength” by Died Pretty. Maybe there’s a message in that but then again. At home we had music going constantly. Old favorites frequently revisited, new music absorbed for enjoyment and review despite those periods of lethargy and distraction where concentration goes out the window and hours drift by without registering.

Below are the records of 2020 that have stayed with me, been on high rotation and spoken with redemptive force, escapist joy or consoling intimacy. They are loosely grouped in a way that makes sense to me and I hope to others.

Irreversible Entanglements — Who Sent You? (International Anthem)

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Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes — Heritage Of The Invisible II (International Anthem)

Moor Mother — Forever Industries (Sub Pop)

Irreversible Entanglements as a collective of musicians have produced several records that have been on high rotation. Who Sent You? is for me the most essential, electrifying and inspiring record of 2020. As I said in my review, it is an extraordinary statement both lyrically and musically which encompasses history, politics, religion, violence and most importantly how structures of power entrap everybody, warping both the oppressed and the oppressors, tainting us all with lies, complicity, delusion and self-censorship.

The band’s trumpeter and drummer Navarro and Holmes’ release Heritage Of The Invisible II explores community and identity through a collaboration of deep empathy and music intelligence. Vocalist/lyricist Camae Ayewa AKA Moor Mother remains a vital voice fired by fierce intelligence and clear-eyed dissections of structural inequality. Her EP Forever Industries combines visceral poetry and experimental electronica in two short tracks. A mention also to bassist Luke Stewart’s Exposure Quintet for their eponymous album on Astral Spirits and Ayewa again twice for Circuit City and with Mental Jewelry as Moor Jewelry the rather excellent, punishing punk of True Opera both on Don Giovanni.

Speaker Music — Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (Planet Mu)

Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry by Speaker Music

Moodymann — Taken Away (KDJ)

SAULT — Untitled (Black Is) (Forever Living Originals)

Shabaka & The Ancestors — We Are Sent Here By History (Impulse!)

Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry speaks directly to the Black Lives Matter with a coruscating collage of poetry, found sound jazz, and fractured techno; it is a summation of the darkness at the heart of the American experiment. Speaker Music seeks not to preach, not to salve but to show and by showing force us to listen and to see and to act.

Moodymann, SAULT and Shabaka and The Ancestors dug deep into techno, funk, soul, gospel and jazz to produce outstanding albums that spoke to the Black experience here and in Britain.Taken Away is riven with betrayal and anger even as the music lifts with transcendent beats, voices and strings. Untitled (Black Is) is both direct and elliptical in its range of styles and voices but never less than compelling and We Are Sent Here By History is fire music for the 21st Century steeped in the lessons of Shepp, Coltrane and Fela Kuti.

Wire — Mind Hive (Pinkflag)

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The Cool Greenhouse — The Cool Greenhouse (Melodic)

Fontaines DC — A Hero’s Death (Partisan)

Ganser — Just Look At That Sky (felte)

Kvalia - Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines (Old Boring Russia)

Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today (Domino)

Tvii Son — Tvii Son (MIC)

It’s been a good year for Post Punk and adjacent bands. Mind Hive arrived early and stuck through the year. As I said in February “35 minutes of Wire is enough to fuel a multitude of pretenders.” Not that the rest of this section are that. The Cool Greenhouse’s shambolic, rollicking, sarcastic songs will hit a chord with fans of Half Man Half Biscuit, Sleaford Mods and The Fall. Fontaines DC’s second album was an unexpected pleasure after Dogrel failed to excite. Ganser’s combination of exhilaration and enervation, Kvalia’s intense, industrial thump and Tvii Son’s bracing detachment hit different nerves but with inescapable precision. Protomartyr expanded their palette to create, as Tim Clarke said on these pages “a thrilling and brutally effective” album. Shopping, Las Kellies, Hypoluxo, Sweeping Promises, Peel Dream Magazine and Lunchbox also released records that held the ears.

Quicksails — Blue Rise (Hausu Mountain)

Blue Rise by Quicksails

Autechre — Sign (Warp)

William Basinski — Lamentations (Temporary Residence)

André Bratten — Silvester (Smalltown Supersound)

Oliver Coates — skins n slime (RVNG)

Dinorwic — Llyn Y Cwn (Cold Spring)

Davey Harms — World War (Hausu Mountain)

Fire-Toolz — Rainbow Bridge (Hausu Mountain)

Hausu Mountain continues to release high quality, challenging experimental albums that are both immensely entertaining and thought provoking. Blue Rise is an amniotic oasis. World War and Rainbow Bridge are always on hand to jolt one out of the doldrums and focus the mind. On days when the temptation to drift with the passing time or succumb to darkness presses, the homeopathy of Basinski’s swoon, Bratten’s obsidian depth and Dinorwic’s environmental calm provided accompaniment, guide and consolation. Coates conjures bleak beauty from his enhanced and manipulated cello while Autechre untangle some of their knottier inclinations without letting the listener completely relax on a relatively straightforward return to the album format.

Archival releases and reissues:

Melt Yourself Down — The Complete Leaf Recordings 2013-2016 (Leaf)

Pole — 1,2,3 Box Set (Mute)

Pylon — Box (New West)

Rowland S Howard — Teenage Snuff Film (Fat Cat)

Stalker — Empire2020 (Ruf Kutz)

Thelonious Monk — Palo Alto (Impulse!)

Various Artists — Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987 (Captured Tracks)

Andrew Forell

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brightlycoloredteacups · 5 years

Text

In The Morning

Fandom: Star Wars

Pairing: General Hux x Neutral!Reader

Warnings: None

Summary: You’re the personal assistant to Hux, and you want a transfer.

Tag List: None

Don’t look him in the eye, you think, he'll figure you out in a millisecond. Being the personal assistant to General Armitage Hux had to be the easiest gig you’d ever landed. You’d been almost everything. A slave, a dancer, an escort, a soldier, now assistant. Your superior officer had felt bad after what happened in your last battle, so he’d gotten you the cushy job of being the General’s personal assistant. But now there was an added complication. You had a massive crush on him.

Your crush didn’t stop you from performing your duties admirably, but damned if it didn’t make it hard. It did nothing for your extreme lack of self confidence either. Someone like the general was so beautiful, you found it had to believe he was a real person sometimes. And you? You were scarred up from the hard life you lived, missing limbs and rough hands. You were not a delicate creature to behold, you weren’t weak in spirit, you were tough. Your friends liked to joke you were so tough that you could survive the direct attack of the Finalizer. It was a mixed source of pride and pain, that joke.

Being so...unique looking made it hard for you to find a lover. A long term anyway. You could always find a willing partner in the backstreets for the right amount of credits. Even then it took someone with a strong belly and a stout heart to see you completely naked. But you longed for the romance of falling in love, the flowers, the poetry all the frills and fancy. You’d never get it, and that was just something you had to live with.

As it was, you had requested a transfer no less than three times. All denied. You wanted to find out who was denying them, and ask them why...after you wrung their tiny little necks. Didn’t they understand this was a personal hell you wanted to be free from? A torture you could no longer endure? Maybe they’d get the hint after the fourth one you put in that very morning.

That wasn’t what you had to concentrate on now, now you had to listen to the general’s instructions for you today. It was the same as usual, review this, deny that, get him his bitter tea, make sure Millicent is fed and played with, blah, blah, blah. “Right away sir.” You tell him, wanting this to be over as soon as possible. “One more thing,” he says, rising from his desk. “Yes sir?” Hux throws a datapad in front of you. You’re transfer! “Am I really so bad?”

You gulp, not knowing how to answer that. You decide to go with the semi-truth “No sir, best job I’ve ever had honestly, it’s just…” Think of something quick! “I’m bored is all. I s’pose I just want to see what else is out there.” The General sniffs. You chance a glance at him. His face tells it all, he knows you’re lying. But does he know the reason behind your lie?

“I’ll pretend you didn’t just say that,” Was his answer. “You’ve become invaluable to me these last few months,” He moves around his desk and walks towards you, invading your space. He’s too close, he’ll feel the thump of your heart through the floor. He lifts your chin up, so you HAVE to look him in the eyes. A challenge. You loved challenges...normally You feel the love-sick heartache melt away as you steel your gaze and stand firm. “You’re my best staff member, I’ll not have you leave me on a whim. Give me a good reason to let you go, and I will.”

The silence between you two lasted a long while. You could’ve sworn he moved a little closer to you, as if to kiss you, but you were sure that was your imagination. You jerk you chin from his hand. “Understood.” You say softly. You turn on your heel and retreat to your desk. Damn him, damn this post, damn your feelings.

Armitage Hux doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t want to, doesn’t have to. All he knows is that he’s incredibly attracted to you. Perhaps it’s because you aren’t the dainty little pieces he’s used to, peacocking, yelling at him silently ‘look at me! Look at me!’. Perhaps it’s the way you approach your job. You’re efficient, diligent, often keeping up with his early mornings and late nights with little to no problem. Meeting his every whim with a promptness only a soldier of your caliber could. He knows so little about you, he wants to, no he needs to know more.

He knows what’s he’s read in the files. You were a street rat, doing all you could to survive until you were picked up by the First Order. A little late in the game, at seventeen, you quickly made rank. The stories that surrounded you were fascinating. You were a one person army, with added brains.

Your last battle, however, left you scarred. You were missing a leg and an arm, your face had one long scar settled on the right side, from your forehead to your chin. It pulled the right side of your lip down in a permanent frown. A scar across your throat told of a botched assassination attempt by a rebel sympithizer. That was all he could see. He could only guess at the markings that told your incredible stories of survival.

He wants to ask about them. He’s sure you’d tell him if he did. You were straightforward in that regard. He refrained from doing so only because he knew how much you hated them. He’d found you glaring at them more than once in reflective surfaces. Scratching at them as if you could peel away the ravages of time. You hated yourself, and it killed him inside.

What killed him more was your ardent wish for a transfer. Hadn’t he made it obvious he so desperately wanted you? He complimented you daily, on your work ethic, your dress, your hair. He gave you light duty when he sensed you were having a bad day. He let you go early at least twice a week in an effort to be nice to you. Surely his intentions were obvious?

He sits at his desk, staring at your transfer in front of him. It occurs to him that perhaps you didn’t feel the same way about him.

The realization comes crashing down on him. He chokes, momentarily worried Kylo is doing it from somewhere within the ship. That’s why you were asking for the transfer, he had made you uncomfortable by being so pleasant.

It all makes sense now. The way you avoid his gaze. The reason you’re always giving him quick glances when it seems he isn’t paying attention. The way you stare at him when he isn’t looking. You despise him. He gulps, losing his neck fastenings. You absolutely hate him.

His brow furrows, feeling guilty that he didn’t recognize the signs before. First, he should apologize to you. He’ll do it in the morning. Secondly, he’ll personally see to it that you get transferred to you desired location. Somewhere much more cushy, somewhere safe. Planetside, so you can settle down with someone nice, someone more like yourself, a fellow soldier. You’ll have a good retirement package. He nods to himself, it’s the least he can do, no matter how much it hurts.

You had been drinking. It was never a good idea for you to drink, which was why you didn’t do it often, but you needed one tonight. One easily turned into two, which turned into five, and now you were sufficiently drunk. Drunk enough, you daresay, to give a piece of your mind to your superior officer. General Armitage Hux.

“Smug bastard,” you growl. He’d been the one denying your transfers all along. “Selfish prick,” You continue. You had to be good at your job, hadn’t you? You just had to be efficient and neat and good. You were always so good. Good for your masters, a good little lap dog that did nothing more than take all the abuse. No more! “That evil little shit.” You stand, taking a moment to get your balance. “That no good, dirty rotten, evil little shit. Why, he’s going to get a piece of my mind!” You nod, as if talking to a crowd of people. That little voice inside of your head cheers you on. What right did he have denying the transfer you so ardently wanted?

You knew where his quarters were, you’ve had to feed Millicent for him before, that meant entrance into his very sparsely populated rooms. The walk from his rooms to yours was normally a short one, but it was made longer thanks to the alcohol. Walking at this point in time wasn’t exactly the easiest task for you when you were drunk. You managed to keep your balance, making it to his rooms with little fuss.

You get there and hail him. He lets you in immediately. Before he can even take in the disheveled sight of you, you start to chew him out. “You want a good reason for me wanting a transfer? Fine I’ll give you one”

“Lieutenant, I don’t think this is the right time. You’re obviously-” he begins, “This is the perfect time,” You argue, “I want a transfer because I’m falling for you, you dumbass.” You hiccup, tears begin to prick your eyes. You’re so deep into your thoughts you miss the pinking of his cheeks and the pleased smile that graced his features. “And there’s no way we’re going to be together, so there. I want my transfer.”

“We can talk about this in the morning, when you’re sober.” He says, just so happy with how things turned out. “No, we talk about this now. I want my transfer. I can’t stand being around you anymore. You remind me of...of...all this!” you motion towards yourself. “I’m so ugly!” You wail, tears beginning to fall. Had you been sober, you would’ve laughed at the look of alarm on Hux’s face. “I’m all scarred and beaten. Did you know this isn’t even my real arm?” You roll up your sleeve to show him the cybernetics underneath. “All I ever wanted was to fall in love.” You begin to pace in front of him, letting it all out. “I want the romance, the flowers, the poetry. I want kisses underneath moonlight. Long walks on the beach. Candlelit dinners. And now I never can. Who would be with someone that looks like I do? I’m a thing General! A tool to get the job done, a means to an end. I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t keep falling for you even deeper. It hurts, it hurts so much” You suddenly sober up. Lip trembling, you stop crying, trying to gather what dignity you can. “So, I want my transfer, and I want it immediately.”

Hux takes a moment to take in the pathetic sight of you. This was not his idea of a love confession, but he’d take it over rejection any day. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.” He tells you again. “Now run along.” You sniff and nod, “Right,” You say, “In the morning.”

#star wars #general hux #general armitage hux #armitage hux x reader #hux x reader #reader imagine #hux imagine

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