#you don’t have to be Catholic but it helps as most of the lower roles have been passed down in families

[queenshelby]

My Friend’s Father (Part Nine)

Pairing: Cillian Murphy x Reader

Warning: Age Gap, Smut, Domestic Violence, Angst

Words: 3,064

Please comment and interact...it's what keeps this blog going

***************************

Almost a week had passed since you stayed with Cillian at his unit in Galway and, despite the fact that he was away, things had further developed between you as emotions grew with every day.

He was different to any man you had ever been involved with and, whilst your involvement with each other stemmed from purely sexual lust and hunger, you had evolved from this to something different entirely within a matter of days.

Of course, you knew each other for years and, whilst you had a crush on Cillian for as long as you could remember, you never thought that it would be like this and, for Cillian, this feeling had never been mutual.

Whilst he always considered you to be attractive and very intelligent and kind, he never felt any emotional connection or sexual attraction towards you, at least not until that weekend when you visited Denise, which was also the first time he saw you again after six months had passed.

On that night during which you slept with each other, he let his sexual hunger take over his reasonable thinking mind after he saw you, in his kitchen, making pancakes and you had since, quite openly, talked about it. He saw sleeping with you as a mistake but, ever since that night, he couldn’t get you out of his head.

For you, things weren’t just sexual anymore and you began to feel strongly for Cillian which worried you especially since he was open about the fact that he didn’t know where things were heading with you. The fact that you are his daughter’s friend and much younger than him clearly bothered him and he sometimes admitted to you that he felt strange about building such a strong connection with you. A relationship was not what he wanted but he liked you, a lot.

As such, during the past week, Cillian called you every day after he finished filming and you were talking to him more frequently than you were talking to Denise.

During his breaks, he would also text you and check in on you as you were in the middle of exams. He always remembered when you had a test and asked you how it went and, when you told him that you didn’t feel confident with your results, he reassured you that you probably did well and, even if you didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. According to him, a pass is a pass and you needed to lower your expectations of yourself just a little.

To your surprise, he also remembered appointments you had scheduled and things that bothered you which meant that, unlike other men you had been with, he was actually listening and was interested in what you had to say.

Some nights, you had spent hours on the phone or Skype, joking about things you had encountered that day or talking about books, literature and music, which is something you both enjoyed.

Politics and social issues were other matters you could discuss endlessly and, even when you were of different opinions, you would be able to argue in the most satisfying way. Cillian always treated you as an equal and even opened up to you about his divorce from Denise’s mother recently.

Another thing you learned from Cillian was that Denise was brining along her friend Amalie to Manchester to stay at his apartment and, when you gave him a warning about her and her intentions, he reminded you that he only had eyes for you. In fact, he always showered you with compliments and all of his compliments were genuine and came natural to him, helping you immensely with your self-consciousness.

Unfortunately, whilst you enjoyed how engaging Cillian was with you every day, like a teenager in love, with the constant text messages and calls, your father soon got suspicious and confronted you about.

****

“Dad, I am almost 22, you don’t need to be spying on me” you said somewhat frustrated as he asked you who you were talking to every day.

“You live under my roof and you answer me young lady” he said harshly and you couldn’t help but roll your eyes just as your mother stepped in, trying to calm him down. Your father was much older, approaching sixty and fairly old school in the way he expected you and your sister to behave.

“A friend…I am talking to a friend” you explained and your father asked again, telling you not to lie to him because he would know.

“And this friend of yours, you can’t meet him…you just text and talk? You can’t bring him to our house and introduce him?” your father asked along with a million other questions.

“No, I can’t. he lives in Dublin and I, most certainly, wouldn’t bring him into this…” you said somewhat irritated by the interrogation.

“Dublin, huh? So, you met him when you visited Denise?” he asked and you nodded.

“It’s not her brother, is it? Because I really don’t want you to get involved with him. I don’t like this family and their views” your father said harshly, causing you to chuckle.

“Their views?” you asked somewhat surprised and your father nodded.

“Yes, their views on what’s right and wrong. If I recall correctly, this girl you call your friend was going out with someone of the same gender for a while. God didn’t tell us to do this but her parents obviously didn’t have an issue with it which, apparently is called new age parenting. Everything is pro choice and lets their children decide what is best for them even if they lack experience” your father went on to say and you couldn’t help but shake your head at his absurd commentary but, he continued and you soon learned what had happened between your parents and Denise’s parents many years ago, before which your mother had called Denise’s mother her friend as well.

According to your father, Cillian had voiced his opinion to your father when it was found out that your sister was pregnant following a short affair with a man she had met through university.

Cillian’s ex wife had told your sister that she had options, causing your father to get rather angry with her, which is when Cillian stepped in, supporting what Denise’s mother had said.

She had offered your sister help but your father considered this to be a betrayal and, whilst your mother maintained contact with Denise’s mother for a while, your father refused to get involved with Denise’s family thereafter.

Cillian’s often all so public views angered him and he made this very clear. He didn’t want you to be involved with his children and you couldn’t help but laugh about the irony of it all when you found out about this incident.

“Jesus Dad, that was years ago and not everyone has to have the same views as you” you said before confirming that you weren’t seeing Denise’s brother.

“No, they don’t, but I am just looking out for you and, instead of acting the way you do, throwing yourself at guys with new age ideas, I would much prefer if you met a nice young catholic man” your father explained, causing your mother to fume in anger with him.

“Throwing myself at guys? Listen, I am not sure what slut you think I am but it’s nice to know that you think so little of me” you said before storming upstairs and into your room.

Having to deal with this crap bothered you and you knew that, when this semester came to an end, you could be moving out now that you saved enough money for a bond and rent.

*****

As the evening went on, you spent all of your time in your room, reading a book until, finally, at around 9 o’clock you saw a notification on Skype.

‘Hey Beautiful’ Cillian said as you picked up and popped in your headphones.

Cillian apologised for calling through so late and informed you that he was finally able to speak to Laura, the woman he was seeing before you.

He knew that you wanted to know about it and he had no problem telling you what you needed to hear while telling you that you had absolutely nothing to worry about.

It was Laura’s first day back on set after a week-long break and Cillian told you that she wasn’t exactly impressed when he stood her down.

‘She probably likes you…I can understand that’ you said calmly but Cillian told you that he was pretty clear with her about what this was between them.

‘Well, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have gotten involved with her’ he went on and you were quite happy to change the topic by this point and told him that you were aching for him.

‘Well, I am not sure that I can help you with that’ Cillian chuckled.

‘We could have Skype sex I suppose’ you giggled.

‘Skype Sex?’ Cillian laughed before telling you that he didn’t think that this would be a good idea since you were at home with your parents and you had previously complained about the thin walls of the house.

‘Oh Jesus Cillian, my father already thinks I am a slut, so I personally don’t care if anyone hears me getting myself off. I’ve got my earphones in and am the only one who can hear you and my door is locked’ you chuckled.

‘Your father thinks that you are a slut? Do you want to talk about that?’ Cillian asked concerned but you shook your head.

‘I rather not. You met him and know what he is like’ you explained.

‘I do. He takes God very seriously’ Cillian said before continuing on. ‘But, if you have problems at home you need to tell me please. You can stay at my apartment. I can get my house keeper to meet you there with the key’ he offered.

‘You said you were going to stay out of stuff between me and my parents just as I would stay out of matters between you and Denise’ you then said, reminding him on the conversation about your respective roles which you had three days ago.

‘Yes I did, but I can’t if I have to worry about you’ Cillian said firmly.

‘There is no need to worry Cillian. I promise’ you reassured him. ‘Well, actually, I need you to worry about my sexual needs right now’ you then went on to say with sly grin.

‘Through Skype?’ Cillian asked again somewhat concerned.

‘Yes’ you said with a cheeky smile as you settled more into your bed with your laptop.

‘Alright then, show me what you are wearing” Cillian said as he cut straight to the point.

‘Can you see?’ you asked as you adjusted the cam and showed Cillian your dark blue lingerie.

‘Very nice…but…I think you would look even better if you were naked, don’t you think?’ Cillian said somewhat nervously and you nodded in agreement.

‘Well, I suppose I should strip for you and you should strip for me’ you giggled as you seductively took off your bra slowly, showing Cillian your perky breasts through the camera.

You heard him inhale sharply as he watched you and took his t-shirt off at the same time, leaving him in nothing but his CK briefs.

Without words you then scooted back on the bed and removed your undies, allowing him to watch before you sat down on the bed, spread eagle and naked, giving him a good view of your mound.

‘Jesus Y/N, you are so fucking beautiful and sexy…touch yourself for me, nice and slow’ Cillian breathed out and you let his soothing voice wash over you, knowing what he was trying to do and happily helping him succeed.

‘Like this?’ you moaned as you began to run circles over your clit with your fingers.

‘Yes, just like that babe’ Cillian groaned as he shuffled down his briefs and you were finally getting a good look of his hard cock.

‘Oh god, I want to stroke your cock so badly’ you moaned as you seductively opened your pussy lips with your fingers, opening yourself up before reaching for the black vibrator you kept in your bedside table.

‘Well, someone's particularly horny tonight’ Cillian chuckled as he watched you play with your pussy, and you could hear the smirk in his voice.

You mumbled a small "mhm," and he laughed.

‘Good, that's exactly how I like you, so naughty and needy’ Cillian said as he slowly began to stroke his hard member.

You barely registered his words enough to answer with another "mhm," but your subconscious managed it. Your weak answer elicited another delicious chuckle from the other end of the line.

"Why don't you show me how this little toy of yours works?” Cillian then asked as he watched you eagerly.

“I was just waiting for you to ask” you giggled as you began to run your fingers along your stomach and back up to your chest, leaving a trail of goosebumps their wake before reaching for the vibrator and turning it on.

“Put into your sweet pussy babe, let me see it” Cillian groaned and you moan in response, barely processing his words but still understanding enough to answer and do what he asked.

"I bet your pussy is already dripping” he said as you slid the vibrator into you slowly. He was right, you could feel your wetness pooling.

“I am so fucking wet and I wish it would be your cock inside me” you moaned as you began to stroke the toy in and out of you.

Cillian was groaning on the other side, his eyes full of lust and desire for you and you let out a quiet moan as you watched him with the same desire and hunger while you were pleasuring yourself.

“Good girl, keep going…” Cillian tells you and you moan again hearing it.

“Tell me how much you are aching for my cock” he then said you moaned again.

“I want your cock so badly, fuck…I want your cum inside me, dripping out of my wet little pussy” you moaned, eliciting a groan from Cillian as he began to stroke his cock harder and faster.

“Such a naughty needy girl, aren’t you? I can’t wait to be inside you again and make you cum over and over again” Cillian said with a laboured breath and you are barely listening at this point.

“I want you to cum for me and show me this dripping pussy when you do…I fucking love hearing your moans, so fucking sexy…common babe….let go” Cillian said, knowing that you were close and your orgasm rolled over you as soon as the word 'cum' left his lips, and although your sensitive clit was screaming at your hand to stop, you couldn't.

‘Oh god fuck, yes…’ you moaned as you came hard and fast.

“That’s it babe, don’t stop” he instructed as your moans continuously spilled from your mouth, and you were not even sure what you were saying or if you were forming words at all. The only thing in your head is a deliciously heavy fog and Cillian’s voice guiding you to do what he wanted.

“Don’t stop, keep fucking your sweet little pussy babe” Cillian ordered as he knew you weren’t done and, just as he did, you let out a high-pitched moan, bordering on a scream, as an even stronger orgasm washed over your body.

‘Cum for me babe…I want to see all this cum’ you moaned in return, focusing on the delicious image in front of you as Cillian was stroking his cock and, just when you finally come back down you heard Cillian groan loudly.

“Fuck” he groaned as he stroked his cock hard and fast you watched rope after rope of cum spurt onto his stomach.

‘Oh god, what a waste, I want to lick your cum off your skin so badly” you breathed out as Cillian came down from his high slowly and used a tissue to clean himself up.

‘Stop saying those things or you have to stay on the line for another twenty minutes at least’ Cillian chuckled as he could feel his manhood stir again.

‘Well, I think you shouldn’t cum again until you come to visit me in Galway the weekend after next…I want you to save it all for me’ you said, causing Cillian to cock an eyebrow as he pulled his briefs back up.

‘Fat chance babe’ he chuckled, knowing that going without an orgasm for nine days would be rather difficult for him.

Eventually, after a lot of begging, he agreed to try but he wouldn’t be able to make you any promises to this effect.

***

The following day, you went to work and then university thereafter but, when you eventually returned home, your father was in a worse mood than ever before.

‘Can you explain this to me?’ he asked angrily as soon as you walked through the door and you couldn’t help but gulp when he pointed to a white box which he had placed on the living room table.

‘You went through my personal belongings’ you huffed out as the box contained some lingerie and intimate items, including toys, that you were hiding in the bottom of your dresser.

‘Again Y/N, this is my house, my rules and I don’t want my daughter to own filth like this’ he said, after having heard small pieces of your conversation with Cillian on Skype the evening before.

It was obvious to you that your father was appalled and you were outraged that he had been snooping through your room and, as you would later learn, had even tried to access your computer.

‘I can’t fucking believe you dad. These are my personal belongings and you have no right to go through them’ you huffed out and, just as you did, you could feel a sharp strike across your face.

‘Get this shit out of my house and talk to me with some respect’ he said harshly, leaving you speechless and in tears as he walked away, leaving your cheek burning red.

   Tag List:

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@peaky-cillian​

@severewobblerlightdragon​  @ysmmsy​

[batmansymbol]

hi riley! read this recently and would love to get ur perspective on this as a YA author https://tinyletter.com/misshelved/letters/did-twitter-break-ya-misshelved-6

hi anon! yeah, i read this the day it was posted. thoughts/supplementary essay below.

firstly, i'd put a big "I AGREE" stamp across this essay. i think it's well-cited and thoughtful, and i agree with pretty much everything in it. i especially appreciate it for introducing me to the terms "context collapse" and "morally motivated networked harassment" - seeing internet sociology studied and labeled is ... odd, but useful.

i left twitter in 2017, but i keep an eye on things, which seem similar now to the way they were four years ago. the essay describes the never-ending scrutiny, the need to seem perfect, and the pressure on writers to out themselves. all of that is spot-on. twitter is an outing machine. there is so much harassment and anger on the platform that in serious conversations, good-faith engagement becomes something that must be earned, rather than something that's expected. and in order to earn good faith, strangers expect you to offer up an all-access pass to who you are. otherwise, things might take a swift left turn into verbal abuse.

obviously twitter is a cesspit of harassment from racist, homophobic, and transphobic people, but i think the most painful harassment comes from within the community. i, and most people i know, wouldn't give a single minuscule little fuck if ben shapiro's entire army of ghouls came after us and told us we were destroying the sacred values of Old America or whatever. but the community at large does care about issues of racial justice and queer liberation and economic justice. which is why it's painful to see this supposed "community" eating its own over and over again.

how cruel can we be to people and pretend that we are their friends? that's the emotional crux of the essay to me. what we're doing to ourselves - people who do share our values and want to achieve the same goals - because this one platform is built on rewarding the quickest, most brutal, and most public response.

god forbid you don't have your identity figured out. god forbid you have an invisible disability, or are writing a story about something sensitive you've personally experienced but had an off-consensus reaction to. on twitter, if you are not a paragon of absolute and immediate clarity, you may as well be lower than dirt morally, because you're unable to do what the platform requires of you: air every private corner of your identity, up to and including your trauma, to justify not only your everyday actions and opinions but also your art.

(this is all honestly incompatible with interesting art, but i'll get to that in a bit.)

it doesn't take a genius to see how troubling this environment is when combined with twitter as a marketing tool. i remember that around the time of my debut, i'd tweet out threads of private, painful, personal stuff, which felt terrible to recount, but i'd watch the like count increase with this sense of catholic, confessional satisfaction. all of this was tied to the idea of my potential salability as a writer.

i was around 21 at the time. i felt a lot of pressure as a debut. i wanted people to like me and think i was exceptionally mature and confident. i wanted to do my job and build buzz for my book. i saw that all these publishing professionals and authors spent day in, day out angry and exhausted on twitter. every few days, a new person fifteen years older than me would say, "i can't take this anymore, i'm so fucking tired of this, i'm logging off for a while." i thought, well, this must be how online activism feels: like running on a sprained ankle.

i can still remember book after book after book that inspired blow-ups, big explanations, and simmering resentment: carve the mark (whose author was forced to admit that she suffered chronic pain after relentless criticism of that element), the black witch (a book explicitly about unlearning racism that was criticized for depicting ... racism), ramona blue (a book about a bi girl who thinks she's a lesbian but winds up in an m/f relationship, because she's still discovering her identity) ... etc

each book, each incident, followed the same pattern. firestorms of anger, a decision of where to place blame, the desperate need for a single consensus opinion in the community. i think a lot of people on book twitter see these as bugs inherent to the platform, but really, in twitter's eyes, they're features. the angrier and more upset twitter's userbase is, the more reliant they are on the platform.

i wound up leaving around the time i realized that not only was twitter making me anxious - NOT being on twitter was beginning to make me anxious, because of vaguely dread-infused tweets all around like "i'm seeing an awful lot of people who are staying silent about X. ... why are so many people who are so loud about X so silent about Y?" etc.

that shit is beyond poisonous. people will not always be logged on. the absence of someone's agreement does not mean disagreement. actually, someone's absence is not inherently meaningful, because it is the internet and silence is everyone's default position; internet silence in all likelihood means that that person is out in the universe doing other things.

this is already a ridiculously long response, so i'll try to wrap up. firstly, i think that progressive writers and readers have GOT to stop thinking that a correct consensus opinion can exist on every piece of fiction, and on every issue in general, and that if someone diverges from that consensus, they're incorrectly progressive.

secondly, i think that progressive writers and readers have got to uncouple the idea of a "book with good politics" from a good book, because 1) there are books about morally grimy, despicable subjects that help us process the landscape of human behavior, and

2) if, in your fiction, there is only one set of allowed responses for your protagonist, you will write the same person over and over and over again. you see this a lot in religious fiction. the person is not a human being but an expression of the creator's moral alignment. (not entirely surprising that this similarity to religious correctness might crop up with the current state of the movement. i read this piece around the time i left twitter and it shook me really, really deeply.)

i understand that in YA, there's a sensation of immense pressure because people want to model good politics and correct behavior for kids. this is a noble idea - and maybe twitter is great for people who want to be role models. but i've become more and more staunchly against the idea of artist as role model. the role of the writer is not to be emulated but to write fiction. and the role of fiction is not to read like something delivered from a soapbox, or to display some scrubbed-clean universe where each wrong is immediately identified as a wrong, and where total morality is always glowing in the backdrop. it's to put something human on paper, and as human beings, we might aspire to total morality, but we fall short again and again. honestly, that's what being on twitter showed me more clearly than anything.

[azazelsconfessional]

((so i was gonna open up my askbox again but I got distracted doing this and watching streams i think idr what i did the past few hours, buuut there's something I need to cover first, especially since there are so many new people around! Hello! Especially since so many of you are playing OCs/MCs.

Don't worry, it's a tip to hopefully help you along! It may get a little long, especially as I try and provide examples. . .but hopefully it'll help.

I'm gonna talk a lot about OCs but this applies to canon characters too a bit. It certainly helps.

Tl;dr, you should have a character profile page.

(also remember that tumblr mobile doesn't really have direct access to Pages made with the Pages function on desktop, so you'll have to link them manually in your pinned or description or host them on another site(I used Google Docs in the apst) or in a regular post(this makes it very easy to lose as a forewarning) for maximum accessibility!)

(rules pages are also really really handy if you have alot of resteictions.)

So, in general, OCs have a bit of a lower reception rate in rp. Idk if that'll be the case here with MCs because they're, well, the main character. Housamo is also a series that lends itself well to OCs pretty well, especially non-human ones, but I figured I'd warn for that.

BUT. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play an OC! It just means there are things you need to keep in mind!

Think of all of the OCs you've seen--you all seem to be fun and wonderful people, and your characters are surely interesting. But. . .if you don't tell anybody about them, nobody will know what's going on or where to start, which makes asking questions a little hard, right? That's easier to work around with MC characters--we've played the game, we know the story, we know the characters, so we can figure out questions fairly easily based on that alone and go from there.

But with other OCs, especially those that don't represent charactera from mythology or fiction like many other characters in housamo do, there's like. Nowhere to start. We may see a face or some dialogue, but otherwise we don't have a frame of reference.

That's where a profile comes in!

Azazel-mun, I don't want to share all of the info about my character at once!

What if I don't know everything about my OC yet and want to figure it out along thw way?

The profile doesn't have to be super detailed! At most it shoule include things like the character's name and age and probably things like their location, profession, grade in school or place of work, etc., and anything you'd notice on the surface like their apperance. It's never a bad thing to include a description of their personality too, or a small section about their history/background. Little things that even you should probably know, too.

You can also section your profile off a bit into things like "surface info," "meta info," "things you could easily figure out about them," etc. That way, no one can spoil themself. Making lists like this can help you think these things through if you haven't already as well.

Let's use Azazel, a character that you probably know already, as an example here. I don't have a profile set

Name: Azazel

Species: Fallen Angel; Capra Therian - an anthropomorphic Goat (?)

Gender(pronouns): Male(he/him)

Age: difficult to calculate; several thousand years old?

Apperance age: hard to say, he's not human. Adult.

Origins: banished from his home world of Eden, has been in the human world for several thousand years

Profession: Priest of dubious denomination, most likely Catholic or Protestant; teacher at Daikanyama Academy; de facto head of the Missionaries Non-Profit charity Organization; supervisor of the Aoyama Missionaries

Role & Rule: Watcher; Revelation - allows him to see anything within the territory of the Aoyama Missionaries and anywhere the pages of his Artifact see

Apperance: Azazel is a 5'10"(180cm) tall, anthropomorphic goat of ambiguous breed, with fawn fur all over his body and lighter fur on his head and around his neck. He has brown, riged horns which curve out and back. Though his eyes are often closed, when opened they're red. He always carried around a leather bound bible with an eye on the cover, and is never seen without several chains on his person, although only the one(s) around his neck can be seen unless he's undressed.

He wears a black priest's cassock with a maroon sash and a capelet of the same color, with the same eye as on his bible on the shoulders of the cape, and brown dress shoes. The front of the robe is always open to expose his bare chest and the chains beneath.

Personality: Azazel is kind and doting, very fitting of both a teacher and priest, although his openly flirtatious, lustful, and secretive nature causes others to distrust him. He doesn't mind this at all. He has a strong adoration for humans, and values love in all of its forms more than anything. He's a bit of a passive person, often being unmotivated but working hard regardless, and seems to prefer to watch others and the world go by, although he won't decline most invitations to take part in it. He is always aware of anything that happens within the extensive territory of the Missionaries, and seems to know and see just about everything about anyone he meets, from their surface to their soul. . . .

If you know Azazel, or take note of some of the wording or question marks, you'll note I didn't explain everything(although I may have shared more than you want to.) This is just a bare bones exampe of how I do my profiles--but it can get even more bare!

I'll do two this time, a more vague version of Azazel's, and another that obscures information all together, using the same or a similar format to the above.

Name: Azazel

Species: anthropomorphic goat

Gender(pronouns): male (he/him)

Age: unquestionably an adult

Origins: Eden

Profession: Priest; teacher; head of a charity NPO; member of the Missionaries

Apperance: Horned goatman of slightly above average human height. Light brown fur, blond fur-hair, red eyes. Wears priest robes and a gold chain around his neck and chest. Carries around a bible with an eye on it?

Personality: Kind of eerie, but friendly and affectionate. A little flirtatious, especially towards humans. Seems to know everything about people for some reason?

Compare it to the one before--see how I've left even more things off or left things ambiguous while still sharing what's necessary or surface level? However, it's also not as engaging or as informative as the other one where I gave more information.

As someone who plays him, profiles like this aren't as helpful for me lol since he knows so much about everyone and everything, having a lot of details helps me play my character!

Now, as helpful as this is, this is also a character you probably know. So how about I do this with an OC? Normally I'm extremely detailed in my profiles and such, especially for OCs, sharing headcanons and ideas for relationships between characters. But, again, I'll try and show how you can show some info while leaving some up to people to ask about to later be filled in.

Name: Kezia

Faceclaim/Art Source: [this is where you would put where you get the art for any icons you use--if you draw it yourself, say so; if you use official art from a series, credit the name of the character and the series; if you use picrews, link the specific picrews. DO NOT USE ART YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PERMITTED TO USE. DO NOT STEAL ART. IF YOU CAN'T FIND THE CREDIT, ASK SOMEONE TO HELP YOU, DO NOT JUST SAY THAT IT ISN'T YOURS. DO NOT USE ART YOU HAVE NOT BEEN GIVEN PERMISSION TO USE OR THAT ISN'T FROM A SERIES OF SOME SORT.]

Species: Human

Gender(pronouns): Female (she/her)

Age: mid 20's~early 30's?

Apperance age: older than she looks?

Origins: Tokyo?

Profession: Professor; Witch

Apperance: A fidgety woman who looks older than she is. She looks anxious and confused as often as she looks curious and confident. Wavy light brown hair. Often carries around schoolbooks and is never alone, always with a Rattus Therian and often with a Nyarlathotep.

Personality: seemingly anxious, but curious and exploratative nonetheless. On the awkward side, but can still keep up with the Nyarls that accompany her. Gets into trouble when she gets ahead of herself in exploring and learning about the arcane, but her Rule allows her to disappear easily.

History: Has always been curious about magic and attempted to run through a Gate when they began to open up. Performed a summon and brought a certain transients to Tokyo and recieved her familiar and the magic to use her Rule as a result. Currently teaches at a college. She stumbled into a certain someone while attempting to explore time, and became a fan ever since.

That tells you a fair amount, doesn't it? Even for someone you don't know? It may even raise some questions that you could ask. At the same time, it doesn't tell you that much, and that can be as much of a hindrance for coming up with questions as saying too much can. It's really up to you what's too much and too little. Here's a more detailed version! Some things have been left vague or confusing in such a way that they could be filled in after being revealed through asks and play. That way, people are encouraged to/given ideas of what to ask--and you can still share things in the long run.

Name: Kezia

Faceclaim/Art Source: [N/A]

Species: Human

Gender(pronouns): Female (she/her)

Age: mid 20's~early 30's?

Apperance age: somewhere in her 30's, maybe even a little older

Origins: Tokyo, with some sort of connection to at least one other world

Profession: Professor of [?] at [?] Academy; Witch

Role & Rule: [?] & [?]

Artifact, Summon, Familiar?: Always accompanied by at least one Nyarlathotep and some sort of man-rat? She also carries around a book that's labeled as a Grimoire, but it's rare for someone to be both a summon-user and an Artifact-user. . . .

Apperance: A fidgety older woman wearing a labcoat and a witch's hat. She looks quite stressed and has trouble sitting still. Her ashy brown hair is thin and a little wavy, with some strands of gray. Although she often squints, she doesn't wear glasses. She carries around a lot of books relating to maths and sciences and one labeled 'Grimoire' decorated with arcane symbols from Gehenna and Old Ones. She's always accompanied by at least one Nyarlathotep and a very short, bearded man who can best be described as a brown rat therian with a human-like face. Sometimes there's a normal rat on her person or in her pockets.

Personality: Kezia is a fidgety and anxious magic practitioner. She's very curious about other worlds and has been since the Gates appeared in this Tokyo since she was a child, however she has been pursuing magic before then. She often appears somewhat confused about or fascenated by even her usual surroundings, but, at other times moves through the world with confidence even in unfamiliar territory. She also likes rats and other rodents, and as such will often avoid felines and birds of prey. She has a tendency to disappear, seeming to walk through walls despite assuredly being alive.

She's a little bit awkward with people, but somehow keeps up with Nyarlathoteps nonetheless. She's a good teacher, once she figures out how to explain things in ways others can understand easily, but can be a bit difficult to follow and flighty up until then. Aware of this, she's rather patient, if a little down on herself at times. However, she most often simply has her mind elsewhere. Despite this and the company she keeps, she's relatively sane. . .most of the time.

She shares a name with a witch from the world of Old Ones who made a pact with Nyarlathotep, believing him to be the Devil. . .and the ratman always at her side uses the same name as that witch's familiar as well. It's. . .probably just a coincidence. . .who would rightfully make a pact with Nyarlathotep?

History: Kezia is an adult human from this Tokyo before the apperance of the Gates and construction of the Walls. She's explored various witchcraft pursuits since she was a child, with what was originally a mere imaginative curiosity and fascination. After the arrival of the Gates when she was still young, she snuck over the fences built around one and attempted to go inside the massive pillar of light, which she attributes to the reason she often seems to struggle with her vision. Several years later, she performed a successful summon and she recieved her familiar, Brown Jenkin, transformed into a somewhat therian form from one of her pet rats, and was given some powers from Nyarlathotep. She has no discernable control over any of the chaotic creatures, however they seem to spend time around her regardless.

At present she's a professor of a subject that interests her at a certain college. She's had other dangerous run-ins due to her excitement over the arcane and "darker" arts, but doesn't seem to show any signs of stopping. However, after an incident in an attempt to explore time itself, she encountered a certain guardian of time and feels reluctant for once to explore it further. . .although she's become quite a big fan of his.

. . .i ran out of steam amd kinda lost track of where i was going. idk if that helped at all really. But maybe it did! I hope it did. You don't need to use any of those things exactly by any means, but that's the kind of thing you usually see in profile pages. Basics like someone's name and birthday and age and apperance and a little about their personality, maybe some history. Oftentimes things like powers and weapons and the like. Interests, hobbies, ways they could be intereacted with, etc. Just stuff that'd help you know the character.

I write everything in paragraph form, but everyone is more than welcome to use a more script format. I love making profiles, myself--it really helps to think about the character and details about them. Normally I make really, really detailed profiles, but maybe I'll try and be more simple about it this time around. depends on how i'm feeling.

I know this seems weirdly hypocritical given I don't have one but when I first made this blog there were like four of us including myself. I didn't see the need for a rules or profile page because I didn't anticipate that there'd be so many of us or, like, people from other fandoms or who aren't familiar with certain characters. I'll rectify that soon hopefully. But I figured I'd pass along this idea/knowledge to others.

. . .I'm gonna go reopen my askbox now. Feel free to send asks again, ask about this, etc! You can send me an IM too if you want. I'll properly close up the guest event tomorrow. I'm real tired rn lol so idk how much i'll get done, but i usually do things super late at night my time, so i have some time to pull my shit together haha))

[imagining-in-the-margins]

Here to Misbehave (Pt. 4 | S.R.)

Summary: Spencer and Reader go on their first date. Couple: Spencer Reid/Fem!Reader Category: Smut (NSFW 18+) Content Warning: Adults w/ Age Gap (10yr), exhibitionism, masturbation, fingering, spanking, penetrative sex, Prof/Student fantasy Word Count: 8.3k

MASTERLIST | Series Masterlist

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When I was younger, I hated going to museums. Granted, I'd only ever really had the opportunity to go during school field trips. The crackling, barely coherent ramblings of a stranger through a loudspeaker had never been my idea of fun.

In fact, I'd been to that exact museum before. But the present time was a little different. That time, I was enthralled with the objects on the other side of the glass. With wide eyes and childlike wonder revived, I was hanging on every word out of Spencer's mouth.

I knew the guy was probably a genius, but I had no idea how much of a genius he was until he was recounting the entire history of civilization like he'd been reading straight from an encyclopedia. He looked like a hilarious mix of proud and embarrassed when he finally admitted his IQ. Meanwhile, I had to admit that I not only had no fuckin' clue what my IQ was, I was certain it was significantly lower than his. 

He didn't seem to mind.

In a way, I thought it was strange when he told me he wanted to bring me to a place like that. After all, I'd told him I wanted to learn more about him. I figured a museum would teach me about everything else, not him.

But seeing him in this environment told me more about him than I ever could have imagined. I learned about his avid love for the most trivial facts, the way his inflection changed when he got excited, and that despite reading probably hundreds of thousands of books, his hunger for knowledge was still very much alive and well.

Most of all, I learned that Spencer Reid was unlike any man I'd ever seen before.

It was a bad idea. Because when we finally made our way out of the final exhibit, I didn't want to leave. Not even close. If you'd told my mother I spent several hours in a museum and didn't want to leave, she'd never believe you.

"Hey, so..." I started, pausing outside the gift shop on our way out. "It's almost 5. Did you want to grab dinner before we head back? I have worked up quite the appetite listening to you for the past 4 hours."

"Has it really been that long?" he asked incredulously before glancing down at his watch wrapped over his shirt.

I tried very hard, and failed, to suppress a giggle at the habit.

"I'm honestly surprised you still have spit left in your mouth," I joked as I swayed closer to him, almost enough to touch him.

"Ha ha, very funny," he replied. A slight pout formed on his face. I almost enjoyed the swapped roles; it wasn't often that he was the one who looked so forlorn.

"Come on, I'm joking!" I laughed before slipping my arm around his and pulling him closer to me.

Spencer glanced down in surprise, staring at my chest that was now fully pressed against his arm. Although, the way he looked at me was nothing compared to the response he'd given after I showed up in a pleated skirt that better belonged on a Catholic schoolgirl.

But I mean, like I'd said, I used to go there on school trips. It was only fair.

"I love listening to you talk, Spencer. You know that."

The speed with which he looked away when I finished talking was enough to tell me that I had said the wrong thing. His goofy, playful demeanor vanished so quickly, I'd almost gotten whiplash. He didn't remove his arm, instead clearing his throat and pulling out a brochure from his pocket to look at nearby places to eat.

A bit reserved, he asked if I was interested in one of the closer casual restaurants, to which I agreed. At that point, I removed myself from his side and was only a little surprised to see the way his body immediately relaxed.

I wanted to believe he just didn't like to be touched, which I was certain was true, but he was behaving differently with me than he had before. We'd touched in public before, a lot more than that, and we'd known each other a lot less!

But of course, that was probably why. The closer we got, the farther away he felt.

The walk to the restaurant was slightly awkward, so after a moment I decided to break the silence.

"You said you grew up in Vegas, right?"

"Yeah, until I moved to go to school," he explained, looking around at the surroundings of the D.C. crowds winding down rather than turning his attention back to me. 

At least I was finally learning more about him.

"Where did you go?"

"Caltech."

He was keeping his answers short, but I feel like he might still be a little embarrassed at my little jab at the museum. That was fine, I knew ways to make him talk. I clasped my hands behind me as I walked by his side, still tempted to touch him somehow, however ill advised.

"Was it hard being away from your family? That's a few hours away, isn't it?"

He laughed awkwardly, a sure sign that I'd forgotten that him and I come from different worlds.

"Well, I was barely 13, so... My mom was kind of legally obligated to follow me."

He was so cute, and he definitely wasn't aware of it.

"Right, sorry, forgot about the genius thing for a minute. Don't know how."

The smile he returned was genuine, which helped my guilt for bothering him yet again. But in my defense, it was easy to do when he was a literal genius and I was barely scraping by half the time.

As we arrived, we were seated in a booth near the back of the restaurant. I offered him the booth with a view of the door because I'd figured he would want it. He gave me a strange side glance at my assumption, like I was hiding something from him that would grant me the knowledge that it would be more comfortable for him to be able to see the door.

I didn't want to talk about how I knew that, though.

Instead, I asked, "Do you like it here? In Virginia?"

He nodded as he flipped open the menu, speaking almost scripted answers absentmindedly, "I do, but mostly because it's been so long that everyone I know is here."

I'd already been here before, so I didn't bother looking at the menu. Naturally, he'd only required a few seconds to read it. When he made eye contact again, I spoke through my thoughts.

"You said you're a profiler for the..."

"Behavioral Analysis Unit."

His tone was a mix of pride and nerves, which immediately made me nervous.

"I haven't looked it up yet because I'm scared about what I might find. What do you guys do, exactly?"

The server brought us drinks just in time to pause his answer, which he seemed to appreciate. I figured it was either a tough job to explain, or he didn't want to share that part of his life with me just yet (or, potentially, ever). 

Spencer lowered his voice like he usually did when he talked about work.

"We profile the behavior of serial killers. Sometimes for research, but mostly to assist local police in catching them."

"Oh..." I started, stopping mid-sip of my drink. It was a lot to take in at once. "So... yeah, I'm glad I didn't google it."

He scrunched his mouth in that unsure way, like he wanted to explain to me how he really felt about his job. Something in the bags under his eyes told me he hasn't talked about this in a long time. At least, not like he should. But he didn't talk about it. He looked away, opting to say nothing at all.

"Doesn't it get to you?" I pushed, trying to offer him the platform to talk about the thing that no doubt consumes most of his life.

"Does what get to me?" His voice sounded so far away.

"Spencer, when I met you, you were whisked away at the crack of dawn to go talk about serial killers. On a weekend. The second time you showed up at my place after clearly not having slept, I'm guessing straight from work..."

His eyes narrowed as I spoke, like I was talking from a tightrope that I could plummet off any second. He seemed scared that I would speak something into existence he wasn't ready to face himself.

"You're surrounded by evil all the time. You're responsible for learning, recognizing, and manipulating evil. That can't be easy."

Spencer's eyes were glazed over in a way I couldn't describe. He seemed defensive, steeled, and absolutely terrified. He wouldn't look me in the eyes, opting instead to stare down at the menu in front of him.

He shrugged as he halfheartedly concluded, "I guess that's one way to look at it. We also get to see a lot of good."

"Yeah..." I nodded solemnly, recognizing the dismissive thoughts from my own experience.

He was downplaying the great likelihood of traumatic memories he carried, as if he could will away the damage. Like it would stop existing if he could convince himself it wasn't that bad.

I wondered what had happened to him on the job for him to already have forgotten that things didn't have to be the worst possible to matter. That he still deserved better. That hurt does not require permission.

I couldn't stop myself, needing to see how he reacted when I continued, "But which do you see more of?"

I never got my answer. The server once again saved him from a conversation that got away from him. The presence of a third, impartial person shifted the mood back to what it was in the museum. I wondered how much was an act, both back then and in that moment.

Deciding it best not to dwell on the thought, I tried to forget about the darkness brewing in those coffee colored eyes. Once our orders were in, he turned his attention to the cocktail menu still laying in the middle of the table with a smile.

"I'm almost surprised you didn't try to order alcohol," he half-joked.

I leaned forward on the table, bringing a hand up to my mouth and whispering, "I heard there might be an undercover fed here, so, never can be too safe."

The bubbly, childish laugh that followed renewed my faith in him. He had that kind of infectious laugh that made you forget that badness existed at all. Once our ruckus had died down, he looked at me with the softness that had drawn me to him in the first place.

"You're cute."

When the words registered in my mind, I couldn't believe I'd heard them. The way his expression changed shortly after the words left his mouth told me he hadn't meant to say them aloud. But their effect on me was not at all stifled by his momentary lapse in judgment.

I'd wondered if it was getting hotter in the building, or if it was just my nerves getting the best of me. But it wasn't bothering Spencer, who was about to down yet another cup of coffee in front of him. I cleared my throat, trying to not look like a schoolgirl whose crush had just checked 'yes' on a note asking if he liked me.

Pointing to the mug in front of him, I joked, "How do you sleep?"

"Honestly? I usually don't."

That was the goofy overly literal dork I wanted to see more of.

"I can think of one way to wear you out," I suggested, lifting my leg to press the top of my foot against his leg under the booth.

He raised his eyebrows, giving a simple glance down to acknowledge the contact. Then his eyes were back on me, staring deeply with a hunger that would not be satisfied by whatever dish they brought out to us.

"I can think of several."

Humming cheerfully, I continued to run my foot up and down his leg. My cheeks flushed with my growing desire that I'd managed to put off for several hours. I was honestly shocked that I'd spent the whole day with this man, and only then thought about sleeping with him.

"It's too bad we can't," I pouted. "My roommate is back in town. Not sure she'd appreciate all the noise."

That time as my foot drew up his leg, he shifted in his seat so that his legs moved closer to me, extending the contact for a few seconds longer.

"Not to mention, I don't think you'd like to deal with several 20-year-olds."

The way he behaved whenever I pointed out my age was endlessly entertaining. That time, though, he seemed significantly less bothered.

"One is already borderline for me," he teased back.

I gasped, clutching at my chest as I batted my eyelashes just dramatically enough to showcase my pride.

"You flatter me, Dr. Reid."

He almost choked on his coffee as he stifled a chuckle, putting it down as he shook his head.

"Only you would take that as a compliment."

Recognizing this repartee as the foreplay it had always accompanied, I leaned forward on my elbows towards him. He immediately mirrored the movement, putting our faces much closer to each other than they'd been all day.

"What can I say? I enjoy being a challenge."

"Yes, you do." He hadn't even thought about it, responding almost instantaneously, suggesting once more that he could actually read my mind.

"How are you so good at that?" I kept the question vague on purpose.

He didn't fall for it.

"I'm good at a lot of things. Which are you referring to?"

What a cocky bastard. A very handsome, ridiculously sexy, dork of a bastard.

But he wasn't the only one at the table that knew how to get someone hot and bothered.

"Your humility is my favorite part, Dr. Reid." I stuck my tongue out at the end of the sentiment, a cheeky grin that reflected on him just as quickly.

"Quoting me? That's bold."

Deciding it had been too long since I had touched him, I lifted my hand to press a single finger against his chest as I taunted, "You aren't the only person with a good memory."

He leaned back at this point, backing away from my finger and the heated exchange.

"I don't have a good memory. I have an eidetic memory."

He had been very proud of that fact earlier when I asked him why the hell he was able to list off every single word from a museum display we'd seen an hour earlier. I'd asked him if it was the same as a photographic memory, and he'd gone on a rant about the pejorative connotations of the term. I wasn't going to go down that rabbit hole again today.

Instead, I took the same hand that had touched him moments before, curling all but one finger into a fist.

"So you'll be able to remember this forever?" I cooed as I held up my middle finger.

"I'll just file that away with the most important memories, like birthdays and the works of Arthur Conan Doyle," he sighed in response, graciously admitting defeat.

I was not brave enough to tell him I had no idea who that was, but I was sure I'd learn one day. That one, I thought, was probably safe to google. While he filed away my crude gesture, I filed away yet another fun fact to surprise him with later.

"You are, by far, the most interesting person I've ever met," I implored, to which he immediately shot back, "I could say the same about you. And I regularly talk to serial killers."

Touché, Dr. Reid.

"I'm flattered," was the last word I got in edgewise before our food arrived.

The rest of our time in the restaurant went very similarly, with teasing comments that built the sexual tension that was already too big for this tiny room. Our legs never stopped touching throughout the entire meal. Maybe that was why, when it was finally time to leave, we both felt a strange mixture of excited and sad. Once we were no longer behind the booth, it was back to pretending like we weren't constantly trying not to pounce on the other.

The walk to the metro was equal parts long and tense. At one point I'd swayed closer to him than I intended, and our sides brushed up against one another. Unlike before in the museum, he hadn't moved away. I couldn't believe something so minuscule could made me so happy.

The metro was more crowded than I'd anticipated. The fact that the station is underground was usually enough to make me feel a little claustrophobic, but the number of people bustling around me felt especially overwhelming. I couldn't help but chastise myself for having worn a skirt, considering the stark number of perverted men in places like these.

Spencer's touch woke me from my reverie. His arm had wrapped around my lower back with such unassuming delicacy, I'd hardly registered it at first. He was looking down at me with concern covering his features as he asked, "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, sorry, there's a lot of people here."

I had one hand holding my skirt down against my leg, the other crossed over my chest.

"Makes me nervous," I further explained.

"Can I help?"

Even though he was offering, I could tell the crowds bothered him just as much. Thankfully, his presence was enough for me.

"You already are."

There was something so calming about his presence that was hard to explain. It wasn't his ability to physically protect me, considering he didn't  have his weapon with him most of the time I was with him. It wasn't his emotional availability (or lack thereof). It was more like he  exuded some chemical that made me docile. It was hard to explain.

I just liked him, okay?

When our train pulled in it was relatively crowded, but we managed to grab two seats near the back of a car. I sighed in relief as I plopped down into the plastic chair, happy to finally be able to rest my legs.

With Spencer on the aisle seat and us on our way back to Franconia Springfield Station, I let myself relax. My head dropped down onto his shoulder without much thought, and my entire body slumped over with it.

"How am I supposed to stay awake for this when you're so comfy?" I mumbled, looking down at the hem of my pleated skirt as I fiddled with it.

"That certainly sounds like quite the predicament," he said in what I assume was jest.

He sat up, bumping my head off his shoulder for a moment. I interpreted it to be a subtle way of telling me not to do it, but once he had shrugged off his cardigan, he looked at me like he was confused I hadn't resumed the position.

Armed with a simper, I cuddled up even closer this time, wrapping my arms around his and resting my cheek against his shoulder. I wasn't sure why he had gotten so open to touch, but I wasn't going to complain. 

He didn't say anything when he draped his cardigan over my lap, covering my knees peeking out from under my skirt. A nice gesture, I thought as my body instinctively gravitated towards him. It wasn't until I closed my eyes that the pieces started to come together.

I was on the metro, in a skirt, with Spencer Reid's hand slowly but surely inching up my thigh.

My eyes shot open, and I tensed my grip around his arm. It was the only thing I did to betray my otherwise composed and unassuming position.

His breath was hot on my ear as he leaned over to me and began to whisper, "Do you know the idea that people fall asleep after sex is less true for women than men? Many speculate it's because women are just neglected in bed, but that's not quite it."

I didn't dare respond, hardly trusting myself to breathe as his hand continued to move closer to me.

"Both sexes do release the same chemicals during orgasm. Oxytocin to stimulate smooth muscle contraction and initiate the need to bond, prolactin to relieve arousal and signal satiation, and the leftover gamma aminobutyric acid, dopamine, and serotonin..."

I couldn't understand how he'd managed to make the lecture sound sexy, but I was too lost in the sound of his voice to bother thinking about it then.

"Still, women are less likely to fall asleep. Sure, they typically exert less physical energy during sex, but what about those women like you with a penchant for going for a ride?"

A woozy, lovesick smile spread across my face at the reference to our first encounter.

"Those women might still stay awake for longer and may actually be more invigorated after reaching climax. And it's all thanks to their naturally lessened refractory period."

I nodded dumbly, gasping lightly once I felt his fingers make contact through the flimsy cotton of my underwear.

"Which might sound like a curse. But it's not. It means that those lucky women can reach multiple orgasms in succession. Some partners just aren't willing to put in that kind of effort," he continued, tracing a finger up and down my folds through the fabric.

"But I'm not one of them."

His words were strong, and I buried my face into his shoulder, trying not to alert the entire car what was happening underneath his cardigan.

"I would much rather watch you come undone. Again, and again, and again. I want to make sure that when I'm done with you, you can't keep your eyes open."

My breath was getting quicker, and I let out a small squeak against his shirt as he pressed down on the bundle of nerves at my center, drawing circles around it.

"That being said, if you need something to keep you awake, I do have a solution. But if you make a single noise, I will stop."

I had to bite down hard on my bottom lip to prevent any noise from slipping out. My legs were wavering between opening and closing as I tried to keep them apart. I could feel how damp I was getting. My hips were moving with a mind of their own, rocking toward his hand. It took all of my concentration not to give us away.

I choked on my breath as a sly finger snuck into the side of my underwear, allowing entrance to the others that followed.

"Shhh," he hushed, pressing a soft kiss on the top of my head. Underneath my skirt, though, he was much less chaste. Slipping two fingers into my heat, I could have sworn I heard him laugh from above me.

I didn't dare look at him, nervous that the moment I did, I would lose all control.

"I had no idea it would be so easy to get you to follow directions. Are you that worried you might get caught?"

He could feel my heartbeat against his arm. He must have been able to, because I was suffocating against his arm. My hands clenched around him like he was the only lifeline in an ocean of pleasure.

"Imagine what they would think if they knew what you let me do to you. What you beg me to do to you."

My legs were beginning to tremble around him as he stroked me from the inside. All I could feel was him. His hands, his breath, his words.

"Is that why you wore this skirt? A naughty little schoolgirl fantasizing about an older man touching you like this?"

He quickened the pace of thrusting into me, his words getting more insistent as the train was almost empty now, closing in on our stop.

"Is it everything you thought it would be? No. Can't be. You wish there was something else of mine in between your legs."

I couldn't explain how, but my climax snuck up on me. When it happened, it smashed into me like a wave crashing onto the shore. I gasped for breath against his arm, and he thankfully took mercy on me. Despite definitely making a noise, he continued his motions, palming at the crest of my folds to give me one last boost of stimulation.

I shook around him, my thighs tightening onto his arm as I finally found release. I could hear the announcement calling for our station, but it felt worlds away. Still, Spencer pulled his hand out from underneath our pile of clothes, wiping the evidence of our escapade against the inside of my skirt before also removing his arm from underneath my tight grip.

"Son of a bitch," I puffed, relaxing all my muscles at once as I tried to retain control over my pulse. I could barely think straight.

"You're welcome," he beamed, as if he hadn't just gone full dominant as he finger fucked me on the metro.

I didn't understand how the hell he expected me to get up and walk off like nothing happene, but somehow, I managed. I stood with wobbly legs and a flustered state of mind until he linked his arm with mine and led me off the car and into the station. I clung to the assistance, grateful that he was once again taking pity on me.

However, it felt like it wouldn't last long. Once we'd gotten to his car, he helped me in before climbing into the driver's seat. It was silent for a moment, like he wanted me to ask him a question that I wasn't willing to ask.

I didn't want the night to be over, but if he asked me if I was ready to go home, I'd have to say yes. After all, it wasn't proper form to invite myself to his apartment. Especially with how weird he got whenever I got close to him.

"Do you want me to take you home?"

The pity was gone.

I didn't think before I spoke, immediately responding as a joke, "Not unless it's yours."

The silence was back.

Oops.

I realized that I'd spoken out loud at the same time he delivered his response; I was going to stop him, but he was too quick.

"My place it is, then."

I couldn't help but smile, my cheeks burning as I asked quietly, like my volume might change his mind, "Really?"

"Sure, why not?"

I didn't have an answer. We didn't talk for a moment, enjoying the contented silence as I texted my roommate to tell her that I was going to be late home, if I came at all. I was hoping for the latter. Once that was sent off, I returned my gaze to the man paying almost full attention to the road.

"You know, I have to get you back for what you did back there."

He smirked, not breaking away from the road as he replied, "I did you a favor."

"A cruel favor," I whined, turning in my chair as I buckled my seat belt so I could get closer to him.

"No such thing," he corrected, although I think we both knew there very well could be such a thing.

"Uh-huh."

I watched him for a moment, trying to decide the best way to get back at him. I could always try the most relevant payback...

He didn't even notice my hand reaching out until it was already sliding up his thigh at a rapid pace.

"What are you doing?" he asked, as if it weren't already obvious.

"Getting you back," I snickered as I finally made it up his leg, palming the quickly forming erection under his pants.

"I'm driving!" His voice was so high pitched it was heartwarming. It was like our roles had switched, even just for a second.

"I'm not stopping you from driving!"

Obviously trying to compose himself, he grabbed my wrist and held it in the air and out of reach of him.

"Unless you want to crash this car, you'd better wait until we get back to my place."

It was a valid warning, but not one I wanted to hear.

"Spoil sport."

"At least you're alive!"

It was back to the sexual tension from before in the restaurant. I wanted to touch him, and I was guessing based on the visible tent in his pants, he wanted me. So, I got to thinking, and I figured that if I wasn't allowed to touch him, that only left one other person.

"... What are you doing?"

It was a valid question. He'd glanced over to see my hand traveling up my own skirt as I parted my legs just enough to maneuver beneath my underwear.

"Nothing," I hummed, now looking at him with half-lidded eyes as I rocked forward onto my hand.

"That's cruel." He sounded so devastated to see that I was doing what he couldn't, despite the fact he had his hand in this exact spot not that long ago.

My fingers dipped between my folds, collecting the remnants of the orgasm he had given me as I crooned, "What? You said I couldn't touch you while you're driving. I'm not touching you. You're welcome."

I opened my eyes just enough to see the way he tightened his grip on the steering wheel while trying not to look at me. Couldn't drive distracted. That was the entire reason why I was touching myself and not him.

"Unless, of course, you do consider this part of me as your property. In which case, I'm not going to stop, anyway," I snickered. 

Rewarding myself with a soft moan, I tried to prolong the experience the best I could. It was hard when every couple of seconds he would look over at me. I hadn't thought that I would find his anger that attractive, but there I was, coming apart at the seams already based on nothing but a look. 

He was thoroughly unamused, which only egged me on, honestly. I didn't care if I was being overdramatic as I touched myself, I wanted him to think about what he was missing. Which was why I didn't stop myself from moaning. Pants and gasps echoed throughout the car as I picked up my pace.

"I hope you're ready for the consequences of this very poorly thought out decision."

On the contrary, Spencer. I had very clearly thought it through. I was thinking it so clearly I could picture his hands where mine were, among other parts of him.

Thinking about how to dig an even deeper hole for myself, I found the perfect mechanism.

"Mmm, Professor Reid," I cried, recognizing that it would either infuriate him or bring him a great sense of pride. I was fine with either.

I closed my eyes so I could better envision the fantasy that was actually just a memory. For now. With my eyes closed, I couldn't tell much of what was going on outside of my touch, trying to ignore the man beside me as best as I could. I wanted him to suffer.

Spencer, however, had other plans. With both eyes still on the road, his hand had found its way to my legs, where it shot up to join mine. He removed my hand quickly and replaced it with his own.

There was no subtlety or warm up this time. Without any hesitation, he dipped a finger into my heat just to remove it and begin rubbing harsh circles over my clit. I couldn't stop the yell that resulted, and seconds later I came undone against him.

As soon as the spasming stopped, he removed his hand, not speaking a word or even looking at me. I'd realized at that point that he'd only finished me off because he hadn't wanted to grant me the satisfaction of doing it myself. He was asserting that yes, in some sense, he viewed this as a part of his property.

I was oddly okay with that.

"Is the silent treatment my punishment?" I asked with a pout after a few moments of nothing.

He laughed bitterly back, finally looking at me for a moment before vaguely replying, "No. Your punishment will be much more fun for me."

I had to admit the implication that the silent treatment wasn't fun for him was flattering, at least. I was glad to hear that he enjoyed talking to me as much as I enjoyed listening to him talk.

But for the moment, I was sort of exhausted. Not in the way that would make me fall asleep, but in the I-just-had-two-orgasms-let-me-recoup way. Even though we enjoyed talking, those moments were refreshing in their own way. The best kind of connections were the ones that could always be maintained, even in the quiet.

Despite it not being my punishment, Spencer remained fairly quiet the rest of the way home. I wondered if part of that was due to him brewing a plan for what would happen when we got there.

God, I hoped so.

As we pulled up to the nondescript building, I had to admit I was a bit disappointed to find Spencer didn't live in some whimsical fantasy like I'd always envisioned. The building looked like every other one. But, at the same time, I couldn't want to see the inside. If I had to bet, there would be a lot of books and a stark lack of computers.

Walking into Apt #23, I was only a little surprised by what I saw. The warm green tones of his walls were complimented by red and brown accents, and my theory was quickly proven correct.

"Whoa," I mumbled under my breath, "It's like a library."

"You must go to some pretty small libraries, then."

I rolled my eyes. Like his usual attempts at humility, Spencer failed horribly.

I spun around on my heels to face him, but at the same time as I heard the lock flip into place, I felt his hand around my arm. Spencer's movements were quick as he gripped tightly on my wrist and pulled me towards what I could only assume was his bedroom.

Weirdly, I was still trying to take in my surroundings rather than focus on fucking him. It made sense, I figured. I had already experienced two orgasms today, whereas he had none.

Oops. Guess I really was a spoiled brat.

But seriously—I was in his apartment! I wanted to snoop, dammit!

Spencer wasn't going to give me an opportunity, though. He'd even made a point of shutting the door to his room once we were inside. Something told me he would keep a close eye on me as long as he could. That was probably deserved, considering that within the first few hours of interacting with him, I had answered a call from his boss.

In my defense, it had been fucking hilarious.

He led me to stand in front of him, and out of instinct and habit, I moved forward to kiss him. I never made it to his lips, though. Spencer pushed me aside toward the bed, and I laughed as I leaned over it, making a point of flipping up the back of my skirt.

"I've been bad, Professor," I giggled, turning to glance back at him from the position I had happily assumed without being told.

He had that dark fire in his eyes that usually came before a storm.

He looked like he was ready to break me. I was ready to be broken.

"Are you going to teach me another biology lesson?"

When his hands touched me, they were as tender as ever. He caressed my hips where I had turned the skirt up, hooking his fingers around the waistband of the underwear and casually removing them.

"No, I'm afraid not."

He sounded delighted despite the words he spoke.

"This will be a very different kind of lesson."

Oh, I realized all at once.

"A lesson in discipline?" I inquired, swaying my hips underneath his hands and waiting for confirmation.

The loss of his hand on one side caused anticipation to build. I could hear the sound of blood rushing in my ears.

It was hard to tell which happened first. Instantaneously, his hand came down hard on the soft skin of my backside as he responded, "Yes."

The adrenaline that coursed through my veins in response shook any feelings of fatigue I might have sustained throughout the day. I welcomed his body heat against my back as he leaned forward against me, and used his weight to press me down into his bed.

"Unless you've changed your mind."

"No!" I shouted back much too forcefully before gripping onto the sheets in front of me. "I deserve to be punished, Professor Reid."

He withdrew from me and, within seconds, brought his hand down on me again, that time striking the other side. The snapping sound of the contact was enough to elicit a response. I clamped my legs together and gave a soft mewl. Appreciating my vocal response, the next two hits came in rapid succession. I could feel the warmth building in the skin, the breeze from the motions acted as a buffer for the delicious sting.

He roughly grabbed both cheeks in front of him, for no reason other than wanting to. I groaned at the sensation of the tender flesh being handled, which only led him to release one to smack it once more. He followed with the other, appreciating the balance required of this particular punishment. I wasn't going to stop him. I was happy to continue. But something told me that he was breaching the point of comfort in his own conscience.

He was always so worried he would break me. I couldn't say it wasn't endearing. That didn't stop him from giving each side one more forceful blow, however, which earned him a mangled cry from deep in my chest. His body was against mine again, one of his hands reaching around to tilt my head up, despite not being able to see him. I was beginning to think he just enjoyed manipulating my body at will. To see how far I would let him.

"I think you're starting to get it, (y/n)."

"Yes," I responded, not caring if it didn't make much sense in response.

Despite the fact he'd already finished me twice today, I somehow already wanted him again. Maybe it was the allure of finally being able to fuck him in his own bed, or maybe it was the desire to see him fall apart as a reminder that I'm not the only one desperate for the other's touch.

So quickly he returned to the gentle, barely there traces along my skin.

"Punishment looks good on you," he praised, and something about the way he said it filled me with pride.

"You look good on me, too, sir," I slurred as he continued to draw feathery markings on the abused skin. He chuckled, finally moving up along my back before I interrupted his thoughts and appreciation once more.

"Fuck me," I begged. I wanted him and didn't care how I got it. "Let me help you feel good."

The hands that had inflicted pain moments ago were now gently massaging my shoulders through my top. I sighed, relaxing further into his touch. So easily I had become complacent to his desire. I let him do whatever he wanted, trusting that he would never do anything to truly, honestly hurt me. 

"Something tells me you're more interested in making yourself feel good," he asserted — quite correctly.

"Can't we have both?"

His silence told me he was considering my words. I knew that he didn't want to, since that would ruin the whole idea that this was a punishment in the first place. Then again, I didn't think he was fully committed to that idea anyway.

Dragging his hands once more down the plane of my back, he stopped to grip my hips and shift me backwards until I was pressed against him.

"You're lucky you look so fucking cute in that skirt," he growled.

I felt dizzy again already, drowning in the way his bed smelled like him.

"Mmm, I wore it just for you," I admitted, rubbing myself gently against his crotch now pressing into my bottom.

"Smart girl," he responded.

It felt like I was in a dream, to be there with him like that. For a long time, I'd thought I'd never see him again, let alone be laying on his bed.

I could hear him stripping behind me, and I peeked over my shoulder with a modest smile.

Time was not moving fast enough, I thought, but it was also moving too fast. Because as badly as I wanted him to ravish me, I was afraid what would happen when it was over.

I couldn't think about that in that moment, though.

Once he reached into his nightstand, I giggled with anticipation. He raised his eyebrows at me, unable to contain his own laughter.

"Oh, you're happy with yourself, huh?"

"A little bit, yeah."

When he returned to me, his hands were still gentle as they pushed my skirt back up where it had fallen. He revealed my body to himself, and I didn't have to be able to see it to know that my arousal spread down my inner thighs. I had, after all, already had two orgasms before now thanks to the man behind me.

"I'm also pretty happy with you," he whispered as he leaned over me.

With no warning, he fully entered me with one swift thrust. I whimpered at the feeling of him hitting against angered skin, mixed with the pleasure of being full once again. I clutched at the sheets and wished that they were him, wishing that I could somehow be even closer to him than I already was. 

"We'll see if you still feel like smiling after I'm done with you."

It was the last thing he said before he began to ruthlessly pound into me. I struggled to scream as loudly as I wanted to, but I couldn't make any noise at all. My body seemed to have relented all control to him within seconds; I didn't put up a single battle. Although his grasp held me in place, I still attempted to cant my hips forward to allow him better access.

My chest and face were warm with friction from rubbing against the bed, and my knuckles were blanched from the force exerted to try and remain grounded. Each movement seemed so purposeful, much like the way he thrashed at my skin with his hand.

"Fuck me," were the first words I managed to string together.

With one forceful thrust, he held me down on him as all the moans I couldn't make previously came pouring out of me. I thought I might actually cry from how overstimulated the day was  becoming. Seemingly reading my mind, Spencer pulled out of me entirely. I tried to reorient myself, but he stopped me. Using one hand to grab hold of my arm, he flipped me onto my back beneath him.

I hadn't even realized I was still wearing basically all of my clothes until he had to force my skirt back up again. Missing him between my legs, I began to crave him everywhere else, too. I struggled to pull my shirt over my head.

Spencer didn't stop me, just watching while he playfully rubbed his arousal at my entrance.

"Please, sir," I pleaded once I was finally able to lift my legs. I wrapped them around his hips and pulled him closer to me without letting him slip into me just yet.

"Just as impatient and needy as ever, (y/n)."

I chewed on my bottom lip, looking up at him with the puppy dog eyes that had always worked on him up to that point. It must have worked again, because he was sinking back into me before I knew it. My arms spread out across the bed, holding onto whatever I could reach as he set another brutal pace.

Our bodies melding together in a chaotic fusion of skin and fluids, I let myself get lost in the bliss of Spencer Reid laying claim to my body. I threw my head back, my eyes clamped shut as one of his hands came up to caress one of my breasts through my lacy bra.

"With undergarments like this, I have to wonder if you planned this all, young lady," he teased, no doubt referring to the matching underwear now discarded on the floor.

I opened my eyes to meet his, and for a second I was left breathless at the sight of him pumping into me. How I managed to say anything at all is a miracle.

"Never a plan, sir. But always a pleasure."

A flirtatious sparkle in his eyes, he slowed down as he pressed, "Did you wear them for someone else, then?"

The way I arched my back caused him to push even further into me, and I had to pause to moan before I continued.

"Are you jealous?"

His hips snapped forward, producing a simultaneously jolt of pain and pleasure. His voice was breathy as he tried to hold himself together while speaking, "Should I be?"

Our eye contact caused tension so powerful that I was certain it was palpable. A devilish grin and a bit of a snicker was the provocation he needed to drive into me harder once again. I didn't even try to suppress the noises he elicited from me, tightening my grip around him with my legs.

"Take me," I whispered under my breath, almost hoping that he wouldn't hear me.

I couldn't tell if he did, but his hand switched sides of my chest, and our faces grew closer together.

"I'm yours," I slurred. I truthfully hadn't thought about the words when I gifted them to him, but he clearly took note of them. That time, it was his moan that filled the air in the room, and I had never felt so excited by one of his responses. I chased after the feeling, locking eyes with him as both his hands grabbed my hips to begin the race to the finish.

"I'm yours, Spencer."

I didn't stop to wonder if I could play this off as part of the fantasy. I mean, it was part of my fantasy; the fantasy of being his, and him being mine.

He didn't object to my words then, either, and he had definitely heard me that time.

I smiled, barely noticing that he'd placed his fingers back on my heat, swiping frantically at my clit until I lost all composure underneath him. My hips rocked at no apparent rhythm, and distorted versions of his name broke through my mouth.

I hadn't even come down yet when he rammed into me with full force, bottoming out once again. I felt his cock twitch inside of me, followed by my muscles pulling everything out of him that they could.

The view of his satisfied face through my lust-filled daze was angelic. It appeared that he saw the same in me, but I couldn't be sure. Just as quickly as the moment had come, it had passed, his arms giving in to his weight as he collapsed onto my chest.

His hair tickled my collarbones, and I laughed at how incredibly out of shape he was. Especially for an FBI Agent. Even if he did go on the field often, I figured the resident dork didn't need to be totally ripped, anyway.

And, hey, he was strong enough to treat me like a ragdoll, so who was I to judge?

"Tired?" I asked, taking a shaky hand to his head, playing with the soft brown curls damp from sweat.

"You aren't?" he slurred, his words smothered against my skin.

"I am fucking exhausted."

That time, we both laughed. He was clearly pleased that, despite any perceived weakness, he was still able to thoroughly wear me out. When he moved to leave me, I dropped my legs. I was surprised I had managed to hold them until then, honestly.

He fixed his hair that had fallen in his eyes first, and I smiled at the peculiar priority. It was cute, though.

"Do you have to take me home?"

I tried not to let the disappointment bleed into my voice, but it did. He tried not to notice. He didn't answer as he cleaned himself up, and I sat up to look at him — once the world stopped spinning, anyway.

"No."

The butterflies spiraled out of control, spreading through every inch of my soul. I must have been beaming, because he looked so very nervous.

"Thanks."

His response came in the form of an unsure smile, followed by a genuine appreciation.

I briefly wondered if he realized just how transparent he was, but then decided I didn't want to think about it. I excused myself to clean up before bed, taking a long moment to rub my skin with aloe from under the cabinet, only to realize that I had basically nothing clean to wear. I rolled my eyes at the situation, wondering how many red flags it would set off for me to ask Spencer for some of his clothes.

I could just be naked. He seemed to like me that way.

I padded back into the room, expecting him to be waiting up for me. He wasn't. Spencer had passed out on the bed before he even had a chance to get under the covers. I stood at the door for a moment, trying to appreciate the value of this quiet moment while I still could.

Stripping off my clothes as quiet as possible, I was careful not to wake him. However, that also meant I couldn't climb under the covers, either.

It isn't exactly snooping if I'm looking for something innocent, right? That's what I had to tell myself, regardless. Because I was not going to freeze my ass off over a hookup's paranoia. Glancing at the dresser, I almost convinced myself it wouldn't be an invasion of privacy to open it. Luckily, I didn't have to. Directly next to it was a hamper of clean, folded laundry, with a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt on top. While disappointed that I had lost my excuse, I was grateful I had stripped myself of the choice.

He deserved better than me trying to pry into his life like that.

Slipping into his clothes, I stopped to hug myself in the soft fabric. With him asleep, I felt comfortable taking a moment to revel in the position he'd allowed me to exist in. I was in his apartment, in his clothes, and I would soon be back in his arms.

For now.

I chased the inevitable end out of my thoughts, slinking onto the bed and shimmying over to him until his hands found me in his unconscious state. I faced him, my hands pressing softly against his chest to feel his heart happily working under my touch.

His eyes fluttered open for a second, just long enough to see the wonder in my own. A smile crept along his cheeks, and he wrapped a lazy arm around my waist.

I wondered if he recognized his own clothes, or if he even realized this was real. Then again, the alternative was him assuming that it'd all been a dream... and it was a pleasant one, it seemed. 

"I'm happy," he confirmed in a hushed tone.

My heart almost stopped, and I peeked up at him, inching up so I could better see his face. His breathing evened back out as I felt the way he relaxed, quickly retreating back to the comfortable embrace of sleep.

"About what?" I whispered back.

Our legs twined together, and a soft sigh left his lips. I waited with bated breath  for his response, although I don't think I could have ever been prepared for what followed.

"I'm happy that you're mine."

... What?

 —————————————————

| Part 5 |

[ask-the-clergy-bc]

I'm curious to hear your hc on what the actual jobs of the siblings of sin and ghouls are. While obviously the Papas serve the same role as the Catholic pope, what exactly do the lower ranking members do to maintain the abbey and further the cause? Like is it mostly the same to how a Christian abbey is run or is operating a Satanic abbey completely unique?

Jobs of Siblings of Sin and Nameless Ghouls

Going to break this up into two parts, since both groups have some unique duties! 

Siblings of Sin:

~Siblings who stay in their abbies operate just like a Catholic church but... way more free! These siblings do everything from keeping the grounds, cooking, cleaning, laundry, library duties, booking, tailors, helping the higher clergy, etc. 

~Duties are divided out by rank and specific abbey needs. New initiates usually do a lot of the “boring” chores, senior ranking siblings are usually leads in specific chore areas, and those who show the most initiative get to help with rituals and other religious needs. 

~All Siblings are shuffled around so that they can all have a chance to participate in rituals. But higher ranking ones are more likely to be chosen repeatedly to help lead and keep things in other. So a normal sibling might get to help in chanting, but a senior sibling would have the honor of holding a blood chalice. 

~Ministry Prelates and Higher members typically take care of the important religious matters. They are the ones thought to be qualified and designating who does what. 

~There are tons of siblings who have ‘home’ abbeys but don’t actually live with the congregation! Unlike a traditional church, there are countless roles outside of the religious ones! Especially with modern technology and the Ghost project, more siblings have to spread out! they are required to keep up their prayers and mandatory events, but they will live either on their own or in clergy paid apartments. 

~Siblings are almost exclusively employed during Ghost project tours. You’d normally see them dressed as normal people. They are typically the roadies, merch stall vendors, band staff, and managers! The Papas will sometimes employee siblings to be their personal assistants, or someone to entertain harem members who travel with them. 

~These jobs can range from very average to a little more discrete. Like marketing for the project, book keeping in their region, merchandising, networking with companies, and just trying to keep extra funds coming in. 

~Discrete jobs are very very special and take a lot more decorum and sneaking to get done. A LOT of siblings actually infiltrate local governments and religious organizations in order to study and corrupt. There are tons of undercover siblings in the Vatican alone, doing what they can to destroy it from the inside. Some even just travel to convert small churches and pose as pastors. 

Nameless Ghouls: 

~Ghouls have a vastly different purpose in the clergy, even if they can help fulfill certain sibling duties. We normally know the band ghouls and their roles, but this is only a fraction of the Ministry’s ghoul population! 

~First and foremost, ghouls were originally summoned to be guardians to the bloodline and the first Clergy. Body guards and to help give Hell a better stronghold in the physical world. Angelic forces and crusaders are still a big threat to any abbey and any member of the bloodline. This is why any Papa or their progeny will have a flock of ghoulish bodyguards following them at any given time. At least five ghouls are stationed at a location at any given time just in case it is attacked. 

~Higher Ministry members are also rewarded ghoul escorts and assistants. Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, and even Mother Superiors have one to three ghouls at their side. The higher the rank and influence, the more ghouls! Cardinal Copia himself had at least five before he was appointed Papa! 

~Ghouls are also needed for ritual and sermon duties. Their powers can help bring about Hellish influence and make the magic around them more powerful. You will see this in Ghost project rituals, summonings, and holidays.

~Ghouls are also needed to help summon and maintain ghouls on earth. The biggest need for them is to help new ghouls adjust and learn human language and customs. Especially with summoned ghouls that are a little more feral and essentially need a baby sitter before they can join the Clergy population. 

~Aether ghouls have a particularly important role, despite the clergy trying to keep their current population as low and controlled as possible. They serve as guides, oracles, and general council to the Papas. It is why Special and Omega were summoned for so long and held close to the Ministry. 

[siberlius]

buddhist symbolism in csm

context

core ideas relevant to this topic

key parallels to chainsaw man

future of the plot

(1) context:

in japan, buddhism is one of the major religions besides shinto. japanese media tend to dress some of these ideas in christian/catholic imagery (see evangelion), which is pretty funny actually. the religious parallels may or may not be intended by fujimoto, but i think it’s worth considering it because the potential implications are quite compelling

japanese buddhism is generally considered to be under a major branch of buddhism called mahayana buddhism. i am more familiar with chinese buddhism, which is also under the same branch. there are similarities especially to the core ideas (which are what i will reference for this post), but do note that my analysis will be limited by the fact japanese buddhism has their own specialities, nuances. 

buddhism is pretty complex due to the amount of texts and cultures that have shaped its interpretation and honestly, i feel like the ideas i have discussed may be misleading due to how i simplified and interpreted things

(2) some core ideas (relevant to this topic):

all beings are stuck in a cycle of death and rebirth, also known as samsara 

being stuck in samsara is the source of our suffering (which is why samsara is also called the wheel of suffering)

by reaching nirvana, we can escape from samsara and become liberated from all suffering. 

did i say all ‘beings’? that’s right! there’s six realms of rebirth, though i think it’s more accurate to refer to it as “class of beings you can be reborn as”. which realm you get reborn in depends on your past karma. there’s the good/fortunate realms (gods, demi-gods, humans), and the bad/unfortunate realms (animals, ghosts, beings in hell). usually, the more positive your karma, the better realms you get reborn in. yet, karma is also the fuel to samsara. karma, at its core, are actions (in buddhism, cause AND effect) motivated by desire and ignorance (no matter good or bad), and these desires and ignorance perpetuate samsara. 

the concept of hell and heaven here is a little bit tricky, because they are all ‘trapped’ in this cycle of samsara. heaven and hell are not final. your death is not final. the buddhism concept of impermanence applies here in samsara. thus, the ‘best’ realm to be reborn in is to be reborn as humans, as being human gives you the motivation to try to break free from samsara, to be free from your suffering. as a human, you aren’t too complacent from the pleasures (say, like the gods in the “highest” tiered realm), and you aren’t too tortured in hell or being hunted down like the lower tiered realms. 

to reach nirvana is to be free from desires and ignorance, and thus liberated from suffering. nirvana is the finale. nirvana is constancy. a lot of people think of nirvana like a form of paradise - a bit like the idea of heaven - but i don’t think it’s consistent with the idea of becoming free from desires. your personality, the layman concept of your self, is driven by karma. by liberating yourself from this, you become something some academics refer to as a ‘non-self’. in fact there are interpretations that think that nirvana is becoming samsara - you transcend to something beyond existential. in either ways, you no longer exist in the material world. in practice, most buddhists don’t aspire to achieve nirvana, unless you have decided to become a monk. your goals (reach nirvana, or get good karma) are guided by buddha, the ultimate teacher (remember, there is no omnipotent, omnipresent, ultimate ‘being’ in buddhism. you have teachers who guide you to spiritual freedom, which is a state, not a being). thus, most simply wish to gain enough good karma (by doing good deeds) and become reborn in a better realm. 

here, mahayana buddhism is unique because they believe in the concept of bodhisattvas. bodhisattvas are beings who have reached enlightenment, but chose to stay in samsara out of compassion to help others achieve nirvana. but the reason why bodhisattvas like guanyin or kannon (in japan) are so popular is because of their kindness in helping the layman and the layman’s needs, alleviating suffering of the regular people not just the grands acts of salvation. guanyin arguably is the most important and famous bodhisattva in east asian buddhism to the point that she’s known as the goddess of mercy, representing buddhist compassion itself.

(3) key parallels to chainsaw man

by now, the parallels should be pretty clear:

the cycle of death and rebirth of devils

the devils in csm are clear parallels to the demi-gods. the demi-gods are powerful beings but aren’t necessarily good or evil. in many stories they are evil, but they are generally known for their addiction to passions and desires (like the seven sins). (i think primal fear devils could be considered a god.) all beings (even gods and demi-gods) in buddhism are subject to karma. while gods can live a long time, they are not immortal, and the main reason why gods can’t escape samsara is due to their attachment to their fortunes to the point they don’t really care about escaping samsara. the fact that devils are personifications of fears is pretty consistent with the symbolic representations of deities (gods/demigods) in buddhist stories. deities aren’t just symbolic - they are personalities subjected to the laws of karma. also all realms can interact with one another. 

finally, mr chainsaw man himself. a warped blend of a demi-god and a bodhisattva-like powers except with chainsaws and gobbling. chainsaw man saves both preys and predators by erasing devils from existence altogether. 

at first glance, makima’s is almost like the twisted version of guanyin. makima looks kind, is super powerful and almost omnipotent (guanyin was so devoted to the cause of saving everyone from samsara that she split to 11 heads and a thousand arms to reach out to those in aid), and most importantly, she actively pursues the goal of ‘saving’ people. 

interestingly, guanyin originates from Avalokitasvara, which means “sound perceiver” or “he who looks down upon sound" (i.e., the cries of sentient beings who need his help)” - sounds familiar?

my real point: makima and chainsaw man are narrative foils on what the role of a bodhisattva, or specifically, guanyin/kannon should be. makima resembles superficially, but chainsaw man is the substance.

Avalokitasvara, depending on cultures, may be portrayed as male and female, though their past life is consistently male. in china and japan, guanyin/kannon are portrayed expressly female, because she chose her gender to suit their causes (society equates compassion and mercy as feminine traits) in this essay i will explain why chainsaw man and makima are trans-

(4) future of the plot

I... actually didn’t think that much about it since personally it feels like csm is ending BUT as of now:

chainsaw man rising to a true bodhisattva as his character plot. you may be wondering - how can a bodhisattva be compassionate if they have let go of their desires? the thing is, love as a desire is specifically attaching yourself to something to achieve safety and belonging. BUT love in terms of buddhist compassion is about openness and fearlessness. again, my point on how makima and chainsaw man are narrative foils! 

makima’s goal. is it to save humanity? or to trap them in their own desires and ignorance?

csm’s concept of nirvana - what is nirvana? what is the final end? 

potentially (world building wise) - interpretations of other realms and beings?

that’s all i have for now!

[blankdblank]

Brother Dearest Pt 42

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhJVMW3tI6g – Inspiration for the Catholic ceremony I chose for this story. Probably a far more modern version of the ceremony but the older ones were mostly a less personal wedding than I wanted. Just loved the relationship between the Priest and the couple.

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The ceremony part is in italics for the most part and the Latin bits are in bold and italics for those who might be bothered by wedding ceremonies or how heavily religious Catholic Weddings can be. Trust me it took hours to shift it down to something more personal and not monotonous to hinge more to boring for this chapter.

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Two soft knocks and James just about shot to his feet to answer the warning notice that the guests were seated and the ceremony could begin. Out into the hall he went to a deep exhale with hat lifted to sit atop his head for the stroll to the doors of the cathedral. Just muffled noise of the guests’ chatter had him pause for a break that let Victor claim a tight hug from his brother. With ease James chuckled and returned the hug that once through had helped to give him the nerve to slip through the doors that were again closed behind him for the much watched stroll to the alter. Sparsely the chatter paused and rose up again at the cue that the Bride would arrive soon. Unable to help it James chuckled to the wave of whistles from the uniformed soldiers who alongside their dates had filled the seats behind the high ranked guests up front on the right side of the diagonal Y shaped rows.

Off his head his hat was eased in his glance at the large four lensed cameras on either side along the back wall on a platform high enough so when the guests stood there would still be clear view of you both over their heads. Between them a pair of photographers took the first of the pictures on the first of the two cameras they had around their necks. A few comments from the Brocks kept his mind occupied from the voices he could hear on the other side of the door of the Groomsmen complimenting the Bridal party on their outfits.

Those doors however did open and the organ began to play a soft tune for the entrance march that turned everyone’s heads to find the Priest on his lead role in the march. Behind him with flower petals for the girls and candles inside glass lanterns for the boys to keep from burning the place down as each pair spread petals around all the way up to and around James who chuckled at their skipping circle of him to loop back to their second row in the empty diagonal seating.

Victor and Dawn as Witnesses came next with Norma on his free arm after having forgotten her cue to slip back in before the ceremony began, she sat on the end closest to the non procession Brocks with a smile at the others who sat in the front row. The beaded white gown however stirred pangs of scandalous comments inside the heads of those watching until they saw the continued theme when Dot and David arrived next. Dot’s Cousin and Erik came next, him with the small tray pinned under his arms and rings in his pocket to keep from dropping them. Gina, Ambrose and their husbands came to take their own seats next for the chest clenching moment of silence in the shift of the music sheets for the Bridal March.

Already on the verge of crying James straightened up to the comforting pat on the back from the Priest who was alone at his side with a smile of his own from the sight of the teary smile on your Groom’s face. A million thoughts echoed in his head all at once that fell to silence at your golden glow enveloped self. For all the imagined moments in wonder for what you had chosen to wear today he couldn’t have gotten close to this perfect gown. Each ruffle on the skirt giving the impression of almost being feathers that added to your float down the aisle, just barely the hints of sheer fabric that grew to the sleeves ending underneath Eddie’s elbow and the blue rose and calla lily bouquet in your hold. Just barely he caught a glimpse of the now naked finger your wedding band would sit on and to the blink that freed a tear down his cheek his eyes rose up from the glint of gold tucked in your cleavage above the clear gem coated broach on your corset and then higher. Bared shoulders framed your neck and the lower glimpse of your chin through the netting of your top hat.

Every single step had him on the cusp of shouting those vows to jump ahead of it all. All those years and nights of separation back in the war when your troops had to divide stung at him and drove him to the brink of madness to break his ranks and orders to simply go hunting for you. Day by day burning and screams kept him on the cusp of trembling from increased rage to be away from you for so long. And once you had reunited he swore to never be apart from you again. Those painful uneventful nights his mind went loose filled with possible forevers and now here it was. Just five feet away he watched Eddie claim your bouquet to Edie’s smile filled reach to lift the netting to tuck on the rim of your hat.

Father Thomas in the end of the tune approached with hand extended yours rested upon in the walk to James’ side on the way to the alter where the kneeling stools were waiting. Smoothly in a reach your free hand rose for a stunning stroke of his cheek to wipe away the tear trail he used to his advantage. Around your wrist his hand moved to cradle the hand in a stolen press of his lips to the ball of your palm, against his chest a moment he held your hand there with his right, to use his left to help lift the hem of your gown on the three steps. Once at the kneeling stools he traded his right for his left hand to keep hold of yours in following the hushed reminder of the Priest to kneel.

To the now seated crowd he looked and drew in a breath motioning for Ambrose to open the ceremony speeches up at the podium to read from the marked passage on the large open bible there. Her Latin fluid after weeks of practice with the Father to get the words right that she managed with apparent ease. A brief song from an assigned guest among the Brocks to sing the brief version of ‘Let Us Rejoice’ that in her return to her seat opened for Gina’s turn up at the podium to read the second passage of scripture marked for her. Proudly for her also successful and surprisingly tear and sniffle free. No matter how awkward it might have seemed for the both of you to be kneeling through the lengthy service the thumb tenderly stroking the back of your hand rested on the hand rest on the stool completely ignorant of any discomfort for the contact with his true love.

Behind your back however beside Professor Elliot settled a bit more into his seat having stolen a glance back at the wall to his left now with Heimdall, Prince Loki, and your parents all proud to be here along with the blue dress clad woman who had taken the seat opposite the Professor. The woman named Asteria who had arrived as a plus one to one of the soldiers who seemed to be oblivious to the odd aura she was giving off that had the golden eyed guardian cautiously keeping her in his attentions for the remainder of her presence there.

A request for you and James to stand from the Priest came. In which James rose with eyes on you to ensure a smooth motion against the voluminous skirt of your gown while never releasing your hand. Hallelujah briefly was sung next from the same chosen singer who then sat again for the rise of Father Thomas to read his own chosen scripture in Latin. All the while James kept a gentle stroke of his thumb against your hand as you were translating in your head what was being said that caused your heart to quicken in the secretive ceremony you had seen played out over the years. When done the Father then stepped from the podium for your next hushed reminder to kneel again. Up to your side he came and began to open with a speech in English. The deep breath he took had triggered James’ hand to tighten a bit more around yours to keep from speaking or staring at you in awe of his breath taking Bride to continue with you to stare at the wall behind the alter.

“In the beginning there was darkness and God spoke ‘Let there be light.’ For every bought of darkness in our world as we ebb and flow between the wars of Men, with each loss involved removing another grain of innocence from the brave souls defending our lands and their children and loved ones left behind. The sting of every bullet and explosion of those projectiles tear through more than just the heart of those within the sights. We all bear the burden, the hunger, the toil. Always in the same endless dark tunnel that so many have to scrape and claw their way out of. Coated in scars, some so deep the human eye cannot see, some that never fully heal. Deep in that darkness it is so simple to just give up, declare defeat and say that you are alone in your suffering. But for every blinding darkness there is a wave of blinding light to follow.

I knew of a small child who had been abandoned, left alone in the rain moved from one funeral to the next without a single person who lifted their eyes from the pavement, who continuously sought shelter in the church from those turbulent storms ravaging our world. A child knew our Heavenly Father would bring the sun back to our world, and he does so through example, rarely do we have a sea parting moment these days to free people from toil and devastation. And in the midst of that devastation these two blessed souls found one another.”

He chuckled and looked to you both that lured your eyes to him in his notice of your joined hands deepening his smile, “And so you two, you are, ready, willing and I think very grateful today.” His words deepening your grins back at him and James’ all the more in his stolen glance at you that had another tear fall from the corner of his eye in  the joy of this moment with you. “You are a beautiful, beautiful couple. I don’t know how God made the two of you, but somehow that’s how it happened.

You have found each other. And in finding each other you have made the decision first in friendship and in love. To take the next gigantic incremental step. It’s the promise, it’s the great promise. The promise that you two will make in just three minutes and it’s a promise that you intend to keep for the rest of your lives. And I hope you know how truly blessed you are. That you whole heartedly give thanks to God. That he has given you the integrity of your lives, and he has given you these families and all of this good fortune. And that you will take it, receive it, all of his love, and make a difference in this world.

Many people have so far less, I know personally the both of you have faced those harsh blows and many toils in your young lives. We need good people, great people like you to make a difference in this world.

Jaqi, I was standing beside James here the moment those doors opened and he just about jumped out of his skin, and I think that’s wonderful, but I just hope in the future the both of you can focus and live in the power and the grace and the gift of this moment. We’re so distracted by the pains of the past, so anxious of the future that we lose the grace of now.” In his glance to the crowd you stole a glance at James whose heart skipped in seeing the misty eyed timid smile that flinched away to the sight of his wide smile at you that won him a joint share in a hushed chuckle that spread smiles wider through the crowd in this surprisingly tender turn to the ceremony.

“There’s a story I recall of a beggar man on a street corner for thirty years, seated on a box with a cap in his hand. Begging for nickels and dimes. A man approaches him and says, ‘get off that box you’ve been sitting on and look inside’. And the beggar says ‘there’s nothing in the box, I’ve been on this box for thirty years there’s nothing there’. So the man says, ‘get off the box!’ So he did, and he lifted the box and you know what he found inside? It was chock full of gold. He was begging for and living off nickels and dimes and all this time there was a fortune right there for him.” He looked to you again.

“So I ask you again, take all the good, the grace, the positive things and blessings you receive in this life and turn around and do good with it, send it back out into the world and spread the love you have been given. One of the hardest things to do for those who had never felt that love, but the true power, the true grace is in loving, in giving. I know you are strong enough to love when scorned, to give when penniless, to scrimp and crawl your way through truly, truly blinding darkness. Bask in the light, in the love, and then send it out. Because I too have faced some of my darkest doubts in a looming war of my own thoughts in the churning sea of the world, always when the sky seemed to drop out and just let loose all the waters you could never dream of. But always on those days through the empty cathedral back in Brooklyn a little girl would sneak in, and shattered the silence with the most ethereal music as a beacon of that love, and at least to me, emptied my mind of that noise and through her, God stilled those waters. If only for a moment and reminded me why I was put here on this earth.

For many years we feared we lost our beacon, when in actuality among a fellow child of God you were sent to rescue others, to guide others home to peace. You were sent to bring Eddie onto his own path, to find James, and his brother, to build a family that across the world, shot a light, just a tiny one, but a light. That is why this promise, these vows are so sacred, you have both come here today to bind yourselves together in the presence of all of us and of our Heavenly Father. Jaqi, now I’ve known you all your life, I baptized you myself, and for the life of me I thought I could never find another person so quiet as you. Then you brought James home,” the crowd chuckled along with you both in his brief pause, “And I have never met such a couple who through silence, could radiate such a poignant noise. Oh you can talk and shout and sing the both of you but always measured when needed. Ebb and flow, like the tide the both of you found one another and keep finding one another like the sea and the rocky shore. A solid pair, made to endure, and you will, now, if you would both turn with me. And would the wedding party please join us.”

Up you both stood and with his hand in a reluctant slide free from your right hand that in the backwards shift of your left folded gladly around that hand in the rise of your Bridal party. With the exception of Eddie and Edie who remained seated, to split in half circles on either side of you down the stairs to meet the sides of the Priest. It was then your eyes wandered over the crowd and landed on your parents who smiled widely and gave you proud flinched waves who you looked away from to keep from running to them. Hand tightening in James’ in his own stolen glance at the couple Erik had to look away from to keep from an open mouthed gawk for the man and woman he knew to be dead alongside the armor and helmet clad duo in full regalia for the occasion.

Peering up at you the Father said, “James and Jaqiearae you have come together in this church so that the Lord may seal and strengthen your love. In the presence of the church’s minister and this community. God has abundantly blessed love. He’s consecrated both of you. He now enriches and strengthens you by the sacred sacrament. So that you can assume the duties of marriage in mutual and lasting fidelity. And so I ask both of you now to state your intentions.

James, Jaqiearae, have you come here freely and without reservation? To give yourselves to each other in the sacrament of marriage? Will you say I Do?”

His brows rose and you both chuckled repeating, “I do.”

“Will you love and honor each other as husband and wife for the rest of your lives? Will you say I Will?”

Both say, “I will”

“Will you accept children lovingly from God, bring them up according to the law of our God and of our community? Will you say I Will?”

Both say, “I will.”

“It is your intention then to enter into marriage. Turn to each other, with your still joined hands, and declare your intentions before God.”

He moves closer to James up onto the bottom step to recite each line that James then repeated in as calm a voice as he could muster.

“I, James Pluto Howlett,

take you Jaqiearae Persephone Pear to be my wife.

I promise to be truthful.

In good times, and in bad.

In sickness and in health.

I will love you and I will honor you.

All the days of my life.”

 Again he was on the verge of crying while you blinked away a few tears of your own and gave a giggle in catching the eye of the Priest now smiling at you in a pause for you to draw in a breath. Stating each line for you to repeat as well.

 “I, Jaqiearae Persephone Pear,

take you James Pluto Howlett to be my husband.

I promise to be truthful.

In good times, and in bad.

In sickness and in health.

I will love you and I will honor you.

All the days of my life.”

 One brief moment of silence was given and the Priest spoke again, “My Sister and my Brother you have just declared your consent.”

In Latin he spoke, “Before God and before the church, may our Lord in his goodness strengthen that consent and fill you now both with his blessings. What God joins together let no Men ever sever. Amen.”

“Amen” echoed from the both of you and those in the crowd who were familiar with Catholic services who tugged along those unfamiliar.

To Erik he turned, and now with the tray flat to hold the matching purple stoned bowtie wedding bands, he extended his hands to offer the rings to fulfill his important role in the ceremony. “Now, the rings.” Father Thomas turned and spoke in the approach of one of the older Brock girls in her mid teens with tray in hand for the holy water and sprinkler inside.

“May our Lord bless these rings. They are a sign of your love and faithfulness.” Over to the other tray once lifted in his fingertips he moved them to the second tray. With silver sprinkler in hand he sprinkles holy water across the rings blessing them. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen” lifts rings he carries back to you both commenting, “You chose knotted bows, how fitting.” The words made you look to the rings in James’ adoring smile at you and chuckle excited to be able to kiss you soon and seal the bond and silence the thunder of his heart in his chest. “Here you go, and you, yes this one.” He says while you each release a hand to claim the other’s ring to repeat after him again.

“Jaqiearae take this ring.

As a sign of my love and faithfulness.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

From fingertip to the final knuckle the ring was slid with tender strokes of his fingertips down the length of your finger and across your palm to claim your hand again with his same loving smile. Almost bashfully you stole a blushing glance to the Priest that had you both chuckle again before he spoke to get you started.

“James take this ring.

As a sign of my love and faithfulness.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

To his hand your eyes fell and around the tip of his finger you slid the ring that after which your knuckles slid between his to hook your fingertips together as you heard, “Not far off now,” he murmurs to you both making you chuckle in his turn to the crowd, “Let’s congratulate this bride and groom now.” He says stirring claps and cheers from the crowd, “And now for the Prayers of the Faithful.”

The cheers died down again as your left hand released his right to ready your skirt for the next move. Turned back to the prayer stools you lowered to kneel again with hands rotated for his to engulf yours again to grant view of both of your rings in the tuck of his fingertips between your fingers as your Bridal party claimed their seats again. While in front of you both the Priest gestured to Eddie and Edie who approach with large rosary chain for the wedding lasso they come up and drape around the both of your shoulders. In their step back to their seats he continues after asking everyone to stand.

Beginning the Latin Euchratic Prayer for the communion for that next official step in the ceremony. First speaking of the plate and then the cup of the communion continuing on until he calls Eddie and Edie up to retrieve the rosary from their shoulders asks you both to stand once again to lead the crowd through the Our Father Prayer.

Another turn had a shuffle of hands and almost had James break the rules and give you a twirl in his eager wish to get you to the barn for that opening dance as a full excuse to keep you in his arms for the rest of the day until he could steal you away. For this prayer your eyes darted from your still lingering parents to the Royal Family still seated inside the sea of standing guests around them. After which their confusion grew at the trading of handshakes and hugs through the crowds for the Exchange of Peace for the lift of your skirt to walk with James down to the rows of your relatives to hug one at a time post near tackling group hug from the Brock children who walked you down the aisle. A bit more open the Prime Minister and his guest shook hands with the First Family and to you both on your way back up to the alter with kind smiles and nods sent to the Royal Family who while a bit perplexed at this ceremony so different to their usual wedding seemed a bit pleased they hadn’t upset you by not taking part.

Back up again with interlocked hands you walked up to kneel again for the beginning of the communion. While settling there Father Thomas shared that those of other faiths are welcome to approach and receive blessings or otherwise are welcome to remain in their seats while those who wish to receive communion.

From the ceremonial plate and cup communion is given post introductory statement on the purpose of communion to the both of you first. Alone he left you still kneeling with cup across from you and try in hand to the rise of the same singer to begin the song ‘Panis Angelicus’ while an aid stood to guide row by row those willing to take communion or accept blessings up to the Priest to loop around and retake their seats again.

‘Ave Maria’ was begun at the end of communion that signaled James to help you up to your feet again in the offer from the Priest to you of a second smaller bundle of flowers you took to the statue of the Virgin Mary statue at a second spot off to the side for a joint hushed prayer between the pair of you alone. By use of an agreed squeeze of thumbs to warn of the end of your individual prayers an agreed joint rise again ended the up and down with the walk to face the Priest again who was still beside the kneeling stools. His smile spread and gladly he claimed hugs from the both of you with hushed congratulations and while you both had your eyes on him he spoke again.

“My Brothers and Sisters, the Lord be with you. And may almighty God bless each one of us, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” He says motioning his hand in a cross over you both and the crowds while you and James cross yourselves along with the crowds. “Our mass has ended. And I would invite you two to turn around,” he said with a smile for your turn to face the smiling crowd. “It is with a great deal of joy and an honor for me to introduce to you this afternoon, for the first time, Mr James Pluto Howlett and Mrs Jaqiearae Persephone Pear Howlett, Husband and Wife. Congratulate them now.” The crowd stood in cheers after a few stunned expressions at you taking both names cheered and clapped in James’ turn to cup your cheeks in a loving kiss all the sweeter in the muffling of your giddy giggles.

Just barely you had lifted your arms to circle his neck and out of the blissful moment he tore himself from the lip lock to lift you in his arms. Again you giggled in a reach up to wipe the lipstick from around his mouth answered by his chuckling trot down the steps to the doors to carry you to your seats in the barn where the reception was already prepped. Your own lipstick smudges were fixed by your free hand with Father Thomas chuckling and passing you your bouquet over James’ shoulder helping you to loop your arms around his neck.

Right behind James’ back you spotted your parents in a hurried trot behind you who smiled as you said hushedly in a tearful squeak once alone outside, “Daddy, Mom.”

“You are spectacular my Queen of the Cosmos.” He rumbled and caught up to James’ left side as your mother smoothed her hand over your back luring a sniffle from you. He spoke again catching James’ eye, “I am so pleased you are together again. Well done. The mortals cannot see us,” he said looking to you again, “When will you be alone?”

“Tonight, after the reception at the cabin by the lake.”

To James he asked, “Would you mind sparing me a dance for our Queen tonight?”

James smiled answering, “As many as you would be able to grant her.”

Sarah spoke to you saying in a melodic Irish accented hum, “Well done my precious Bunny. I’m so proud of you. What a stunning Bride.” She said moving in to hug you around your back, a move that in her pull back had Eddie’s mouth open in seeing the dead duo with his own eyes, “We will see you tonight and enjoy watching your reception. I love you, treasure this day, your new beginning.” Each word sank in to her excited trot ahead to take your father’s hand to get a sneak peek inside the open barn stirring hints of the accent to certain words or vowel sounds you had picked up from her even against her lessons to get you a more American accent to give you and Steve a better footing.

Warm and sweet James kissed your cheek to the tap of your forehead to his temple and he hummed to you, “I look forward to meeting your parents tonight. Perhaps they can give you some answers to give you some peace.”

“I know it’s our honeymoon.”

Lowly he chuckled passing into the shadow of the barn approaching the door he passed through, “I love you, I am yours forever. If tonight is all we have for you to speak to them let’s savor it Darling.”

Inside you caught their awed stroll around the effortlessly elegant decorated tables in a weaving path towards the bar where Eddie strolled with Victor at his side who caught onto his chasing the odd couple that when they turned he instantly caught the resemblance and who they belonged to. Sweetly you were settled into your chair and sweetly kissed again by your chuckling husband who smiled in your second move to wipe the pesky lipstick off his lips he used his thumb to wipe a hint of a smudge away from your lips joined by another in a second stolen peck. “I love you Darling.”

With a grin your hand rose to settle around his engagement ring that in your tug on it he smiled deeper and let you move the ring in front of his wedding band. A move that he mirrored to move yours over as well. Excitedly people found their seats, including Portia, who took the long way around to steal a hug from you to share her pure glee for how beautiful the ceremony was, matched by a firm handshake from her father and brother for James on their way past. Elliot upon seeing where your parents were moved to join Eddie and Victor in their chat with them, that to the others was taken as a conversation in private between the two in the drift of your eyes to Edie that came to sit on your left with Erik. The both who sat down and looked to their empty plates then you at your lean closer to them to whisper, “Apparently they found a door back here for the big day, but only we can see them.”

Edie asked, “You can see them? Oh I am so relieved.” Her hand patted on top of yours luring your smile wider, “The service was beautiful. Quite unlike any I have seen before. Very loving.”

With a giggle you said, “Yes, usually the sermons are a lot less personal for the ceremonies I’ve seen.”

Erik chuckled saying, “Probably because the Priest stated he knew you as a baby.”

As if on cue Father Thomas entered and for the entrance of the special guests everyone stood for their stroll to the table beside the one for your siblings, aunt and cousin opposite the ones containing the rest of the Brocks. Once King George had taken his seat you all could sit again, though in the settle of your skirt you smiled and lifted Teddy onto your lap after his hurried path over to be with you answering for Gina as to where he had gone. From the side of the room one of the caterers brought over a large towel they helped to spread over your lap under the boy you had lifted to prevent any spills to ruin the dress.

Elliot had slipped back to his seat at your table while the Priest did the same. Eddie took the floor first in the break for speeches while everything switched over for the food to be served. Around the table he walked to give you a quick hug from behind you smiled through and laid your hands on his arms to his gentle peck on your cheek for the photographers to capture along with Teddy’s pat on his head when he pulled back to give his speech at the microphone. A smile eased across his lips and in a shuffle of his feet to hold his weight he looked to you in the crowd knowing what he wanted to say.

“Bunny, I guess I’ll get this started off and do my best to not make you cry. I grew up the baby to my sisters until you chose me to be your big brother. Roughly, ten years ago you changed my life. And you were in desperate need of a big brother while I didn’t realize how terribly I needed a baby sister.” His smile spread to your grin and peck on Teddy’s head in his cuddle closer to your chest.

“My impossible sister, who together, we got through the edge of Hell and back. I never imagined ever finding a man who would be able to cherish, protect and respect you up to the level I expected to hold them to. Nobody would have ever been enough was my thinking. Then five years ago with the kick of a door,” That had your eyes close a moment in a set of giggles to Victor and James’ chuckles.

“The brother of the man who nearly broke your hand strolled into our lives. It would be a couple years before we’d get to know the both of you, Vic and James, who in a trade of luck we ended up in two platoons who saw just how incredible my baby sister is. Countless planes and tanks later and we found our way back to the beginning again. There’s never really an end to the baggage but bravely James you stuck in there, you both gave us a home here in Canada helped us to get our feet on the ground. The both of us got our degrees, we toured the states coast to coast and found a way to get my sister to the school your dad went to, one of the best. And way out of left field James after a single tour of the fire trap her old place used to be you plopped down cash and we got to gutting for one heck of a surprise in showing us a bit more about your own hidden skills. Turned around and taught Bunny how to demolish and remodel homes for another skill we can use for the future no matter where it leads.”

He paused a moment to wet his lips and said, “Six years now, we’ve been interweaving our lives and you’ve always been there for me. Helped me to smooth things over with Dawn over my own nerves and two left feet for a phenomenal woman like her, you were there when my babies were born, you were the one who helped to save my son when he came early out of left field. I can’t tell you how glad I was when I won the pot for how you’d demanded James take you on a date,” you giggled again in James’ lean into your side with fingers easing underneath the underside of your arm looped around Teddy to keep him upright. “Nowhere near how over the moon the whole family and town was when you got engaged. And we are so glad, me and Vic, that you didn’t get mad when the both of us got engaged and hitched before you.”

James smiled and chuckled out as Victor said, “Plus babies.”

Eddie chuckled smiling at you, “Plus babies, two for me. And you never took that against us, welcomed us into your family and our babies that you love like no one else could. And you got one year down, nearly to your degree a good chunk already, comic book, photography, and the world is wide open for you. None of us can wait to see what you will get up to in years to come with James at your side to make sure no one steps in your way. I love you Bunny, and even you too James, and everyone here is quite eager to see what sort of babies Battle Bunny and Wolverine can create. We’re always here for the both of you if you need us because you’ve always been so selfless for us, and no hard promises but we will do our best to not have too many more babies before you do.”

Eddie chuckled in the claps to his stroll back to his seat with a grin to Victor’s pop up to give his own speech. Victor’s speech had you laughing and James dangerously close to hiding under the table from his brother’s lovable ribbing. Five more speeches came from the Brocks and the guys working with you on the comic who teased more than a few in attendance today would be up for abduction in the big wedding issue luring amused chuckles and glances between one another. After them President Truman then King George spoke and the latter asked to open the dancing with you that had James requesting Queen Elizabeth’s hand for a dance. “Incredible ceremony Baroness Howlett.” King George said with a smile you smiled back, “Quite unlike what I had expected.”

“Well Father Thomas made it a great deal more personal. Usually they are much less casual and friendly. Thank you for coming, I hope the footage is up to what you wanted.”

He smirked saying, “There have been whispers of those who wish to watch my own daughter on her wedding day across the big screen.”

“Well I know what you plan will be beyond perfect for her. Can’t imagine how happy you’ll be, I know my dad talked about my wedding when I was little. I know my parents would have been happy though.”

“Oh beyond happy, and as a father myself I would be amply proud if my Lizibet carries herself with half as much grace in such a grand affair as this on her day.”

“Thank you. I’m beyond certain she will make you proud.”

The second dance had you both Trading for the President and First Lady. Eddie took up what would have been the Father, Daughter dance that after which he in a spin traded you off to claim Dawn and let you finally dance with James before the food would be served.

Truman in your second dance claimed your hand pleased to see the King and Queen take one another for the second dance as James claimed the First Lady for a second obligatory dance before he was all yours. “You are truly a picture perfect Bride, Mrs Bunny.”

“Thank you. No doubt I’ll be hearing all about this back at Barnard when summer is over.”

“Oh you will. I was a bit shocked to hear about your title however.”

“You and me both, he didn’t know they would be sharing the news about it. He’s not how I would picture a Baron.”

“True,” he said, “Quite down to earth.”

“Out here he works in a lumber mill, they have land, and a big house he grew up in we’ve fixed up but I suppose the title was always linked to his harsh Grandfather.”

With a smirk he replied, “All the same, we will be grateful to see the titles across the front pages of the Baroness of Brooklyn when you return home again.” You chuckled and stole a glance at James in his own smiling glance at his own wife, widely James smiled picking up their conversation when she looked back again to hold up the small talk until you could trade off for each other.

Taps on shoulders found you outside in the final gasps of time until the food would be ready as the smiling crowds danced away. Right to your side Loki strode while atop baled of hay coated in lengths of carpet your bridal party and the Brock children involved in the march were lined up. “Fairly odd ceremony.” That had your eyes shift to him for his addition of, “Quite lovely by mortal standard I would imagine.”

“Why do I get the hint that was almost painful for you to say?” You teased in a whisper making him smirk in his watch of your stroll over to the signal to be helped to the center where James had been manhandled to.

The children would be freed first after their group pictures had been captured and the Bridal Parties would be sent next just leaving a few intimate pictures with you both at James’ side and in his arms. All ranged from a picture of you twirling your skirts that had his smile wide to one post loving kiss of him smiling in another wipe of his face. All three which would be printed side by side in the promised magazine edition on the highly anticipated wedding that the crown Press Secretary was taking notes of the ceremony to add details to share with the writer of said approved piece. The warning the food was ready however found you excitedly back on the way inside, both kissing Teddy’s cheeks on the way back to your seats on his father’s lap widening his own smile.  

.

.

Sorry it's been a bit between my last update. Been out of power a couple days. But so far we are back up and running again.

Also I did have it pointed out that I had mistakenly made it seem that the drive from Brooklyn to Alberta was closer to 8-10 hours somehow as it's in real life 40 hours to drive between them. So somewhere my dyslexic mess of a self has mixed up the flight time or simply just jumbled the numbers when i was writing it since the first trip. So please just excuse my mix up and find it all the more amusing at the thought of a 40 hour drive with two adults, two large dogs and a cat cramped in the cab of a truck to drive between one home to the next.

Lots of warm wishes to you all, happy reading and i wish you and your families in whatever form they come a safe winter wherever you are. :D

Pt 43

[leesuhyo]

Let’s talk about trauma.

(TW for trauma, obviously) 

My parents always tell me how I was a quirky and cheerful child when I was little. Now the quirkiness is only there when I fake it. 

I started school at the age of three. Kindergarten was fun, people there was okay. Sometimes they were mean, but it’s fine. I was happy. My teachers were nice.

Timeskip to primary school at six. Initially, I thought people would be the same, since it was the same school and all of my kindergarten friends were there. I thought the teachers would be nice.

They were not. 

You learn quickly to not step out of line, because there would be consequences. If you even whisper in the corridors after assembly, detention for you. If you were even late to school for a minute, you stand next to the stairwell where the whole school gets to look at who is late, even though most people don’t. If you made a mistake, the teacher stands you outside the staffroom, and yells so loudly people in the upper and lower floors could hear. 

Public humiliation was the most common form of punishment. It wasn’t encouraged, but girls can be mean at that age. Gradually peer pressure usually sets the norm. 

If you don’t have a ‘friend group’ you’re weird. 

Soon you learn to avert people’s eyes, even if they don’t have ill intentions. 

You learn to jump whenever a teacher walks too close to you while lining up, because they scrutinise you, and drag whoever’s talking out and give them a severe scolding. 

You learn to run to school, desperately trying not to be late because even if you were late due to traffic, you were still punished 

You learn to fit into the norms, painfully, because your peers laugh at you if you don’t.

 You learn to mistake even light-hearted teasing as scolding, because it usually starts that way. They ask you a rhetoric question, and it spirals into yelling. 

You learn. 

And that’s how the trauma sets in.

Secondary school at twelve. Pretty much nothing changed, except there is more homework, and more classes. More teachers to take note of, who to avoid and who to curry favour with. You learn to manipulate teachers to your favour, until you’re their favourite student. Even though you hate their subject. 

You then learn more about the world. But not the right way, because this is a Catholic school. You learn that homosexuality is a sin. That mental illnesses exist, but they’re bad. That the internet is dangerous. That swearing is bad. And so on.

You also learn that boys are weird, because this was a girl’s school and there were no men, except for male teachers. Your classmates say all sorts of strange things about boys. They’re weird, but they’re cute. Going to after-school tutorial classes with students from that boys’ school down that road makes you feel weird, and you feel instinctively defensive despite them not looking at you. 

Sixteen. First year of public exams. You sleep at 2am, drag yourself out of bed at 7am to arrive at school at 8am. You’re tired all the time, but your peers are tired all the time too. I slept at 1am. Oh yeah? Well I slept at 2am. The continued toxic cycle of bad habits. 

The only source of happiness around you comes from your favourite singer, because back then you’re struggling to find friends after your best friend transferred schools due to her depression. You try to write down a list of reasons of why you liked him to remember how to feel. Ew, what are you doing? 100 reasons why I like ____? That’s so creepy. You stay silent, turn a new page, and continue writing stories to drown out the maths lecture going on. 

You start healing a little when you were sixteen. You start to get angry at social issues, and managed to find your own group of misfits who doesn’t want to follow the norm. You start to feel at home at your drama group, where you applied for, out of a leap of faith. 

Do you want to study overseas? 

Seventeen. Your mother suggested for you to study overseas, and you don’t want to, because you only just found your friends. But you don’t have a choice, because your old school doesn’t have the only subject you’re good at. You found out later through a scolding in the corridor by the headmistress that in fact, they did have that subject after you applied for it, and you’re a traitor for ‘betraying the school’s trust’. 

Seventeen. You start studying at a new school in another country twelve hours’ flight from home, a new environment. And you’re panicking because you had arrived two weeks late and everyone has friends. You throw yourself into your schoolwork to distract yourself from the creeping depression, and stay close to the teachers. You avoid your classmates, girls who seemed so much confident of themselves and boys. Suddenly your determined plan to make a new role for yourself seem insignificant. 

And then one of the girls started approaching you. You feel wary because your past experience taught you girls cannot be trusted. But she was friendly, and you decided to get a little closer. Nonetheless, your only trusted figure is your house parent, who is so kind as to stay behind every night to listen to your crying and ranting. 

Halfway through the year. Your older cousin, an established and popular prefect at the school, became one of your topic starters and you decided to let your guard down a little. You’re still wary of the group of girls who were first introduced to you though, because they wear makeup, they were interested in fashion, they were girly and popular, people your past experience had taught not to associate with. 

(You also learn that the teachers are nice. They aren’t strict authority figures, and were bewildered why you didn’t go to them for help when you needed it, because you learnt to keep quiet and just power your way through things. You slowly learn to stop flinching at a raised voice, and even found your teachers for insignificant things. Staying behind to talk about his favourite book, for example.) 

Christmas came, and you became reluctant to leave the school to your parents. After Christmas break though, you were reluctant to go back to the school because you had no friends. Nonetheless you went back, and made new friends in the year above you. You slowly grow back into the community and even laughed with your new friends. 

And then your house parent told you she’s changing jobs. You cried a lot, but she promised to write. She tells you to seek out one of the school nurses. You did. To this day she’s still your confidant. 

Then coronavirus struck. Your closest friend decided not to go back, because her parents were afraid of her staying in a high-risk country. You throw yourself into prepping for your university applications, because that’s the only goal in front of you now. 

It was announced prefects were being chosen. In your old school leadership positions were widely sought after and considered a badge of honour, so you try to take on as many as possible. The teachers told you it was a bad idea, but you did it anyways. It was only later you realised, the responsibility attached was more than the honour it gives. 

(You weren’t chosen for prefect, but it was okay. The teacher was biased anyways)

September 2020. Coronavirus is still an issue, but you decided to go back to school. You were still afraid, but you had friends ( - acquaintances, really) and a few valuable leadership positions that gives you a purpose. You steel yourself anyways, because the dormitory you were about to move into don’t have any of your old friends. 

October 2020. You have new friends. You managed to piece your life together, and for the first time, you actually have a decent social life. But beneath the facade, you’re still afraid. You’re still nervous. You’re still afraid of getting close to people, because what if they abandon you?  

But it didn’t matter. You’re healing. 

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

So a while back, @monotonous-minutia did a short yet comprehensive review of every production of Les contes d’Hoffmann they’d seen, and now, in much the same vein and because a) I think about this opera way too much for my own good and b) I’ve actually seen all ten available filmed productions of this opera (and several multiple times), here is my semi-replication but with Les Huguenots instead of Les contes d’Hoffmann.

And yes I am up at 5:30 on a Friday morning DON’T JUDGE ME

The Productions And The Unique Attributes That Come To Mind Immediately:

Sydney 1990: the OG for yours truly that was also Joan Sutherland’s farewell to staged opera so that’s cool

Montpellier 1990: the production that had strikingly-colored sets but gave pretty much everyone a form of one of three or so costumes

Berlin 1991: there is a wall. also it is in German. also pretty much the entire third act is cut for some reason.

Bilbao 1999: the production that had horrible lighting and that’s most of what I remember thinking tbh

Metz 2004: the one that had the monstrosity of a Black and White Checkered Floor and also fucked up the ending very badly and I’m still mad about it almost a year and a half later

Liège 2005: one of only two productions to follow the stage direction of Nevers sailing in on a boat at the end of Act III (the other was Bilbao). fittingly, Nevers looked like a pirate.

Bard Summerscape 2009: the production where the director looked at the libretto and went “this opera isn’t dark and violent ENOUGH” 

Budapest 2017: the one that looks like it was operated entirely with Baroque stage machines and also GIANT WORDS

Paris 2018: what if we set this opera in the future

Genève 2020: what if we set this opera in a movie studio but not consistently and then shipped pretty much everyone with everyone else

Further thoughts under the cut:

Sydney 1990: as mentioned, the first production I ever watched. a great way to hook first-timers. the production is rather heavily cut but in such a way that if you don’t know the opera well it seems to flow quite nicely, cutting about an hour of music. Urbain’s insert rondo is included but slightly cut, the ballet is cut in half, the ball scene is not included. the cast is one of the stronger ones out there: in addition to Sutherland, who still manages to be impressive, both of the other main ladies (Amanda Thane as Valentine and Suzanne Johnston as Urbain) are excellent. the guys are all good too; special mention to John Wegner, who is one of the few Saint-Brises who doesn’t disappoint me. production is traditional, occasionally a bit static, but it works well.

Montpellier 1990: despite my nagging about the costumes and the occasional standing around, probably my favorite overall production. the ball scene is included; neither Urbain’s rondo nor the ballet are. other cuts (remember, this is before the critical edition) are minimal. the most consistently strong leading septet; all of the principals are towards the top of my favorites for their respective roles. production is traditional erring towards minimalist; this works surprisingly well. unfortunately there are no subtitles and the video quality isn’t the greatest.

Berlin 1991: this production is just so confusing to me. cuts are...confusing to say the least. almost all of Act III is cut; all that remains are the first five or so minutes, the nightwatchman’s scene, and the finale, which are fused into an unrelated scene in which a Catholic/Huguenot game of tug-o’-war turns deadly. the ballet, the ball scene, and Urbain’s rondo are all cut. as earlier stated, it is in German, and the translation used has some odd differences (Marcel becomes Raoul’s brother in this staging for no specific reason). Richard Leech’s Raoul, Angela Denning’s Marguérite, and Camille Capasso’s Urbain are all excellent; the rest of the cast is decent but no more. setting seems to be Berlin in the 1960s but references to World War II are continually made through various production elements. the production handles the last two acts surprisingly well but messes with characterization some.

Bilbao 1999: it’s freaking DARK in here did the lighting designer later move to Vienna or something??? ball scene and ballet included; Urbain’s rondo no. one of the lesser-cut productions, actually: it’s in the ballpark of about thirty minutes. cast is mostly unmemorable (which is both a good and bad thing), with the exception of Marcello Giordani as a wonderful Raoul. production is traditional. would help if I could have SEEN MORE OF IT

Metz 2004: the production started off well enough and I had high hopes but things RAPIDLY went south in the final act. the amount of material cut wasn’t so much the issue as what they cut (more on that in a bit), as not much was actually cut. the ballet and Urbain’s rondo were cut; so was the aria portion of the ball scene but not the ballet, which meant (oh God how did I forget about this) we were treated (?) to what was presumably a group of Huguenot TAP DANCERS who were all eventually shot midroutine. total cuts are also around thirty minutes or so. cast once again mostly unmemorable, although Jean-Philippe Marlière is another of the very few who isn’t disappointing as Saint-Bris. speaking of which: the director completely fucked up the ending BY CUTTING THE PART WHERE SAINT-BRIS FINDS VALENTINE GODDAMMIT IT STILL MAKES ME SO ANGRY. production is traditional, except I certainly hope that hideous Black and White Checkered Floor didn’t exist in the 1570s

Liège 2005: pretty production although it also has some lighting issues. nowhere near as egregious as Bilbao, though. one of the more heavily-cut productions: Urbain’s rondo, the ballet, and the ball scene are all cut, as well as a whole lot else, shearing off about 75 minutes of music. cast mostly good: Philippe Rouillon may be my favorite Saint-Bris. I do apologize though for this but I gotta say it: the Raoul and Marcel are terrible. at any rate, the production is traditional. Saint-Bris shoots Valentine at the end, so there’s that.

Bard Summerscape 2009: what??? the??? ever-loving??? hell??? is??? this??? production??? it feels like an extremely violent fever dream. yes, this opera is violent. no, you do NOT need to hammer this into our heads through everything from a mixed martial arts match to onstage sexual violence to a dude getting stabbed with a processional cross. also the production aesthetic is WEIRD. one of the less-cut productions; Urbain’s rondo is not included. cast for the most part holds up admirably; Michael Spyres and Erin Morley are Babies but already great as Raoul and Marguérite. the Saint-Bris is a huge disappointment though (and the poor guy has to sport a hideous tiny beard). I don’t even know what time period this is supposed to take place in. I just don’t know.

Budapest 2017: very pretty production. also largely very boring. one of the more-cut productions, cutting a little over an hour (including the ballet and Urbain’s rondo) but almost paradoxically being one of only three productions to include the full ball scene (the Montpellier and Genève ones are the others) and the post-2011 production that uses the most critical edition material in Act III, including the only filmed production to include Marcel’s Act III aria. Catholics in white, Huguenots in black, the set consists largely of flats with 16th-century images that get raised and lowered; otherwise, the stagehands (and sometimes cast) move around big letters to form certain key words such as Bachus, Amor, the Hungarian word for mercy, etc. at various points in the score. cast is mostly decent. Gabor Bretz is an excellent Marcel. the main issue: there’s no life, no activity, no passion in this production. the Raoul and Valentine have zero chemistry. lot of standing around. it doesn’t feel compelling. in any rate it’s traditional.

Paris 2018: the concept is surprisingly sound albeit somewhat of a head-scratcher when considered on its own. production aesthetic is very minimalist, clean, and bright. about thirty or so minutes are cut, including both ballets (but not the aria in the ball scene) and Urbain’s rondo. one of the most solid overall principal casts. no one can top Lisette Oropesa’s Marguérite. Yosep Kang, particularly given the circumstances surrounding his participation in the production, is excellent and deserves better than what the Parisian public gives him. overall very good musically. the production is set in an imaginary France in the year 2063. it is very interesting.

Genève 2020: the least-cut production of the bunch; it mostly just cuts a bunch of critical-edition Act III material. as previously mentioned: it’s supposed to be set in a movie studio but this is largely pushed into the background for both better and worse. the cast, for the most part, is excellent (will give you one guess who disappointed me in this bunch). John Osborn and Rachel Willis-Sorensen are a phenomenal Raoul/Valentine duo, Michele Pertusi joins them for a thrilling final scene (having expertly navigated his other material), Léa Desandre is the world’s most adorable Urbain. production design is excellent. directorial choices are very interesting, to say the least. the directors apparently woke up and decided to try to establish as many romantic relationships as possible. I am not opposed to it in principle; in fact, I really like a lot of it. however, the directors completely ruined it by trying to put forth the idea that Marcel has a crush on Valentine??? that was just...extremely uncomfortable to watch (also it COMPLETELY missed the point of the duet) but yeah, the production, although weird and confusing in places, is mostly good. setting, specifically I’m not sure about the location but the time period is somewhere between interwar and WWII fashions. so yeah.

anyway, if you’re here now, thanks for reading this unsolicited article! ask me any questions you may have!

[livingmybestfictionallife]

Knife in a Gun Fight

Colson Baker/MGK 1920s bootlegger AU

A/N--This is the very short intro/prologue of my Colson Baker/MGK 1920s gangster AU. Message me to be added to the tag list, and chapter 1 will be up in a few hours.

Established in the plains of north Texas, a solitary, Irish Catholic family existed solely on their ability to farm and sell—farm, sell, farm, sell. For generations, farming produce, such as wheat and corn, was all any member of the Nevin family knew. There was nothing outside of the small, flat farm; no prospects of any other career, no hope for advancement, no life for a person with the last name Nevin, and the same could be said about the Klaffs. This was a fact of nature known for generations upon generations, until the birth of Siobhan-Honora Nevin.

As a bitter cold air pierced her neck, Siobhan peeled her eyes away from the newspaper she had been examining and carefully scanned the room. Sure, there was a sense of protection as she sat in a semi-circle booth surrounded by her cousins and brothers, but it didn’t take away from the sheer danger she knew they were in. The cozy and welcoming feeling of the small café she sat in did nothing to ease the gnawing within her stomach as her eyes nervously danced across the room once more before she returned her attention to the paper before her.

A fresh mug of steaming hot coffee was placed in front of her by a young woman who couldn’t have been much older than herself, and she tried to ignore the flirtatious glances the woman exchanged with her older cousin, George Klaff. “Do you mind,” Siobhan huffed under her breath as she pulled the paper back to her line of sight and cautiously examined it for any tips or leads that contained information about any of the five individuals gathered around the table.

“Get off it, Shiv,” George grumbled as he leaned over and propped his elbows up onto the table. “We’re in Saint Paul. Ain’t no body going to find us here.” Shiv eyed her cousin as she chewed anxiously at the inside of her lip.

“We’re ‘hiding out’ in the place all criminals go to lay low. It’s a safe haven for the lowly, and it’s the first place someone will come looking for us,” Shiv retorted as she lowered her voice and glared across the table at George.

“Lay off her, George. You know she’s right,” George’s little brother, Walter, piped up. At only twenty-one, Walter was the youngest of the bunch of familial misfits. He hadn’t meant to get mixed up in the actions of his older brother and cousins, but once he had, he knew there was no going back.

“Who’s the oldest one here?” George retorted as he scanned over the faces before him. “Who formed this operation nine years ago?”

“You know your role, George,” said Shiv’s older brother, Arthur, in a deep and low tone. “All of us do, and right now, it’s time for us to back down and for Shiv to take over. Got it?” George scrunched up his face and pursed his lips in aggravation, however he knew the words Art had spoken to be true.

Had it really been nine years? Shiv thought as she looked over the men’s faces around her. George was a year away from thirty with nothing to show as proof he’d lived life other than a few scars from narrow escapes from death. George was a fairly tall man, standing just below six foot, with a stocky build. His dark eyes were clouded with hooded brows and his black hair fell over his forehead in shaggy strands. The energetic and playful look he’d once had when he first, unintentionally, introduced his cousins and brother to this lifestyle was replaced with a stoic and mysterious grimace which instantly tied together his allure of being the tall, dark, and handsome stranger of the group.

Art stood slightly taller than George with a leaner frame but equally as strong and muscular as his older cousin. He was only seventeen when he began driving George around to neighboring counties, unaware at first of what they were doing, however upon realizing there was something to do with his life other than farming, Art willingly continued working with George. His deep blue eyes had only grown sharper with time and his once sandy blonde hair had darkened into a light brown.

A year of Art and George wandering throughout Collin, Grayson, and Hunt counties was more than enough time for Shiv to connect the dots and blackmail her way into the non-nefarious criminal activities the pair of cousins were performing. At sixteen, she could see the benefits her brother and cousin were bringing their families, and being the only educated member of either family—aside from their parents—Shiv demanded to be let into the operation. She’d always been tough and stronger than other girls her age. Being a girl didn’t excuse her from working on the farm once she returned home from school or had no where to go during the summer, however it did damn her to the fate of being nothing more than bride-wealth for her family. She saw what her cousin and brother were doing to be a means of escaping her fate, and like the older two members of the group, she embraced it.

Undenounced to Shiv, her younger brother Edmund had overheard her conversation with George and Art, and threatened to tell their parents if they didn’t include him. Two years later, when Walt was fifteen, he joined what would become known across the country as the Nevin-Klaff gang.

The papers have it wrong, Shiv would constantly tell herself as she read article after article in nearly every Tribune, Press, News, Gazette, and Journal from Texas to Minnesota containing the words Nevin and Klaff. They only see us as breaking the law. They don’t care that it’s a stupid law, and they certainly don’t try and see the benefits small farms across the country are reaping because of it. Shiv knew the papers didn’t care, that law enforcement didn’t care, and that no glory would ever be sent their way, but she knew that because of her, her brothers, and her cousins, farmers that would have otherwise lost their land to banks are now developing nest eggs, and that was all that mattered to her.

“I wonder how Ma and Pop are doing,” Eddy sighed as his eyes trailed the paper over his sister’s shoulder. She knew he was trying to read, and after what she’d been teaching him, she assumed he could come to the same conclusion she had—they were going to be on the move for quite some time.

“Sometimes I have dreams of Mom and Pa swinging out on the porch swing with Auntie Johanna and Uncle Owen, not having to worry about a damned thing anymore, but then I remember they’re probably worrying about us,” Walt sighed as he scooped some eggs up on his fork and shoveled them into his mouth. “It makes me want to see them again.”

“Y’all know we can’t ever go home,” Shiv commented sharply as her eyes darted between the two younger members of the group. Edmund was only a year younger than her, but only growing up on the farm and not having any friends outside of their cousins made him seem much younger than his biological age, and even thought Walter was only three years younger than Shiv, he shared a similar outlook as Eddy. “I don’t mean to sound harsh, but you knew this was a possibility when you signed up,” she said in a softer and more gentle tone after seeing how her brother’s face fell at her harsh words.

“They’re still kids, Shiv,” George whispered into his cousin’s ear only to have her turn her head to face him. Her pale eyes shone up at him as her dark hair fell around the soft, pale skin of her face. Everything about her was binary; her features were sharp yet gentle, she was dangerous but offered safety and comfort, and the one he struggled most with: the wisdom that aged her stood in stark contrast to her youth. Too many times both George and Art forgot that the brains leading them across the country and into safety while still calculating ways to help others was barely older than the two members he still considered kids.

“So, what do we do?” Art asked as he looked at his sister for guidance. Shiv laid the paper down in her lap and looked nervously over her accomplices’ shoulders before lowering her voice to a whisper.

“Local cops are looking for us in the towns we hit on the way up here. We stuck to smaller cities and already returned the profit to the farms. We have enough cash to keep us tied over for a bit, but we have to be careful. No blowing cash, starting fights, or trying to find a quick score or fast job, got it?” she asked as she met each of her family members’ eyes. “Don’t draw attention to yourself by any other groups hanging around here. Most of the country’s attention is on Capone, so there’s still a way we can slide by unnoticed.”

“We can’t stay here forever, Shiv,” Art said softly as he stretched his back and looked out over the café.

“We just have to stay long enough for me to pull off one last scheme.” A devious smirk tugged at her lips as she plotted what was sure to be a one-way ticket to safety for her and her family. Shiv thought through everything: how to gain protection and ensure safety, how to pass through dangerous territory without feeling the threat of danger, how to not only survive, but thrive. She knew her plan inside and out, but there was one obstacle that stood in her way, one uncertainty she figured she could face and be done with, one man who was known by outsiders solely as The Gun.

Next Chapter 

[ahgasescenarios]

Corrupting the Innocent Pt. 3- Dong Sicheng

Word count: 1.6k

Genre: fluff with hints of angst/suggestive

Plot summary: In which (Y/N) decides to “help” innocent exchange student Sicheng win over his crush. Except she has ulterior motives and Sicheng is too clueless to notice.

 A week had passed and here you were, getting comfortable in this environment you had instilled for your lessons, with a different version of Sicheng seated by your side. Apparently, treating the situation as though it was a university course had been the right move- the exchange student wowed you with his completion of the assignment. He even vouched for extra credit, surprising you with a new fashion sense.

Your eyes skimmed over his notes, a full list of attributes on display before your eyes. Hair, eyes, lips, ears and the list went on. You nodded approvingly before handing him back the textbook.

“I’m impressed, bravo.” You paused, gauging his reaction. “How did that exercise feel?”

“Good, honestly. I hadn’t taken the time to think about it before.” He seemed pensive, a different aura about him. Could a week of changing his mindset have done this much?

 You reoriented the conversation to the reason you had started this coaching in the first place.

“Now, I want you to tell me something. Have you talked to Rosé before?” He lowered his head, embarrassed.

“Not exactly.”

“Lovey, that’s going to be your assignment for the week.”

“But I’m not ready.” His eyes had taken on two sizes from pure astonishment and dare you say it, fear.

“Sure, you are.” Seeing as your words didn’t have the reassuring effect you had expected them to, you switched gears.

“Here, I’ll help you. Just pretend I’m Rosé.” You wriggled in your seat, getting comfortable for the role.

“This isn’t going to work.” His lip was caught between his teeth now. What you’d give to bite that lip.

“Yes, it is, try it.”

He finally gave in, a familiar love-shaped glimmer traveling across his eyes when he angled them back towards you.

“Hi, Sicheng.” You coaxed him into a “natural” flow of conversation.  

“Hi, Rosé. What’s- um, how are you?” He scratched the back of his neck. Adorable.

“I’m great! You?”

“Um, good. Thanks.” Silence thickened the air in the room for a second, both of you standing awfully still. Sicheng was entranced by this meager roleplaying and he reached over to you, caressing your cheek lovingly. The way he was looking at you almost made you rethink your plan. You pulled back admittedly not soon enough. Why was your heart beating so fast?

“See, you’re ready.” You smiled at him encouragingly. His mind felt elsewhere, though.

“Yeah, um I should get going. I have an exam Monday so.” His vibe was off, but you dismissed him, brushing the awkwardness aside. You had probably just been nervous because of the sexual tension between you two. The newfound confidence did multiply his already obvious sex appeal (or potential, in his case).

 You retired to your bedroom for the rest of the evening, alienated from the rest of the world as you rolled reruns of your favorite tv shows, barely even acknowledging the outside world. An incoming text message jolted your phone awake, only slightly capturing your attention.

Have you gotten him laid yet?

You sighed. I wish, you thought.

No, I have to keep pretending that I’m setting him up with you.

Rosé: How long are you going to keep this up for?

You shrugged; you didn’t have an answer. What Sicheng didn’t know was that you were actually friends with Rosé, and she was in on the whole thing. This scheming was what kept you two close, toying with people so they wouldn’t toy with you. Rosé shared the same view as you when it came to people and relationships which had made it easier for you to form this dynamic duo. Plus, none of her friends were keen on her “habits” so you were all she had when it came to this.  

 How’s project J coming along? You texted. “Project J” was code for her own plans to get Jaehyun in bed, the hot but oh-so-catholic eye candy.

Ugh, don’t get me started. He’s so much of a prude- even at the party, he would barely touch me. I’m sick of the “no sex before marriage” bullshit, I just want to fuck him already.

You could relate to that. If anyone else was reading these texts, they’d probably think you were both horrible people. That didn’t bother you, everyone was a little horrible anyway- you were just more public about it. You enjoyed these games of yours, it spiced up your otherwise rather dull life and kept you feeling alive. There was nothing like manipulating other people’s lives to make you feel in control of your own.

 “Sicheng, what are you-“ You had jolted awake at the sound of someone knocking on your door, just now identifying the culprit.

“I did it, I talked to her.” He beamed with excitement; his eyes illuminated with joy. If it wasn’t so damn early, you would’ve faked happiness.

“What did you say?” You rubbed your eyes, trying to rub the fatigue out of them.

“We just talked like we rehearsed and guess what, I’m seeing her tomorrow!” His brows furrowed together. “Do you think she thinks it’s a date?”

“I don’t know Sicheng, it’s too early for ME to think.” You sighed, the word think slowly decomposing to a mess of letters you couldn’t fathom.

“Right, sorry. I should’ve called first.”

“It’s fine.” You squinted your eyes at him, he wasn’t budging from his spot. “Did you need anything else?”

“Um, can I come in actually?” He was biting his lip again, by now you had figure out the habit was the manifestation of his nerves. You stepped aside and opened the door wide.

He was twiddling his thumbs, pacing around your living room. What on Earth has gotten into him?

“Remember at the party when we were in the closet together?” You nodded, crossing your arms in front of your chest. Where was this going? you asked yourself. Your question was soon addressed as a prominent blush overcame his delicate features.

“Did you mean it when you said you would teach me how to kiss?”

You licked your lips, knitting your brows together. This had taken an interesting turn.

“Of course.” You narrowed your eyes at him. “Sicheng, have you kissed a girl before?”

His teeth reflexively caught his lip as he timidly shook his head no. A virgin, yours to corrupt. Things just kept getting better and better.

“No need to be embarrassed, I’ll show you.” You offered him your most reassuring smile and he seemed to relax a tad. He sat down on your couch, gaze averting yours. His palms ran down his thighs, his nerves transpiring over every inch of his being. He looked everywhere but at you.

“Honey, this isn’t going to work if you can’t even look at me.”

To this he turned his head back around, eyes boring into yours. Emotions were wrestling each other behind those coffee brown eyes, you could tell.

“Are you sure you want to do this now?” Making them feel like it was their choice was key.

“Yes.” All hesitation from before had evaporated from his voice, perhaps those scenes before his eyes had given him a pep talk.  

You crossed your legs under you, now facing the exchange student. You guided his hand to lay on your waist and he gulped. You rested your hand on his cheek and brought his face closer to yours.

“Just follow my lead, okay?” He nodded and you pressed your lips on his. You gave him a few seconds to get used to your lips on his before you started moving your lips against his. It took all your willpower not to devour him right this instant, it was just too good. He shifted towards you, asserting his hold on your waist. Your lips moved in a steady rhythm against each other’s and Sicheng slowly started to get the hang of it.

You broke away to catch your breath, Sicheng’s eyes following you avidly. You dove back in, deciding to spice things up a bit by sliding your tongue in his mouth. A single yelp resonated into your mouth before he relaxed into the kiss, tentatively adding his tongue as well. He pulled back, not realizing that the lip he had caught between his teeth was yours until you moaned out loud. You quickly covered your mouth with your hand.

“Shit, I’m sorry.” You breathed, truthfully the sound had escaped your mouth unbeknownst to you. You shouldn’t be so careless. The expression scattered on his face was one you had never seen him wear before.

“I’m gonna go.” The air was thick with tension, and not of the sexual kind. You didn’t even protest, cursing yourself for that slip-up. You hoped he wouldn’t make a habit of leaving anytime things got remotely awkward.

You let your thoughts wander as you hopped in the shower. You were enjoying him way too much; it was bordering obsession. It was the first time you had wanted someone this badly before and you weren’t sure how to feel about it.

 The next day, your phone buzzed on the counter, the screen illuminating the following words from Rosé:

Next time, could you not involve me in your hook-up projects? Thanks

Right, their “date” was today. If only Sicheng knew…

Rosé was radio silent for the next couple of hours and you busied yourself with household chores, homework and things of the like. Only around dinnertime did you finally hear back from the blonde.

He barely looked at me, let alone talked to me. He seemed completely uninterested in me, weird since he asked ME out. Good work though, you’ll get him laid in no time!

Had your plan already worked? Was he already growing disinterested in Rosé? You found yourself to be the one biting your lip this time. If you had indeed succeeded, why did your heart feel like it had dropped into your stomach?

____________________________________________

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

a/n: hi loves! I just finished this series and I wanted your opinion on smth- did you want me to post the rest sooner than every week? I hope everyone is staying safe and doing well xx 

[aion-rsa]

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone Proves a Little Less is Infinitely More

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This Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone analysis contains spoilers.

The ending will be discussed at length. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse. Find the film, watch it with fresh eyes, then come back and celebrate The Death of Michael Corleone.

“The power to absolve debt is greater than the power of forgiveness,” Michael Corleone observes in the revelatory new opening of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. He may well be speaking for Francis Ford Coppola. The Godfather Part III concluded the family saga, made a profit for Paramount Pictures, and garnered seven Oscar nominations in its time, but Coppola has never been forgiven for it. The 1990 film has such an undeserved reputation, it almost feels like there was a vendetta against it. Having seen the new cut several times, the director can finally be absolved of sins he never committed.

Coppola’s finale has been bashed for its structure. Critics said he was just going through the motions and the arc of the first two films, and doing it much too slowly. However, the filmmaker was making one long film, and this is the conclusion. It references the other two films because the reality which forms this family history is well known. It is canon, the arcs are similar because each film dissembles William Shakespeare’s King Lear. The Godfather, Part III also has the balls to wear its opera cape up front, and it’s a Sicilian one. But does it move as slow as critics accused? We get an ear bite in the first quarter, a helicopter mass execution, and enough intrigue for three Hitchcock films.

The Godfather, Coda is not much different than The Godfather Part III. Coppola only cut five minutes from the 162 minutes of the original. But like a good haircut, it makes a difference, even though I think he took too much off the top. The streamlining speeds it up and makes it feel more tragic. Michael’s regrets are palpable, the dangers he and his family face are recognizable. It’s the same movie but tighter. The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are perfect films, like Casablanca or Citizen Kane, not a single scene is less than flawlessly framed, acted, and situated. The third one is a little sloppy. It happens. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is sloppy and works perfectly because of it. To this writer, Mean Streets packs more of an emotional punch than Goodfellas, which is also cinematic perfection from setup to cut. The Godfather III is rough around the edges.

Coppola loves the editing room as much as any wine vineyard. He recut Apocalypse Now Redux, and added scenes which may not have been imperative, but are wholly welcome. Coppola filled in the storyline to The Cotton Club for his reworking. When The Godfather trilogy was recut and re-released as a seven-hour chronological saga, it was like hearing the Beatles’ White Album with discarded tracks included. Scenes which landed on the cutting room floor were put back in. The Godfather, Coda takes scenes out. We get less of Eli Wallach’s Machiavellian cannoli-lover Don Altobello, which is a shame because his performance has grown on me since my initial viewing. Coppola also cuts Talia Shire’s Connie Corleone when she goes full-on Lucretia Borgia, ordering an execution in a chapel.

The Godfather Part III is the purest of the saga’s films in terms of cinematic input. The first film was a masterful adaptation of Mario Puzo’s book. The second one also drew heavily from the book. By the third, the motion picture saga was on its own. Part III was also the first of the films which didn’t have the Godfather himself, Vito Corleone, in it. Marlon Brando’s performance is more than iconic; it is Americana itself. Robert De Niro bridges generations as the young Vito in The Godfather Part II. Al Pacino’s Michael is the only godfather here.

“The Pope, the Holy Father, on this very day has blessed Michael Corleone. You think you know better than the Pope?”

The original cut of The Godfather Part III opens on the flooded Corleone compound in Lake Tahoe and dissolves to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Lower Manhattan’s Little Italy. The Godfather, Coda opens with a low-angle establishing shot of the exterior of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It looks like a relic of another time. It is surrounded by the cold steel and glass of modern architecture. The midtown cathedral represents old money.

The first scene is a meeting between Michael Corleone and head of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly). The Vatican is selling controlling shares in real estate conglomerate Internazionale Immobiliare to the Corleone family. These details don’t come out until 30 minutes into The Godfather Part III. By now putting the Vatican meeting at the beginning, followed by the Vito Corleone Foundation celebration, it fits better into the structure of The Godfather, and gives the proper weight to the deals with the Holy Roman Church.

The scene also reestablishes the Corleones as a family of great wealth. They have so much money they can bail out the Vatican. We don’t know how they made that money; we get very little detail about the years between The Godfather Part II and the late 1970s, when The Godfather, Coda is set.

We assume the Corleones had nothing to do with heroin, probably sidestepped any involvement in the Kennedy assassination, and stuck with the traditional vices, which could be best maneuvered into real power. We can imagine a Hoffa scenario because of their union involvement, but we get little indications of business beyond the chase for legitimacy. With this deal, Michael will be one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Moving the meeting also casts the archbishop in the same role that the funeral director played in the opening scene of The Godfather. The priest’s favor becomes his regret, but in a way that inverts the structure of the original film. The funeral director came to Don Corleone seeking justice after chasing the American dream, believing in it with all his soul as much as he believed in holy Mary, mother of God.

Archbishop Gilday’s impossible dream is to turn that around, to siphon the American success of the Corleone family back to Italy, after skimming his part, of course. Michael is awarded the Order of St. Sebastian from the Catholic Church after the charity run by his daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) donates $100 million to the institution. Immobiliare is the other side of the coin, and it is a beautiful flip.

The move also fits the film closer to the original 1972 classic, positioning the Vito Corleone Foundation ceremony as the wedding scene, and introducing us to the players, and the ones who don’t play well with others. Joe Mantegna plays Joey Zasa, who is a stand-in for the John Gotti ascendancy, running Don Corleone’s old territory now that the family has moved up. Eli Wallach ties us into the family behind the family. Vincent Mancini is the bastard son of Sonny Corleone and his mistress Lucy. Actor Andy Garcia clearly enjoys this part. He turns into James Caan a few times.

Sofia Coppola’s performance has been called flat, amateurish, and not in the same universe as the rest of the film. Mary is an important part. For most of the audience, she is the most recognizable character as far as an entry into the world of the underworld. Sofia did it because her father needed her, and quickly. Winona Ryder’s unexpected bout of physical exhaustion didn’t fit with Paramount’s time schedule, and the studio’s replacement options didn’t fit the age of the character.

Coppola’s 18-year-old daughter, Sofia, still had baby fat on her face. She’d made appearances in Rumble Fish and Peggy Sue Got Married, and was used to working with her father, even though she was not an actor. European filmmakers cast non-actors all the time; they bring a real quality to roles. Lenny Montana, who played Luca Brasi in The Godfather, was a former wrestler who came to the set as the bodyguard of a ranking Colombo family member. Martin Scorsese’s mother Catherine makes an appearance in The Godfather Part III. Sofia is playing herself, a college freshman who wants to help her father.

This makes the gnocchi scene feel almost uncomfortably incestuous. Mary is Vincent’s first cousin, and we can see in the way they look at each other; it’s wrong even though it feels so right. Sofia is natural in her scenes, not emotive. She is the tourist the audience needs to circumnavigate the treacherous waters. Mary is the civilian who becomes the collateral damage of the Corleone family life. She takes the bullet intended for her father, Don Michael Corleone. Sofia did the same for her father, becoming the scapegoat for a job she took to get his movie in on time.

Read more

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Redeeming The Legacy Of The Godfather Part III

By Don Kaye

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The Real Goodfellas: Gangsters That Inspired the Martin Scorsese Film

By Tony Sokol

Mary’s death scene has been called the worst in the history of motion pictures. It never was, and as presented in the recut, it’s entirely, emotionally effective. It’s not Bette Davis in Dark Victory, and even though it happens on the stone steps of a church, it isn’t James Cagney’s death scene in The Roaring Twenties. It isn’t meant to be. It is sad. The death itself is one of the most underplayed in film, but the music gives it the tragedy to match Michael’s reaction.

It is hard to resist the pull of the music when considering how much of a worthy ending this cut is to The Godfather saga. The themes are the trilogy’s blood and wine. Composer Nino Rota tells us when to celebrate and how to mourn. We relive Michael’s lost love Appollonia more through our ear’s memory than we do from the faded black and white photograph in the old Sicilian villa. And his reunion with Kay evokes the post-war era they met in. The music ties the film together so beautifully that this time around it feels like the skin of the original, rather than its clothes.

By the end of the film, the emperor has no clothes. Michael thinks he can break a glass ceiling through legitimate business but admits “The higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.” Senators and presidents have men killed. The church is no different. Legitimacy is an illusion. Coppola saw The Godfather Part III as an epilogue. Paramount wanted to grow a franchise. Coppola had to be persuaded to make a sequel to the first film. Paramount wanted Coca-Cola instead of wine. And they treated The Godfather Part III like the Fredo of Godfather movies.

Fredo is all over this film. How he died is the first question Mary asks Vincent. It’s the last rite in Michael’s confession to the Vatican priest who will become Pope, a scene which contains one of the funniest exchanges in the film. Michael tells Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone) a list of his sins would take up too much time. The first cut may have been the deepest, but the final cut in The Godfather, Coda is the most ironic. Coppola adds the subtitle, in quotations, apart from the puppeteer logo of the films and book, and then takes exactly that promise away.

The final scene cut from The Death of Michael Corleone is the death of Michael Corleone.

The Godfather Part III ends as Michael is sitting alone outside a villa in Sicily. All family debts have been settled, but he has no family left. He is wearing dark glasses, slumps in his chair, loses his grip on the orange in his lap, and falls dead to the ground. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone ends, not only with him still alive, but wishing him Cent’anni, telling the audience it means “for long life” and reminding viewers “a Sicilian never forgets.”

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The phrase actually translates to 100 years. Imagine how many Godfather sequels could be made in that time. Michael is left alive, alone. Atonement is beyond him. He loses his family just as he is on the precipice of finally being able to give them what they need. But the coda to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone is an allegory to what Paramount wanted, more life. Yes, Al Pacino’s Don Michael Corleone spent all this time waiting for them to pull him back in.

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone is available now on Blu-ray and digital.

The post The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone Proves a Little Less is Infinitely More appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[okayto]

Mini-Review: Ghost Hunt

High schooler Mai Taniyama accepts a job offer from the Shibuya Psychic Research Center as an assistant to its leader, enigmatic 17-year-old Kazuya “Naru” Shibuya. The firm investigates various strange phenomena at the behest of its clients, joined by a spirit medium, a shrine maiden, an exorcist, and a monk.

Look, this is my shit. A combination of mystery and the supernatural, creepy but rarely reaching horror levels, my biggest problem with this series is that it has 25 episodes and I WANT MORE.

You’ve got your everygirl protagonist: Mai Taniyami. Roped into helping when the assistant to the guy called in to investigate a possible haunting at her school gets injured, she proves to have a talent for sussing things out, and accepts a job offer.

Mai? Is great. She can be impulsive and might yell at her boss for not doing the right thing (in a moral sense), but in a way that felt fairly realistic to me. Plunge into danger to save someone? Sure, I can believe that! Ask questions that people seem to be ignoring? Also reasonable! She is our proxy, hoping for the best and caring for people when the Experts (particularly her boss) seem to be callous.

THIS ASSHOLE ON THE OTHER HAND

To be clear, Naru’s whole thing is that he’s stuck-up. He gets the nickname “Naru” because Mai thinks he’s narcissistic. He’s 17 and the head of a paranormal research agency, blunt and rude, and clearly hiding some secrets. He’s not so bad that you (probably) hate him, but he’s Mai’s opposite.

He ALSO has a communication problem, and we all know how much I want to reach into my screen and strangle people who don’t communicate. The problem is along the lines of “I let you think this thing we’d do would hurt people and so you got very upset and yelled at me in front of everyone, but it turns out we’re doing the thing in a way that WON’T hurt people!” but still, it’s an asshole move because I can’t think of a single instance where he couldn’t at least have said “I don’t have time to explain, but we’re being careful.”

The side characters are what really make the show great. You’ve got your Catholic exorcist, a young priest with a disposition as sunny as his hair...

...a teenage spirit medium who dresses in traditional kimono and has a crush on Naru, a shrine maiden unattached to a shrine (Ayako gets the short stick as far as character development and doesn’t get a chance to shine until the last case of the series, I am bitter), and a monk-on-hiatus who’s part of a rock band.

Monk is one of the best parts of the series: besides being just a fun (and competent!!!) character, he also takes the role of big brother/uncle to Mai, and they have a very sweet relationship.

While the characters are the heart of the show, we do actually have stories: the things they’re called in to deal with. These range from ��minor nuisance in the park” to “evil entity actively murdering people.”

The story spends time with them, too! I think there was only one case in the entire series that was wrapped up in one episode. Everything else ranges from 2-4 episodes, so it can really take its time focusing on their investigations and drama. Most stories are what you’d expect from ghost stories: spirits, dark and creepy atmosphere, etc, but one 4-episode arc near the end of the series did feature an old hospital and murders and shots of blood (though no shots of actively bleeding people or bodies).

(This happened to the be arc in which my roommate joined me, so I was like it usually isn’t like this I swear please don’t leave I don’t want to watch this bit alone)

The manga it’s based on was never fully released in the USA (11/12 volumes came out before its publisher imploded, and it was never picked up again by anyone else) and is now out of print, so the anime is really your only chance to legally enjoy it in any form.

Verdict

English dub? Yes, and Mai’s English voice is one of my favorites--she actually sounds like a teenage girl! Tonally, in her indignation, everything! Everyone else is fine: Ayako the shrine maiden’s voice almost perfectly matches her Japanese one, and both capture that slightly-snobby-lady vibe. Catholic exorcist John’s given an Australian accent (I think in the original he speaks Japanese with a Kansai accent, so this is trying to convey the “different dialect” idea); older assistant Lin sounds exactly like a serious man in his twenties, and Monk sounds not just realistic, but perfectly captures his ability to switch from casual to serious, joking to caring.

Naru’s voice stands out the most as someone trying to match the Japanese voice, because his has elements of trying to lower the voice (not trying to make it deep, but...if you’ve watched a lot of anime dubs, you know what I mean--sometimes male characters in Japanese have a low-pitched, semi-softness quality that we really don’t hear in American English voices, so it’s always obvious to me when someone is trying to do that in a dub.)

Visuals: I mean, it’s from 2006 so it’s not going to blow you away, but it’s not ugly.

Worth watching? YES. PLEASE. I’ve watched the entire thing through twice now.

I mean, there are flaws. Often the female characters are relegated to watching and guarding while the males actively attack or defend. Naru should be nicer to the teenager he employs. The anime came out while the manga was still being produced, so we don’t get to delve into characters’ backstories, but the series does at least end happily.

Where to watch (USA, as of June 2020): Funimation (sub and dub)

Click my “reviews” tag below or search “mini review” on my blog to find more!

[maisstories]

I Need Your Help

To be more precise, my girlfriend needs your help. The reason I am the one writing this text is because right now she is so depressed and discouraged that she doesn’t have the strength to believe asking for help would make a difference, and that… that terrifies me.

For those who don’t know us, I am Mai, and my girlfriend is Kari. Under different circumstances, we should have our lives all nicely sorted out, but as we are all aware, we live in the kind of dystopian world society at large likes to pretend only happens in fiction. Especially Kari. You see, I’m from Spain, and Kari is from the US. This means an entire ocean separates us (otherwise I would’ve bundled her up and brought her home, believe me).

Kari is a poor wlw who lives in a very conservative area (as in, Bible Belt conservative). She has ADHD, which went untreated most of her life, hampering her at every turn. First, because she grew up in a very conservative Catholic family and most Catholic families just Don’t Believe in Those Things. Now… well, now because she has no medical insurance and can’t afford to pay for medication. Cute, isn’t it? And that’s not even the best part. Kari has depression, that I mentioned, but this whole situation, and the hopelessness it causes her, has brought forth suicidal ideation. I don’t have the words to express just how scared I am by this. It paralyzes me. There is nothing, physically nothing I can do if they ever get the better of her.

To add to this, it has been made abundantly clear to Kari that her parents won’t help her if she becomes homeless. They didn’t want a child to begin with. A gay child? Yeah, no, forget about it.

(On a bit of a bright note, Kari has two adopted cats, which are the cutest fur balls over. They’re her closest emotional support most days, and I am very grateful for them. I can’t cuddle her or be physically there for her at all, but I can at least ask her to go cuddle them. They’re not even on the particularly scratchy side for cats).

Currently, Kari has a job, but despite taking on as many extra hours as possible, she cannot make enough money for rent. In fact, she cannot make many other basic necessities, which I will list here because they’re important, I am worried sick, and we really do need help:

-Work: Kari lost her previous job for one of those completely absurd, US-only reasons back in late October. I say absurd because any company trying to pull that shit here in Spain, and most likely anywhere in the European Union, would’ve been fined out of business. But hey, Country of Freedom and all that, isn’t it? She finally found a new job mid-November. Lower pay, though, which means it doesn’t help her cover full rent.

-Rent: As many people in the US will know, and others not from the US will have heard, rent outside of isolated areas is ridiculously expensive, especially for such a large and unpopulated country. The Wonders of Capitalism. As such, Kari is forced to pay a truly monstrous amount of money for a minuscule space to live in, one that ate up most of her previous salary and that surpasses her current one.

-Bills: Let’s not forget these. She rations. As much as she can. Electricity, water, internet… she goes for cheapest and least use, so far as to monitor her use of water during showers, but this still adds to her expenses.

-Food: Now’s where things get to a truly awful degree. When she moved to the place she lives in now (and if anyone wants the story that led to this move, please ask, because that’s an entirely other level of fucked up), she had to apply for food stamps, because she had barely no money left to feed herself and her two adopted cats after all the mandatory expenses. Food stamps people don’t look at the money you have left after bills, they just look at your income, so she was allotted $16. Useful, right? Anyway, fast forward to late October: Kari loses her job, so, obviously, one of the first things she does is contact the food stamps people to update her situation and have her allotment reevaluated. No response. Contact again. No response. This keeps going on. Mid-November, she gets a new job (still no response from the food stamps people despite the many attempts to contact them). Last Friday, her food supplies consisted of a bit of chicken, two fish fillets, and a couple eggs. I do not kid you. Today, the food stamp people finally answered her call: they won’t look into her case until, at least, December.

That’s it for the basics. As you see, it’s a wonderful situation.

Now, my role in this, as I’m sure some of you are wondering.

Let me start by saying this: I am a heavily disabled woman (nearly blind) living in an isolated area with the worst public transport system this side of the Mediterranean Sea. I am incapable of even getting out of home without assistance and someone to drive me at the moment. This means, having a job where I currently live is out of the question (I’m working on getting a job somewhere else where I’ll be able to live on my own. Sort of). My only source of income right now is my Patreon account, the earnings of which go fully to Kari because my girlfriend’s wellbeing matters to me much more than anything I could ever need for myself. I may say whatever I want about my parents’ belief that my relationship isn’t real because they don’t believe you can forge real connections through the internet (or the fact they want me to have a BOYfriend because they want grandchildren), but at least they’re so terrified I’ll break the moment I step outside on my own that they take good care of me.

Still, unfortunately, I’m only a writer, and a writer’s Patreon doesn’t make enough money to cover for such serious issues.

But Kari is the most important person in my life. I’m not exaggerating. I never thought I’d fall in love. I’ve always been the weird one out, the blind kid teachers coddled too much out of pity so other kids disliked and picked on, the one who was so odd that didn’t even fit with the weird kids in school. That happened everywhere, anywhere I went. Even in some fandom groups. It came to the point I stopped trying. It came to the point I thought once my parents died I wouldn’t have anyone. I’d stopped making plans for the future. There was no future for me.

And then I met Kari. She can make me smile with a silly gif and an obscure quote I thought no one else knew at 3am when I’m on the verge of tears because I feel trapped in my own house; she can get me excited about doing a joint cosplay in the distant future when I’d given up on cosplay years ago because I had no one who wanted to go to cons with me; she listens to my stupid history rants and even shows interest in them, when the most I’m used to getting are eye rolls and a change of topic.

Kari is the best that’s happened to me. Ever. And I want her to be happy. I want her to not have to worry about rent; I want her to be able to buy herself a chocolate bar because she feels like it without having to feel guilty for wasting the money. I want her to be able to live without the fear of being evicted every month, without having to worry about tomorrow’s meals because she ran out of food stamps and the fridge has only a can of soup left for the weekend. I want her to be able to go to the doctor when she’s sick and buy the medication she needs to get better.

But I don’t have the power to do this. Not now, not yet. So I’m asking you, everyone out there, to please help us. Help her.

And, I’m afraid, November is an awful month for Kari. Due to the late date at which she found her new job, she is missing a large chunk of rent. I’m doing everything in my power to gather money, and I ask —no, beg— you to help. Donate something, anything. Even if it is small, many small donations can make a difference.

Originally, we wanted to do a GoFundMe page with a three-month goal of 975 dollars to cover that period’s expenses (yes, guys, we’re missing about 500 this month. It’s that horrible), but every single crowdfunding website we have found works through bank accounts. Banks in the US are sharks; they tax you for not having enough income, for not having enough activity… Basically, if you’re poor in the US, you have to pay to have a bank account that will never have any money in it because the bank will eat it up. So, until we find an alternate crowdfunding site that allows to collect through paypal, we have set us several other safe forms through which you guys can donate to help Kari.

Paypal.Me: https://paypal.me/findyourwaycrafts

Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/findyourway

Kari has a crafts store, because she is a fantastic artist (and you should totally check it out), with much stuff already on it and other stuff planned to come:

Store: https://findyourway.storenvy.com/

Store Tumblr: https://findyourwaycrafts.tumblr.com/

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[somekindofseizure]

When the Ink Dries Part X

<Conclusion. Rated for adults. Thank you @icedteainthebag, @gazeatscully and all of you for your help and support over the years (wtf?!!) it took to finish this. Hope you enjoy.>

*

Chapter 26

Stella had been bracing herself to enter a courthouse with the two of them for three years, ever since Scully had delivered news of their engagement. Self-preparation for this had involved two phases. One: fuck all of London for about six weeks and two: settle into the rationalization that nothing would really change. Mulder and Scully were a couple before any sort of documentation, and they would be after. Stella had made peace with it, anticipating that they might spring the actual event on her any time, that every time she came to America, it might be the one. But that had not happened.Scully didn’t have a dress. No one spoke of dates and no one had given her the address to a courthouse...until today.

“Why don’t you sleep over,” Mulder stage-whispered, leaning in beside her. He smelled of whatever he’d been chewing on the car ride over - almonds? - no, seeds, those fucking confounded seeds. “You haven’t been to our new place. It has a guest bedroom.”

“Hotel is fine.”

He hesitated, hovered over her shoulder in a particular way that men generally did not have the temerity to do. Luckily she liked him more than other men, still liked him, even if he was poised to marry the only person for whom she’d ever considered unravelling the tightly wound spool of her existence.  Thankfully, circumstances had not allowed her to make such a mistake. She reminded herself to be thankful often. Forcefully.

“Why?” he pressed.  He was eager to keep her close, Stella knew.  On her better days she believed it was because he cared for her, was her friend. It was also possible he only wanted to be forgiven for winning.  Most days, when she was feeling her cheerfully doubtful self, it struck her as strategic. One distances one’s wife’s female friends at one’s own peril, particularly if said wife has had sex with said female friend.

“I’m not sleeping in your guest bedroom,” she declared in the hushed voice required of their environment.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not your great aunt,” Stella said, her eyes firmly rooted on the hulking shoulders of the man in front of her in the light grey prison uniform. Mulder righted himself beside her, took a sharp inhale. The air was stiff and stale in the room, tasted of chalk. This must be as frustrating for him as it was for her - watching Scully testify on Jerse’s behalf twenty some-odd years after she’d helped put him in jail. Only fair that Mulder was distracting himself with matters of guest bedrooms. 

Ed was taller than Stella remembered.  Also, less nimble, the kind of man who might lose his balance trying to kill a mosquito rather than someone who had  escaped notice as he escorted human beings to their unwanted cremations.  His tattoos had multiplied over the years behind bars - all the faces of girls, and each one turned out to be meaner than the last. Stella and Mulder had both taken turns judging Scully as she made phone calls over the years to keep him out of or remove him from solitary confinement. But even her (arguably inappropriate) kindness had not spared him. Time had passed for all of them, but it had passed hardest for Ed. A courtroom was a very good argument for the health benefits of freedom.

Funny that Stella had always assumed they’d get married in a court and not a church. Scully was Catholic, after all, but somehow she’d always pictured herself in a skirt-suit set and a plasticky smile watching an uncomfortable hour-plus of Mulder pawing gently at Scully as she stood steel-eyed and stiff-jawed before a government clerk, her favorite skeptic allowing an indulgence of incalculable faith. It was enough of a stretch without bringing God into it, maybe.

She had kept her negativity about marriage to herself, had made a concerted effort not to spoil things. It would be unseemly considering. But she had tried to talk Scully out of this, and Mulder had tried too. But Scully was adamant right up until last night’s spaghetti carbonara; there was an uncommon amount of swearing, flame-freckled seething, tossed crumpled napkins and waiters trying not to look. 

They’d relented - what else could they do?   He was her potential murderer, after all, not theirs, and one supposed she was entitled to a certain amount of possessiveness on that account. Many was the sleepless night that Stella had spent cursing the people who had interfered with her plans for Paul Spector. 

The worst part of hearing about the engagement had not been the news itself but the manner in which it was delivered. Scully’s lowered volume, the gentle lovers’ cadence, lips pressed against the mouthpiece, two hands surely cupping the phone.  The worry, the consideration, the sizzling quiet on the other end of the line as Stella rustled up a response she thought she might be able to live with forever.  The grand poetry of it all, the drama and Scully’s quietly feverish attempts to mitigate it. 

Scully, neatly trimmed in burgundy, hair just so, shifted at the small cafeteria-style table where she sat with the other testifiers.  As someone else stood to speak, Stella saw Scully clasp her hands in loose prayer, gaze resting on her fingernails.  She had not turned to look at them since it had begun. Perhaps she was thinking of the first time she met him, trying to reincarnate the moment when she knew him only as an innocent entity. A memory that had been discounted by such drastic measures lived on uncomfortably, vividly, a spider pinned alive and preserved under glass.  

And what about the day Stella had met him? He’d impressed himself upon her almost by accident. It had been a lark, something to get her out of England and keep her busy, but had turned into something she would never forget, scenes in a movie that only later seemed significant. The heavy stench of fear-twinged anger, the impressive composure of the beautiful ginger-faced detective, the nearly imperceptible twitching of her fingers at the table, the lanky male counterpart’s eventual leap at the killer’s throat.  Stella had felt safe and separate from them all, even the killer; she’d ridden the experience like a seasoned surfer, keeping an eye on the two young kids desperately paddling in the frothy tension beside her. That is how she used to do things before Paul Spector had gotten under her skin. Or maybe it was how she used to do things before Dana Scully had. Sometimes, Stella was unsure which had been the bigger danger.

Stella glanced down at the skin of her bare knees and thought maybe she had unravelled a bit over the years after all.

Jerse appeared to be watching the speaker, but with a slight tilt of the head, Stella could see that he was focused on Scully. The others were guards, cafeteria workers, psychologists - but Scully was something else, someone he’d had feelings for, someone who had known him as good before evil. Mulder must have caught the look in his eye as well, for beside Stella, he gave an angry swallow, widened his legs in macho (and pointless) provocation. Stella knew that Mulder’s concern about today was the physical threat of Ed - what he might do if he were out, how his fixation with Scully might manifest into an act of violence or possessiveness. But Scully could handle her own safety well enough. Stella worried instead about the subtler effects - the nightmares, the guilt she might experience wondering who he was luring in the dusty pick-up joints of Philadelphia. Things you could not fix with a lock and key or a sidearm.

But when Scully stood and spoke, it seemed she was not worried about any of these things. Her voice was steadfast and clinical, though it carried a heartfelt quality that unsettled Stella to her core. Stella had heard the rundown of events before - years ago, when she’d asked as a matter of professionally curiosity and Scully had answered as a matter of courtesy. But now Scully spoke of the invitation to dinner and the subsequent date with a matter-of-fact tenderness. The way he seemed before “the voices” had interfered, her belief in an underlying true nature beneath his mental illness. She had been sparing Mulder the nuances back then. Stella had been just an acquaintance. But inadvertently, she’d spared Stella too. For all these years, Stella had not had to look at the inky snake on Scully’s back and think: she liked him. She’d been spared the pain of identifying with how that must have felt. To have been so wrong about someone.

Scully finished without flourish, smoothed the wool skirt at the hips with two hands and sat - still not looking back at them, seemingly alone in her moment, and perhaps rightly so, for this was her unsupported decision. Stella felt vaguely hypocritical for even attending, but then not attending had seemed wronger. 

Snippets of Ed’s report cards were read aloud, brief and modestly generous endorsements he’d received over the course of the years. Mistakes here and there, but a generally cooperative nature, etcetera - no compliment as persuasive as Scully’s sincerity. They were going to let him go - Stella could feel it the way she could sense a confession coming or intuited a multiple murderer’s next attack before he actually crept up someone’s back flight of steps. 

Mulder’s hand startled her as it descended heavily atop her own and quieted her wriggling thumbs. The weight of him in the lap of her skirt made the mucous in her throat thicken - was he holding her hand or asking for his to be held? He tightened his sweaty fingers around hers. There was no reason to cry. This was not her moment. Not her murderer and not her fiancé. She was in the role she’d always found most comfortable - observer. Someone to put in the guest room.

When it was over, Scully stood, looked at the floor and moved toward them like a funeral attendant in the aftermath of an Irish wake - sad, but relieved - attending to the memory of something she’d long past buried.

*

“That tattoo hurt at all?” he asks with a dipped clefted chin and a gleam in his eye that reminds her of her little performance in the shop.  Scully is not even sure why it happened – the booze or the slow burn of the needle or the way he looked at her. It makes her look away for a second now in shyness - the fact that he’s already seen that face she makes.  But she did not call him up earlier to be shy.  She did not sit in a dirty dive all night with a handsome stranger all night to be shy.  She did not break skin, make permanent marks she might later regret to be shy.   She is too quickly running out of time to be shy.

She steals glances at him standing there across the room with his flop of dark sailor’s hair and suggestive sailor’s tattoo and she stammers through something about feeling different. This is true but she doesn’t mean the heavy handed flashart on her lower back.  She supposes she might feel strange the next time she’s at the beach with her mother.  Supposes, the next time, really, anyone looks there, she’ll probably have to laugh.  But nobody ever looks there.  And that’s why she’s here.  She’s responsible.  She’s a woman of faith.  But she’s human, she’s mortal, she knows that more now than ever, even before the doctor’s appointment, and tonight she wants to act like it.  That is what feels different.

He looms over her as he lifts the back of her shirt to peek and she actually believes he just wants a peek.  He’s enormous by comparison, a monument to masculine threat.  He could crush her.  He will try to crush her.  But she doesn’t know that now.  Has no way of knowing that now as he traces the outline of the snake with his finger and tells her it looks all right.  It actually seems like too much of a cliché to fear someone who looks like him, like flinching when you walk down the street past a Doberman. Every cop knows the scrawny ones can be meaner.

She likes him, has liked him from the moment he spoke to her.  She considers herself a good judge of character and she feels in her soul that he is good, but she’s not looking for a soul mate. She’s in the mood for someone who’ll look at her like she’s a problem, not their problem-solver.  Someone who’s not just handing her instructions and checking in. He is not a slap in the face to Mulder. He’s just not Mulder.

He doesn’t leer and he doesn’t suggest.  He offers to take couches and asks her if things hurt.  He’s aware of his own strength even as he displays it.  It may be that none of this counts at St. Peter’s gate, but it will count for something when she’s letting a man a full foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier fuck her standing up.  It will count when he tries to kill her too, but she has no way of knowing that’s what fate – God?  No, not God, that’s not the God she believes in – has in store.

If she were going to stop him, she would’ve stopped him by now.  But instead, she’s telling him she’s a doctor and nothing turns her on like telling people she’s a doctor.  Instead, he’s holding her wrist firmly in the dance partner position, looking down at her like he doesn’t care about his bleeding infected arm as long as he’s got her.  She has wanted to be needed in this way, has been wanting someone who will trade in their other obsessions for five feet two inches and a few hours of her, and she’s been ashamed of that desire.  Then such a person appeared, offered himself up and she’s accepting.  She feels compelled on behalf of her mortality.  Funny - it’s the very thing he’ll turn out to be after.

It’s a quick rundown of events, some of which she’ll be forced to mention later to law enforcement or doctors or both.  She’ll glare and ask them what that has to do with anything as they jot down her perfunctory details.  There are some she doesn’t give. That she reaches for the hem of her shirt two seconds into the kiss, feels his tongue touch her nose when she sloppily backs away to get it over her head.  That he unbuttons her pants as she runs her hands over his chest and his stomach, makes shapes across it with her mouth.  They look for cause and effect, these medical doctors and detectives - she knows because it’s how she normally thinks too.  But the system is working in reverse. The moment his hands graze her ass over her underwear – simple briefs, work underwear, investigate-the-Russian-mobster-underwear – is when she realizes she’s wet.  The moment she drops his pants and puts her hand over his erection is the moment she hopes she’s wet enough.  Effect is what she notices first.

It’s been a very long time.  This might hurt a bit, she tells herself, and gets wetter.

He takes out the condom of his own will but she insists on being the one to put it on him, stares, buying time, as she rolls it down his shaft. It could stop here, she thinks. She could still wake up tomorrow not feeling a bit of regret or the urge to confess, still go into work and not duck from Mulder’s gaze, but it doesn’t occur to her that she could still avoid waking up concussed in a hospital, and that ought to be a fair oversight.

She brushes the infected pinupped bicep by accident, but when she does so, an evil little smile appears on his lips. Blood as permanent as ink itself smears beneath her hand and there is something beautiful about it or something perverse, something she doesn’t take the time to put her finger on because he’s a very good kisser and he can span the entire width and length of her torso with two spread hands, and now he is lifting her with those hands, tossing her up like a lost princess, starting to carry her toward the bedroom.  Just think - Dana Scully, a princess.

“No, here,” she says and so he backs her into the wall as she squeezes her thighs around his thick body.  He shows her with various little touches that he’s willing to take this step by step, but if he does, she’ll lose the nerve, and if she loses the nerve, she knows how she’ll wake up feeling nothing tomorrow morning, because that is how she has woken up many mornings, and she doesn’t think at the time that it might even be worse than waking up in the hospital.  “Fuck me here.”

And then he gets a look in his eye that makes her not care whether there is a tomorrow, not that she has reason to wonder (no cancer moves that fast, has that glib a sense of timing).  It’s a look that says he’s going to ravish her, take her and at the same time sacrifice himself.  It is the look that will haunt her when she’s bandaged and stitched, when she hears of him going to prison, when Mulder makes his stupid, insensitive quips about ass tattoos.

He fucks her with her bra clasp digging into the wall, her underwear pushed to the side, his upper body curled over her like a cobra as he tries to kiss her neck and stay inside her at once.  She lodges her fingernails in the plates of his back lest he drop her, listens to the sound he makes as they penetrate his skin, feels his dick go so high inside her that she’s sure despite all knowledge of anatomy that he’s occluding the base of her throat.

For the moment, with his cock stiff and wholly inside her, she is the threat, the overpowerer. He’s awed by it, grateful for it, and - she’s sure - fearful of it.

“You can do whatever you want,” she orders, “I want you to.”  She hears but barely feels her shoulder blades bruise the wall, any remaining sense she has left sliding out her ears onto the paint job.   He holds her waist very still to the wall as he thrusts upward into her and she tilts her head toward the heavens to moan.  Her eyes burn and her hips ache and she will laugh in a few minutes when he holds her sweetly and still offers to sleep on the couch after giving her a pounding like none she has experienced.

“Come for me, Dana,” he begs and she clutches at his hair, presses her open mouth to his jaw, uses her tongue to try to reach him when she’s not using it to swear, digs her heels into his backside for leverage, consistently pressing the full weight of his hips into her body and she lets herself slide into the deepest, slickest, hardest home plate she’s ever come across.  Or at least that she can remember coming across.   It has been a very long time. As of tomorrow morning, that won’t be true, but then a lot of things won’t be true anymore.

He’s looking at her like she’s the only thing that can save him but the reason she is doing it is to save herself.

*

The decor was sleek and dripped in silver grey, an unslept-in bed at hip height.  There was a photograph of a naked woman in a carnival mask on the wall opposite, the figure’s seductive pout leering over the edge of a dressing-room-style vanity mirror.  The room looked like it belonged in another home - a distinct departure from the oaky, slightly inexplicably Asian-influenced-Americana couple-who-hikes aesthetic of the rest of the townhouse. Sleek and sexy and cool. Nobody’s great aunt would have slept there.

“Hope this is all right,” Scully said behind her, leaning against the doorjamb with pantyhosed feet piled one on top of the other.

“Fine, more than fine.”

“Thank you for staying.”

Mulder’s sports announcers prattled on in the master bedroom down the hall.  The bedroom Scully should be in, would be in by the end of the night.

“I wanted you to be close tonight,” Scully said, punctuating the statement with the kind of breathy chuckle that stood for self-criticism. The days of their holing up in hotels with platonic devotion for a weekend were long gone. Now, Stella stayed in those places alone and Scully visited for dinner or shopping - a pair of regular friends. Scully no longer came to London - Stella’s request - and she did not generally make admissions, however innocently voiced, of wanting her close.

Stella spotted a bronze-brown silk robe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. 

“Pour moi?”

Scully smiled, nodded and Stella grabbed it, turned her back to Scully as she exchanged her clothes for the robe with as much modesty as she could. There was a brass-edged glass bar cart in the corner, fully stocked with red wine and whiskey - the place was a veritable theme park in her honor.  Stella resisted the urge to tease and instead took advantage, tweaked two glasses in one hand, opened a bottle of Macallan’s and poured. Anyway, there was no way to know if the room had been decorated for her because it was meant to court her visit or because there was no one else’s visit to court. They were solitary people, all three of them. It was part of the reason they had held onto each other the way they had.

Scully stepped fully into the room for the first time, rolling from heels to toes like a soft-footed doll in stockinged feet.

“Sentiment get to you?” Stella inquired as her drink pooled, syrupy, in the bottom of the lightly dust-coated glasses. She lightened her tone to a mild taunt in order to refract any impression of flirtation. “Whenever we visit Ed Jerse together we sleep under the same roof?”

“Something like that,” Scully murmured, untouched by the sarcasm. She had known Stella too long, had developed an immunity to it. Sometimes people could say they meant nothing by their sarcasm; with Stella, something was always meant and yet one had to be able to take it in stride. It was not one of her best tendencies but she had never been able to control it.

She handed Scully a glass sympathetically, gestured for her to sit on the bed. Stella sipped and Scully gulped...

“You all right?” 

Scully’s eyes began to water.  She looked at the ceiling, preemptively tightened the skin near her eyes with her fingers. Stella came and sat beside her.

“Do you think it’s wrong, what I did today?” Scully asked.

“You know I don’t see the world that way.”

“But do you feel like…”

“You’ve a good heart, that’s all.”

“I remember when you first told me I was good, do you?”

“Not really.”

She’d always thought it. It was rare for her. Usually she suspected people of things, even when she liked them. Scully stared at her, chewed her lip until it was practically blue.

It would pass. It would pass. It would pass. They had more practice letting it pass than anything else. But this time, it didn’t. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Stella said finally and she meant it.

“You don’t really want me to marry him.”

“It doesn’t matter to me if you marry him.”

“You don’t care if it means you’ll lose me forever.”

“What do you want from me, Dana.”

She’d said it quickly, not meaning to, was immediately angry with herself for doing so.  But Scully’s shoulders softened, some long-suffering secret released.

“You sent me back here for my own good, didn’t you? Because you knew about William. Not because you wanted me to go. I need to know.”

That was three years ago and in that time Stella had gotten the hang of her being gone. This was no time to undo that, not with an engagement pending.

“I sent you back because I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said methodically.

“You couldn’t do it every minute of every day-”

“No - not with anyone-”

“But you could do it sometimes.”

“What does that matter?” Stella said, her voice rising into the tight part of her throat like a trapped scream. Fighting with Scully was like fighting with a teenager sometimes - ridiculous and yet impossible to come out on top. Stella always had the urge to tell her not now, you’re tired, you’re emotional, and yet, there was always a devastating honesty to Scully’s behavior when she was being influenced by such feelings. “You want something constant, that is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed. But it doesn’t mean I need everything to be constant.”

Stella’s head ached - she shook it, rubbing her temples, sipped her whiskey.

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” she said, sorry that she’d come here.

“I’ll stop,” Scully said. “It’s been a long day.”

Stella drank. Yes, a long day. Scully was tired, emotional, deserved a pass.

“Can I lie down?” Scully asked.

“It’s your house.”

“It’s your room,” Scully said and Stella couldn’t help but smile a little.

She let the Scotch burn the back of her throat a bit as Scully scooted back on the bed, dropped herself into the center of a stack of white linen pillows, put her buttoned-up wrists by her ears.

Stella lay on her back until the remainder of her anger dissipated into the plume of Scully’s perfume. Stella pictured Scully dressing, powdering this morning, pretending to herself it was like any other day. She turned onto her side, placed her hand carefully in the center of Scully’s sternum, carefully avoiding the structured brassiere swell on either side. A warm heartbeat patted at her palm.

“Aren’t you uncomfortable in these clothes?” she asked. 

“Deeply.”

“Want to go change?”

Scully shook her head no.

“May I?” Stella asked as her hand drifted button by button down the front of Scully’s shirt. “I won’t touch you, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Scully said. 

Stella half-smiled, flicked the front clasp of the bra, dragged the side zipper down Scully’s hip and finally rested her hand dutifully on the comforter next to Scully’s still wool-crepe skirted, nyloned thigh.

“I’m still deeply uncomfortable,” Scully said, face turning toward her, the malted, woodsy scent of alcohol drifting on the air between them.  A forest, an orchestra pit full of string instruments, hollow and waxed and just removed from velvet cases. “I am actually more deeply uncomfortable than before.”

“Sorry.”

Stella held her breath, her nipples hardening against the silk of the borrowed robe as Scully licked her lips at her, breathed with her whole body so that her open blouse slipped from her chest to her sides. 

“Want to kiss me?” Scully asked.

Goddamit.

“He’s down the hall.”

But she was salivating, tasting Scully, the memory of her.  It had been years. Scully slithered out of her clothes, shedding them like snakeskin, looking new as she lay back down on the pillow.

“I dare you,” Scully whispered.

Stella brusquely threw a knee over Scully’s opposite hip, straddling her as the golden robe slipped its knot.  She shook it down off her shoulders, let it fall to her thighs. Her chest rose, naked and weighted by her heart as she dipped forward toward Scully’s face.

Scully caged her ribs with two hands, traced the black and white tattoo on Stella’s body, draping a finger this way and that in the shape of the rose.

The door was open.  He would hear them.  It would be a betrayal greater than any Stella had ever committed. But she could feel her entire body sinking toward Scully, melting at the heat of her. Muscles trembled, spine withered like an end of summer plant, hips rolled, changes Stella assumed would be imperceptible but Scully’s body moved in response to each one.

She reached down, took Scully’s chin in her hand -

And in a flash of Scully’s eye contact, it all made sense.

“He knew you were going to do this,” Stella said, measuring her surprise.

Scully gulped. Nervous.

“You can live in London, come and go as you please...”

Stella tensed, probably would have moved away but in a burst of effort, Scully reached for Stella’s neck, pulled her close so that she could speak directly into her ear.

“I need you.”

Stella closed her eyes, trying to process the enormity of what was being asked of her but paralyzed by the scent of Scully’s skin and hair and mouth so close.

“I don’t know,” Stella said, her pores sucking up Scully’s skin like the air. She was drowning in her.

Scully’s heart beat faster, she’d begun to sweat, and rightly so. She was gambling with her future - all their futures. Stella wanted to be angry with her but it was impossible. Impossible not to lift her mouth to Scully’s, just briefly enough to leave some of her shimmery gloss on Scully’s lower lip. She paused long enough to settle, to let herself enjoy the certainty of a decision having been made. Sometimes she thought this was the best thing about sex - the rare moment of knowledge, of conviction, of committment. She could not agree to whatever Scully was asking of her, some sort of future promise, but she could agree to right now. The moment would come and go, and in a few minutes, when they were having sex, she would have other ideas about what the best thing about sex with Scully was. With other people, this was often not the case.

“I’m going to fuck you now,” she said. “I’m going to make you pant and swear and moan and we’ll see if your fiance will come down the hall.”

“Do you want him to?”

“I don’t know,” Stella said. “But either of you cries, I swear to God, I’ll never speak to you again.”

She covered Scully’s body from the palms of their hands to the tips of their feet, slipped her tongue into Scully’s mouth before either of them could ruin it by saying anything further.

Chapter 27

He wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it until he saw it. He had agreed to it without reservation. It was even possible to interpret it as having been his suggestion. But still, he could not be absolutely sure how it would feel.  And if he was going to live with it, he needed to see it with his own two eyes at least once. It had always been him or Stella, not both. He’d only shared her once - the first time - and the second time they’d tried had ended in disaster. They’d all kept things separate, Scully in her actions - he doubted she had ever been unfaithful to him when they’d been a couple - and he in his mind. He’d approached his memories of that night with the chastity of a priest, resisted even thinking about it until Scully had made this recent proposition. It was not an unpleasant memory to relive but still, it was a memory.

And now he had arrived at the reality. Stella’s mouth suckling Scully’s nipple in a room wreaking of Scotch and women, her arm’s well-hewn muscles spasming as they worked on Scully beneath the weight of her body, four rounded thighs swathed in a pond of flaxen silk. Scully’s skirt and nylons had been discarded near her ankles, and one of her hands was cupping Stella’s jaw, the other raking up her back. He had waited until he could hear Scully from down the hall, which meant that he had waited until things were very near the end, too near to undo - he could not have stopped them now if he begged. It was a scientific experiment, a matter of proving to himself he could handle what he’d feel.

What he felt when he stood in the doorway to the guest room was hard. Superman fucking hard.

He watched for as long as he could stand it, cleared his throat when he couldn’t stand it any longer. Stella pulled back and sat on her haunches with a well-well-well sort of expression on her face, hair whipping like a blonde gauntlet over her shoulder as she held Scully deep-breathing beneath her palm.

“Come here,” Stella said. He stepped up to the side of the bed, resisting the urge to look anywhere but her eyes. They turned bluer when she made love. Of course - he’d only seen her with Scully. He wondered if they did the same when she was just having sex. “I’m very impressed.”

“With my middle-aged hard-on or my open-mindedness?”

“Both. Have a drink, you might need it.”

She gestured at the friendly half empty glasses left gawking and scandalized on the nightstand. Scully took his hand, squeezed Stella’s thigh with the other. She was in no mood for banter.

“Finish me.”

“You talking to me, honey?” he asked with a slow smile. “Or your girlfriend?”

“Both of you.”

Mulder picked up the glass and sipped - just a bit because he was old enough to be negatively impacted by substances at such critical moments - and then he tipped the glass at Scully’s chest, poured it over her body from navel to neck. She gasped, body rolling like pavement over a growing root. He sat on the bed and leaned to kiss the tip of her drunken shoulder.

They settled in on either side of her,  Stella’s breasts nestled beneath her armpit, his dick wedged against her opposite hip. His arm slid under Scully’s back, his hand pinned by Stella’s trembling belly as she arched it into the hollow of Scully’s waistline. Stella playfully hooked her foot over his leg in the space between Scully’s spread calves. 

“So wet,” Scully murmured and he wasn’t sure if she was talking about herself or the stamp of Stella’s body on her hipbone, but either way it made him desperately want to fuck her.  He settled for a kiss, first on the mouth and then the side of her neck the way she liked as she turned her mouth to Stella.

“Shall we make her come now?” Stella asked without looking at him. Scully’s little ovular  fingertips dug into his skull.

“You want to come, honey?” he teased in her ear, and Stella said something similar in the other, each talking to her as if they had her to themselves, but revelling in the knowledge that they didn’t.

Scully gave a feverish nod yes to all the questions she was being asked, hot tears of simultaneous need and something else - relief? - dripping from her tightly shut eyes. This would not just be the conclusion of a steadily built orgasm, but the proof that her love could carry them all, that she could have the life she wanted but feared was too much to ask.

Their arms draped Scully’s body in the shape of a V, two pageant queen sashes - one ivory, one olive - as they reached inside her together. Stella’s finger was slender and deft against his, leading him sportingly as they found a rhythm they could both live with. Scully hooked her elbow around Stella’s neck, put her hand on Mulder’s cock.

“Dana,” Stella whispered. 

The sound of her so-rarely-uttered first name made him ache like a dirty word. He writhed naked against her thigh, and across from him, Stella’s head hung loose toward Scully’s shoulder as though it might unhinge from her neck. Scully held the center with ease, the flexible crux of an unwieldy machine.

“You’re both so incredibly beautiful,” he said.

Stella thanked him in that a spare, sweet tone she sometimes used but which every time sounded like someone else, and Scully told him to shut up in a voice that sounded exactly like her. Everything slid, slithered - the hand he had wrapped around Scully’s waist bathed in their combined sweat, the whiskey sheen tanning Scully’s chest as she curled it this way and that between them, dipped her tailbone to grind against their hands.

“Good girl,” Stella purred, composed enough even as she gripped Scully’s hip tight between her thighs,. “Good -- girl.”

He lowered the hand up between Stella’s belly and Scully’s waist, bent his knuckles to be of use. Stella found them as she rolled her clitoris from Scully’s hip over his knuckles and back down, delivered a soft fuck from her lips. 

Scully liked it too.

“We’re going to -- take such good -- care of you, Mulder,” she said.

It happened soon after that, the two of them in swift syncopation, Scully moaning and swearing liberally as Stella held her breath, her lips frozen open in the shape of an O. There was a rush of tension and release, sore, slick fingers, wet hair sticking to skin like a sacrament, baptizing a long night to come, and maybe, a new reality.

Chapter 29

The sequence of events was not identical but it was close. A questionable interaction with Ed Jerse that she stubbornly stood behind, come hell or highwater. Stella’s seduction (she had, admittedly, played more of a role in that this time), the precise feminine touch combined with the loving enthusiasm of Mulder’s involvement. And finally, waking up in a bed with him, snoring like a Golden Retriever beside on one side, while Stella’s side was a cool evening desert, bereft of the musky morning jasmine scent that should have been wafting over her shoulder.

Twenty years and somehow she had still not got it right. In some ways she felt they had all been through everything, moved the pieces around in every configuration that existed and she’d landed on a new one, one she knew she wanted best, one in which she knew she could make them both happy. But in other ways, she felt as though she’d been standing still ever since that night, learned nothing, come nowhere.

And more than anything, she was angry at Stella for letting her feel that way. The least she could have done was stayed, told her she hated the idea, rubbed her temples grouchily over a cup of inferior tea while Mulder flipped pancakes. Was that really too much to ask from someone she had known and loved so long?

And in place of that tiny bit of consideration, she’d left a little gift box.

“Sorry...xo” said Stella’s haughty half-script on a prismed, torn-off piece of paper she’d turned into a card.

A hasty unwrapping revealed a shiny little ivory-colored porcelain replica of Big Ben. A delicate and expensive version of something you’d get an an airport. Its base stood in the center of a small dish.

“What’s that?” Mulder grumbled, squinting one eye open. He’d lost some of his voice, left it in one or both of their bodies.

“Stella left us a wedding gift.”

“She left it? You mean she’s not here?”

Scully didn’t answer, so he took the object from her and looked closer.

“It’s a ring holder,” he said. “What does that mean?”

Scully slammed it on the nightstand hard enough to get some satisfaction but not hard enough to crack it. She knew that at a later date, she would cherish this object as the only connection to their union that Stella condoned. She had Mulder had not exchanged any rings - she was no more a jewelry person than she’d been when Mulder had first bought her that Elvis thing and then second-guessed himself. But maybe they should, maybe they would. Maybe she had clung to all the wrong ideas she could have about herself, let all the wrong things slip away into the unlived version of her life. She flexed her fingers over her forehead with a groan.

“She’ll come around,” Mulder said gently. “Let me get you some coffee.”

He was only gone a minute when she heard him calling her name from the kitchen. She joined him, expecting to be shown the spectacle of an ant problem or a pretty bird sitting outside the window or a strange neighbor out to get the mail in a funny outfit - he looked hard when he was aiming to cheer her up.  Instead, the presentation involved a brown paper bag on the table, the oven-y smell of bagels hovering, and Stella... leaning against the counter in the rare odd wrinkled t-shirt, lips pursed, arms folded under her breasts. Scully clung to Mulder’s bare back for protection.

“She came around,” Mulder said.

“Isn’t that getting old?” Scully demanded of Stella, stepping forward, and Mulder sat down, pulled the bag of goodies over. He hesitated to open it in a sudden bout of manners, waited for Stella to answer her.

Stella dipped her head for a deep look at the ground, as though checking to see if she’d stepped on something. Her arms did not uncross.

“Yes,” she said finally with the bluntness Scully imagined she applied to a cold case re-opened and placed unwelcomed on her desk. 

“It’s childish, Stella. I asked you a question, all you had to do was answer it,” Scully pressed. 

“You asked me a question while I was taking your clothes off -”

“Because I thought if I combined it with sex, you’d be more likely to unders -”

“You thought I’d be more likely to say yes. Is there any behavior more childish than that?” 

Scully opened her mouth, made a couple of sounds that didn’t turn into words.

“You’re right, Stell...” Mulder chimed, “Is what Scully is trying to say. She has trouble with that sometimes.”

Scully swallowed her pride, realizing only then that she could let go of both her disappointment and her anger. Stella was still there. They were both there.

“Sorry,” she said softly.

Stella nodded matter-of-factly, uncrossed her arms.

“Eat a bagel and re-ask the question clearly and while I have my wits about me.”

Chapter 30

The neighborhood was full of cobblestone and good bones, svelte-faced buildings painted in aristocrat white, noses in the air as people swept past with briefcases, the damp winter wind whipping chilled hair in their faces.  Scully hugged herself tighter in her long black coat and little white dress, swayed from side to side as she picked a wave of red from across her forehead.  She looked too perfect for this stuffy old courthouse. She also looked nervous.

“She’ll be here,” Mulder said. 

Scully smiled close-lipped, dusted the chest of his jacket, tightened his tie and lied to his face.

“I’m not worried.”

*

When she looked at him here on the courthouse steps, she saw him as he once was, young and bitter, eyes that looked perpetually impressed and a smooth-lipped mouth that looked forever disappointed. She saw their son, the short exchange Stella’s cleverness had allowed her to have with him that day in the park. She saw all the close-calls, the times they should have been parted from one another forever and yet somehow found their way back. They were, as a couple, simultaneously inevitable and a miracle. They were each other’s something old and time itself, their something borrowed.

And Stella - though she’d met her just a few years after Mulder - was still her something new - and that’s how Stella liked it. It was part of the allure of her and the problem of Stella Gibson. She liked to maintain the shiny, silvery lacquer of mystery, and Scully knew Stella worried today would tarnish it. She had considered Scully and Mulder’s offer very carefully, very sensibly, then delivered her answer as she tore bread from the inside of a bagel, a calm voice but a tear in her eye, an embarrassed smile, a mellow-limbed embrace - joy. But there had also been signs of anxiety that day and ever since. It didn’t upset Scully, it only worried her that it might upset Stella. Along the way, Stella had become something else besides the shiny new toy, she had been for some time.

She moved in closer to Mulder as they waited, let her nose rest against his Adam’s apple, a small concession to the  robust unflappability she was determined to show off today. She did not want him to feel his presence meant less to her - it was just that, in this current incarnation of her life, she worried less about losing it. He was sturdier these days, took his medicine and jogged and read novels rather than nonfiction and conspiracy theory websites. He less apt to disappear on her or on himself.

“Maybe we should have stayed at her place last night,” she said.  “Reviewed things.”

“All she has to do is show up, what’s to review?” he remarked casually but through it Scully could see he was more concerned than she was. “You tried her phone?”

“Three times.”

Him too.

“I could go to her place, make sure everything’s okay?” he offered.

“No,” Scully said, her face stoic but her fingers slipping up and down his tie.  The gesture brought him back to the moment and he smiled. His eyes were greener than usual here in the English afternoon.

“Are you sure this is what you want, Mulder? There’s no part of you that would be relieved if we didn’t pull this off today?

He took her chin in hand.

“I’m sure, baby. We’ll do it another day if she can’t make it. Something must have come up.”  

*

What he didn’t say was: we could do it without her.  Because he wasn’t sure that he could.  It was almost perfect, him and Scully alone.  Almost, except that at the same time, always teetering on not-at-all.  Stella’s involvement made it possible somehow, even when she was physically apart from them, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.  They seemed to need her to survive each other. And as stubborn as he was about not needing people, he was also too old, too experienced not to admit when he did.

Suddenly, Scully smiled and he saw Stella getting out of a black cab in a wooly grey dress and the highest heels he’d ever seen. She turned to pay the driver through the window, at first glance betraying nothing but her usual charmed confidence, although upon closer inspection, he could see the way she was gripping her leather clutch with nerve-wrecked white fingertips.

“See? She’s here,” Mulder said and twirled a length of Scully’s hair between her shoulder blades.

She kissed him briefly on the lips and in a moment Stella approached, tapped their cheeks with her own, careful not to smudge her lipstick.

*

“Sorry I’m late.  You look lovely.  What are we doing afterward?”

“We’ll go get you a stiff drink,” Scully said dryly with a tweak to the neckline of Stella’s sweater dress, playing as she’d done moments ago with Mulder’s tie. An excuse for contact, a doctor’s emotional temperature-telling. 

“Drink, yes, maybe several,” Stella said a little more gently, as though she too had merely been awaiting the doctor’s call to feel better. A malady that eased by benign diagnosis. You will not regret this, I will not let you regret it, Scully tried to communicate telepathically as she looked Stella over, but couldn’t quite rein in the eye contact necessary.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t have a flask on her,” Mulder said.

“Who says I haven’t,” and she handed Mulder her little bag.  “Here, just a second.”

She smoothed her dress, checked the backs of her earrings.  Perfume stabbed the air and committed Stella to memory with every flick of her wrist, every twist of the neck. 

“I hate weddings,” she said. “You know that right?”

But Scully was not fooled by the mask of Stella’s comfortable complaints. She busy staring at Stella’s body, trying to place the odd feeling of deja vu and then - 

“I remember this dress.”

And for the first time that day, Stella steadied, really looked at her, let her eyes rest there in the cradle of Scully’s gaze. Her cheeks colored pink a little and her eyes deepened, the greyness of them taking on the hue of brushed denim, the deep hint of indigo. 

There it was, the something else Stella had become, her something blue.

*

It was one of Stella’s great weaknesses that being told she was loved made her want to cry and not in the so happy tears are falling sort of way, but rather in the way of someone falling to pieces. There was only one way she could handle it - in the passive elocution. There were people, mainly men, she’d known over the course of her life who’d somehow learned and observed the rule. One of them had probably taught it to her in the first place.

“You are loved,” her father used to say, or her favorite uncle, or her late-mentor at the academy. “You are missed,” Mulder would sometimes tell her on the phone. But Scully either couldn’t or wouldn’t get used to it. She was restrained in the frequency of her expressions of affection but not in the manner or delivery of them. She gave her love actively, when given.

So of course she remembered the dress, the thing Stella had been wearing that first time.

“Yes, I thought you might,” Stella said, allowing Scully to believe that she’d done it on purpose. She had not consciously thought of that day this morning when she reached for it. But admittedly, there could be no coincidence in such an action. She had dozens of outfits that would have been suitable, in fact two others she’d bought expressly with this day in mind.

“My, you do look lovely, darling,” she added, tingling with warmth as she looked Scully over. More ethereal and yet more solid all at once. “What is it about white that makes a woman look like a new person?”

Actually, all of it was new to Stella except Scully - she was the only thing familiar about this willingness she felt, the generosity of spirit. She was not pretending to be pissed off for having been asked to do this. But really she was self-conscious about not being pissed off. It would have been more comfortable to resent being here, would have felt more herself.

Inside, there would  be waiting to do, the collective and similar but varied anxieties of twenty other strangers pledged to do this same thing this same day. She and Mulder would bicker amiably, tease about who was going to be fucking whose wife later. Scully would hold her head high, pretending to be above it all, threaten them with moving entire affair to a church, but secretly be glad she’d done it here, in the shadow of all the petty tragicomedies of bureaucracy.  They all three were creatures of the system, and they were also its rebels. That included Scully. Sweet, silently subversive Dana Scully, who was sneaking her hand into Stella’s palm, the other already tucked deftly and permanently into Mulder’s elbow.

It had been Mulder’s idea to configure it this way. He’d said it made sense because then she and Scully would be able to visit one another longer. And it would make it easier for her to move to America if she ever wanted to join them there. She had marveled at the breadth of his spirit, his confidence and his love, had been glad she’d fucked him the previous night. But she’d also panicked. She had only just returned from possible escape minutes before.

Scully had hedged when she heard it and fidgeted, twiddled her fingers and smiled shyly as she admitted to approving of the plan. They each took turns making sure Mulder was in his right mind. And ultimately Stella agreed to it because she wasn’t sure any other way would feel binding enough, would serve to remind her that somewhere, someone expected something of her. And if she didn’t feel that, well then what was the point of being involved at all?

Courthouses could be jarring settings for ordinary people but they were familiar to her, and this one in particular. She’d come out of them over the course of her career in all manner of states - furious, indignant, satisfied, vengeful, victorious - all three of them had. When she came out of this one on this day, she would be no more and no less than... married. No one was changing their name. But hers would be a little different because it would be signed on a piece of paper beside Scully’s, with Mulder’s below as the “witness.” 

He would get Scully with his morning coffee every morning. She would get her on vacations, on special weekends, and, somewhere she had never in a million years expected to either get or look forward to getting - on paper.

The law would be involved, black ink and clerks, a mess to undo if needing undone. And the fact of all this did, at moments, make her want to run. But what did Scully deserve if not that?  Her momentary fancies of flight, her panic. That was worth more than her love, it was more than she had ever been willing to entrust to anyone else.

Overhead, a couple of birds scattered noisily from the ancient stony doorway. Mulder and Scully watched them in tandem, eyes arching from here to there with expressions of matching surprise and gratitude. 

“Are those pigeons or--?” Mulder asked, and Scully tightened the lobster clasp of her fingers. “Doves,” she said. “Mourning doves.”

Stella squinted and smiled alongside them in the breeze. For once, for the moment, there was nothing for any of them to mourn.  

The end

[casmoments]

Beyond Worship

Prompt: many requests for a sequel to priest!cas with the roles switched. father castiel “punishes” the sinful reader.   Reader Gender: female Word Count: 5900 Warnings:  alternate universe.  similar warnings as before; castiel is a catholic priest so there is obviously much breaking of vows.  inappropriate use of scripture, sexual acts on church property. d/s (dom!cas, sub!reader).  light bondage, orgasm denial, swearing, spanking, reader is momentarily naked outside (not really exhibitionism as it’s an empty space but still, warning).

you can read part one here.

-

Honestly, respect was important in your relationship—if that’s what this was.  What backward classification fell upon such an illicit thing?  Was there a name for “the other woman” when the betrayed bride was God?  A mistress of heaven, of the divine itself.   Whatever name be given, it was the most passionate and torrid love affair you had ever been in.   Weeks later and a glance could still soak your panties or unglue the seams of your sanity.   And as an individual human, you had an affection and respect for Castiel.   But Father Cas had his own unique magnetism, an allure that never faded.   And though you fought very hard to maintain the drawn boundaries…

…he was so much fun to torment.

His initial vows were long since shattered but he made some vague, half-hearted attempt at salvation.    But the provisos hardly mattered, the details irrelevant, his efforts to beautify decadence useless—a fact you regularly made clear, most often when he was on his knees in front of you, his hands bound behind his back, his skin flushed and broken with sweat, eyes wide, chest heaving, lips swollen and wet.  

“Call it what you want,” you would say, that character you became in these moments seizing your mouth, your hand under his chin and holding firm.   He swallowed and you felt the bob of his adam’s apple, your nails raking down his throat.    “We can do this anywhere, Father,” you purred, “but a whore’s a whore even if you bathe him in holy water.”  

And he would just moan, bow his head forward, his cock hard and raised and bouncing against him, and he would tremble at your feet, begging and praying for forgiveness—not from the icons which decorated the walls but you and you alone.   And you were always merciful, giving him just what he needed.   And the second he was unbound and on his feet, he sought to convey every unspoken thought with a bruising kiss.  You relished in those small moments where his submission flipped and his drive turned feral.    

“You’re so good to me,” you would hum against his lips, his hands smoothing over your body, mapping every curve and contour.

And those moments were divine.   But he inevitably returned to his occupation, not that you complained.   You were allowed to visit his personal lodgings whenever you wanted, a small complex adjacent to the church, joined by a bridge between balconies.   His abode was the definition of humble, bearing only the necessities, but his bed was perfectly big enough for two—honestly, it was like the universe wanted and expected Father Castiel to break—and you made yourself more than comfortable there.    However, while you had a personal key rattling around in your purse, he had refused your presence in other places.   It never took long to break him down in the sacristy or church basement, but he wouldn’t let you anywhere near a confessional, nor were you permitted to attend any more masses.

“You are incorrigible,” he grumbled, adjusting his clerical collar in the bedroom mirror.   He had dressed himself but you were content to sprawl out naked on the bed, lazing about.   “Why do you want to attend the service?” he asked, then frowned at you through the mirror.   “Beyond your desire to see me undone before my congregation.”

“That’s reason enough, Father,” you teased, batting your eyelashes.   You lay on your stomach, twirling hair around your finger.    Castiel finally turned around, looked down at you as he went retrieve his binder, one which contained his sermons.  

“Stay here,” he said, and though your body was sated and relaxed not moments ago, his rough, demanding tone sparked a fire low in your body.  

“Is that an order?” you asked, breath catching as he tipped your head back, rolling you over.   He held you there and kissed you, looking down before releasing you and stepping back.

“Yes,” he said, and he was gone shortly after that.  

Most days you obeyed, accepting the line drawn between his personal life and professional one.    Heaven only knew what concessions he had made.  But damn it all if the temptation did not overcome you as well.  

It was a late night mass and you did not attend, as per his wishes, but you did don one of his long black coats and wander into a crying room at the back of the church, just as the service was ending.  You leaned against the window as he walked past with the procession.   He looked at you and though Father Castiel was very good at playing a stern, stoic, unaffected character, you could always recognize when the chassis cracked.    His frustrated glance had nowhere near enough fire.   He would be exactly where you wanted him.

And he was.   The church cleared out, stragglers in after-mass prayer taking their sweet time but finally disappearing.   You sat in a middle pew with your legs hooked over the row in front of you.    The back doors slammed and you heard footsteps in the main hall, the heavy locks secured and superfluous lights doused.  Then you heard footsteps behind you, purposeful and quick.  A heavy hand landed on the seat in front of you, gripping the back brace, a second hand on the back of your own seat.   You turned your head and saw Castiel staring down at you, looking none too pleased.   He had dressed down already, black shirt and pants, clerical collar in perfect order.   You could not wait to truss him up, even with the contemptuous look he threw you now.

“I expressly forbade your presence here, Y/N,” he said, gravelly voice dropping decibels in frustration.   You bit your bottom lip, rolled it under your teeth, touched the tip of your tongue against it.   His blue gaze seemed to further darken.   “Y/N,” your name was little more than a growl, “you cannot flirt your way out of every conflict.”  

“Flirt,” you repeated, cocking an eyebrow.   You dropped your feet to the floor and faced forward, sitting upright.  “Father, I’m offended.   I don’t flirt.”   Your hands went to the belt of the coat, unknotting it.   Out of the corner of your eye, you saw his head tip as your hands unhooked every last button.   “I know a little flirting won’t do much to sway you.   If I’m going to debase myself, I’ll do it properly.”   You opened the coat to reveal everything.   You had obviously not worn any clothes beneath his coat, and you rolled the material down your shoulders before daintily crossing your leg.

“Y/N,” your name was a warning.   You licked your lips, a small action, glancing over at him.

“Do we have a problem, Father?” you asked.   He looked away from you, retracting his hands from their perch.   He rubbed the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes in a measuring moment.   You regarded him innocently.   Even if he did not know, you knew he would relent.   Sure enough, his next glance was alight with a different energy.   You slid down the pew and he followed, grabbing the coat and tossing it behind him.   For a moment, you sat side-by-side, and you teased him with almost-kisses, rubbing your nose against his cheek, lips brushing his jawline.  

Then his hands went around your waist and tugged.   Before long, you were sitting in his lap, knees cradling his hips, kissing with unabashed fervour.

“Now you can think about me when I’m not here,” you teased, nipping his throat, hands unbuckling his belt.   He looked down, breathing hard, each exhale running across your lips.  “You can look out and remember how we fucked right here.”   He groaned.  You opened his pants, tugged them down his hips enough to lower his boxers.   He was already stiff and you wet your hand, careful and purposefully slow, but eventually stroked him to a perfect hardness.   His hands remained on your waist, his gaze attempting to rest on your face but inevitably falling aside.   His eyes closed a bit, head tipping back as you worked him in your hand.   You couldn’t help but kiss the exposed line of his throat.    “You’re so beautiful,” you whispered.  “I love when you let go.  Love when you let me use you like this.”   Though you were on reliable protection, condoms had been used occasionally, less so these days.   You thus led him to you, your own hand preparing your already wet sex, and he was inside of you before his own gasp could finish.

“Just like that,” you rasped, hands sliding up his chest.   You swivelled your hips, lifting them a bit, and he made a low noise, his eyes opening again.   He stared up at you, meeting your next thrust.   You groaned and kissed the side of his face.   “You broke quickly today,” you said, your own hand circling your clit as your bodies worked in tandem.   “Honestly, Father, your submission is hardly a challenge anymore.”    You made a strange noise, choked and foreign when he all but slammed you onto him, hitting you deeper than before.   You wriggled a bit, gasping when his hands moved up your sides, palms sliding over your breasts before he encircled your arms.   His hands slid down your wrists, gripping them tight.  

“You should know better,” he grunted, pulling your hand away from you.   You yelped as he thrust upward again, and your heart began to race with great anticipation as he pushed your arms back, locking your hands behind you in a steady grip.   “After our time together, I expected you to understand submission when it’s presented.”   You breathed much harder, your chest rising and falling quickly.   He held your hands in one of his, his other hand returned to your chest, thumb circling a nipple.   He leaned towards you to speak directly, that scraping voice now growling obscenely in your ear.   “Do you think you do not already occupy my thoughts?  That you’re not what consumes me when I lecture the flock on weakness and sin?”   You moaned, his hand sliding low to rub you where you needed.   “Where we fuck has little consequence on where I will think about it.”   You moaned again when he swore, such depravity on his lips always affecting you.  

You were slowly building towards that magnificent crest when he stopped touching you, hand likewise releasing your wrists.   You had tipped your head back and closed your eyes, but you now looked at him with obvious confusion and equal desperation.

“Get down,”  Castiel said, nodding his head to the side.   “And get on your knees.”

It took a moment because you were reeling, physically toiling with that last endurance and mentally calculating this sudden switch.   You always adored when Castiel assumed control but he rarely acted of his own volition during sex.  It was always an after-thought or second moment.   But this—this you could get used to.  This was the very fantasy you had conjured all that time ago.   You so enjoyed breaking him down and tying him up, teasing him until he begged, until he fucked you in a needy haze.   But you had long anticipated this volta and took a moment to accept its reality.  

When he pinched your inner thigh, it snapped you to attention.   You managed to lift yourself off of him, groaning and whimpering as he slowly slid out of you.   You stood on shaky legs and stepped out of the pew, into the aisle.   He turned around and looked at you expectantly.  You lowered yourself onto your knees, using the discarded coat as something of a cushion.   You had a tentative fantasy of being fucked against that rough carpeting, but those scrapes and burns would be saved for another day.  

You were fully prepared to lean forward and give him the blow job of a lifetime, but he suddenly stood and stepped out of the pew.   You turned your head, looking up at him in confusion, but he grabbed you by your hair and turned you forward again.   Your heart skipped a beat, breath catching again.   You were aroused and confused, though your questions were answered when you heard the whistle of leather and fabric, belt slipping out of its loops.   He crouched behind you and gathered your hands again, securing them as you had done to him a hundred times.   Once they were fastened, he sat himself on the edge of the pew again, facing you.  

“Open your mouth,” he said without hesitation, speaking as any warrior of heaven might, “and see if your obedience might save you in retrospection.”    You nodded submissively, tried not to smile while playing your new character.   Your stomach had knotted with slight nerves, but excitedly.  You and Castiel had been intimate time and again.  You trusted him, every safe word and boundary long since established.

You shuffled towards him, the coat ruffling beneath your knees, and you leaned over to lick the underside of his cock as you usually did.   But he reached out, sliding his fingers into your hair and cupping the back of your head.  “Properly,” he growled, a spike of heat pooling low in your body.   You took him in your mouth, relished in the sound he made as you worked your mouth over him.   You were accustomed to having your hands for aid, stroking him where your mouth did not, holding onto his knees or thighs or hips.   You could only lean against him and bob your head, taking him as far as you could.   It was a bit sloppier than usual but he did not seem to mind one bit.  

This continued for a bit, his grip tightening in your hair.  Given the sudden way he was pitching his hips and the uneven rumble of breath, you knew he was close.   You were happy to swallow him down, expecting that much as his fingers curled tight behind your head.   But then he pulled your head back and you panted, looking at him confusion.    He opened his eyes and looked at you, gaze falling purposefully down.   Your eyes opened a little wider and you felt an actual thrum below, hot and needy.   You nodded, understanding his silent query.   He stroked himself once and that was all it took before he was coming on your chest.   You shuddered as if the orgasm was your own, remaining on your knees as that substance rolled across your breasts.

You both struggled to catch your breath.   He eased himself to complacency while you waited, thighs somewhat quivering, a drop of cum trickling between your breasts.   He readjusted his clothes with no great hurry, buttoning his pants before rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.   You weren’t sure what was going to happen next, your arousal feeding off the surprise and anticipation.   Castiel leaned forward and seemed to consider you, then he ran his hand across your chest and gathered some of the mess on his fingers.   You looked down as he brought his hand to your face, and you parted your lips in a wordless wonder when you realized what he was asking.    You knew you could safe word at any moment but oh god, you wanted to do this—

You leaned forward and licked his hand clean, looking up at him as your tongue circled each finger and swiped his knuckles.   He turned his hand and cupped your chin, squeezing it gently.   Then he nudged you backward and you shuffled as best you could.  He pried the coat out from under you and used it to clean off the rest of you.  

“Come with me,” he then said, standing, draping the coat over his arm.   He took a few steps away then looked back at you.  “Y/N.”    You tried standing but it was a little difficult.   He took hold of your arm and hoisted you to your feet.   You felt a little more aware of your nakedness somehow, more so when he started to walk to the door beyond the altar.  

“Uh, Cas—”

“Father Castiel, insolent child,” he grumbled, turning to you.  You stifled a reaction to that, blinking and breathing before looking pointedly down yourself.

“Father,” you said, “I’m not wearing anything.”

“Yes,” he said.  “I can see that.”   There was a brief pause and then he turned away again, continuing like nothing had happened.   “Come with me.”    You swallowed, hands still very much bound behind you, but you trailed after him nonetheless.   You walked a familiar path, crossing the sacristy to the back door.   It led to his personal rooms just beside the church… but you had to walk outside to reach it.   There would be no one loitering on that strip of property but all the same, you paused by the door, heat coiling below.  

“Father,” you said.  “What if someone sees?  What would they say about you?”   He threw you a withering glance, opening the door.

“They will rightly assume I am distributing penance unto a sinner,” he said.  “Now follow.”   You took a breath and did so, gasping as the cool night air rolled over your naked body.   He closed the door behind you and locked it, crossing the small bridge to his own door.   You followed after him, looking around even though there was no one nearby.   You shivered in the cold, however, goosebumps rising over every inch of skin, nipples hardening almost painfully.   Castiel fumbled with his keys, aiming to press the appropriate key into the lock when he dropped them.   They clattered to the floor and you looked at each other.   His expression clearly told of his expectations.  

“I don’t have hands at the moment,” you said dryly, shivering again.  It was a wickedly delightful contradiction to the heat still running below your waist.   God, you must have been soaking down there, especially with those looks he kept throwing you, and that voice—

“You are very intelligent, Y/N,” Castiel said, “find a way.”

You stared at him for a moment, unable to help the rebellious regard, but you eventually lowered yourself onto your knees.   The ground was cold and rough and you were careful leaning over, grabbing the keys with your teeth and lifting your head back up.   He reached down and took them from your mouth, smiling at you.

“Good,” he said, the word more of a grunt as he finally unlocked the door.   He grabbed you and helped you up again, guiding you inside.   You shivered again, not for the cold but the sudden change of temperature, warmth embracing you all at once.   “Bedroom,” Castiel said, one word with such promise and fire that you stumbled in your quick approach.   He followed behind you, tossing the coat somewhere, and you stood at the foot of the bed in wait.    He stepped up behind you, leaning down to kiss the side of your face.   You hummed contently, tipping your head, and he kindly pressed a few more kisses down your face, neck, shoulder.   He undid the belt meanwhile.   You stretched your hands once free, twisting your wrists to test them.   You returned them in front of you and rubbed them, though the sensation sent tingles elsewhere.  

“Retrieve that bible,” he said, tossing the belt aside.   You went to the bedside table, glancing at him out of the corner of your eye.   He was rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, though it remained fully buttoned and collared—just how you liked.  You grabbed a bible out its usual compartment  and returned to him, looking him in the eye as you handed it over.   He took it, folding it under his arm before grabbing your chin and drawing you close.   Your mouths almost touched, his lips brushing yours as he spoke.  “It’s not the place of a sinner to meet their judge’s eye.”

“I thought only God could judge us,” you replied, rebellious nature not so easily quelled.   You stumbled when he suddenly redirected you, nudging you towards the bed.  

“God,” he said as you tumbled forward, catching yourself on the edge of the bed.   He kicked your legs apart and moved between them, bending you over the curve of the bed’s foot.   “And me,” he said, tone sharp, voice deep.   You said nothing, did nothing, just remained where you were, listening to the flip of pages as he skimmed his text.    All of a sudden, the book was in front of you, open on the bed.   “Read this,” he said, pointing to a verse, pushing your head closer to the book.   You were fully bent over, feet firmly planted, spread too far to press your thighs together and alleviate the tension between your legs.  

“What are you going to do?” you asked, licking your lips.   You didn’t look at him but you didn’t have to, his hand sliding over your backside in the next second.   It was a gentle caress, rubbing the skin, but you knew exactly what was coming.

“I’ll see your punishment administered,” he said, lightly slapping your rear.  Your knees already felt weak and he had hardly begun.   You swallowed, turning your eyes down to the open text.

“Slaves,” you began, yelping when he smacked your ass, much harder than that first teasing slap.  

“Read,” he demanded.  You gathered breath and focussed again.

“Slaves,” you repeated, “obey your earthly masters—”  You fought a reaction when he smacked you again, the same exact place, skin singing, “—with respect and fear.”   He hit the other cheek, your fingers curling into the bedspread.   “And with sincerity of heart—ahh—”   You lowered yourself, dropping to your elbows instead of your hands.   He kept your hips where they were, backside now curving obscenely, exposing a bit more than before.   His hand returned to the same place, though, and you wished you could see if it had reddened, how much and how fast, like his skin did beneath your own palm.   “Just as you would obey Christ,” you finished the line.

“Keep going,” he said, hand diving between your thighs, earning a squeak as he stroked you.   “Y/N.”  

“Obey them,” you continued, breath catching when he smacked your ass again, leaving you pitifully wet and wanting, “not only to win their favour…”

It was four lines altogether, barely a paragraph in the text and somehow the longest reading you ever endured—and by the end of it you were writhing, your own wetness streaking your thighs, either by his teasing ministrations or your own dripping arousal.   Your backside was positively singing, though he had occasionally rubbed and soothed the skin between slaps.   Either way, once you reached the end of the final line and he released you, you all but collapsed against the bed, bible open beneath your cheek.  

He broke character for a moment, tending your abused backside and letting you settle.   You could have continued but he was not used to a dominating position, so it served as a respite for both of you.   Once matters had been tended and the moment eased, his hands returned to your tender flesh and gently stroked.   He helped you up until you were kneeling in the center of the bed, facing him.  

He was such a softie under everything.   You were already picturing all the things you were going to do to him once you were back in command.  But for now you blinked up at him, wore your best submissive face and licked your lips.  

“What now?” you asked.   “Are you ready to fuck me again?”   You dropped your gaze to his crotch and saw there was a faint bulge there, growing with steady interest.   He just looked at you like you were the most innocent flower in existence—patronizingly so, character returned.      He leaned down towards you, fingers running down your sensitive backside.

“There are better ways to pay penance,” he said, lightly scratching the tender skin.  You arched your back, your chest brushing against his.   His hands slipped low very quickly, under your thighs and knocking you off balance.   You flopped onto your back and his hands moved under your knees, spreading you wide.    He held you like that then tipped his head, staring intently.   “Touch yourself,” he said, dark voice moving right through you.   You obeyed happily, hand moving to that desperate, wet heat and administering the attention it needed.   It was so easy with him looking at you like that, his thumbs circling the inside of your knees, the growing strain in his pants.   You were almost there, head thrown back and whispers of his name on your lips.   Then he grabbed your hands and pulled them away.  He once more gripped your knees when you tried to snap them closed.  

“Castiel,” you whined, humping the air.   He pinned your hips down and crawled over you, and damnit no one who was wearing a clerical collar should ever be giving that look to anyone.  And you were so needy and wanting and none of this was fair—

“I told you to stay here,” he said, kissing the side of your face lovingly despite his dark tones.   “You should have listened to me.”

“I…I want…”

“I know.”   He kissed below your jawline, down your neck to your shoulder.   “Not tonight.”

“What?”  Maybe he wasn’t such a merciful softie under everything.   You would rather go another round with the bible.

“You won’t come tonight,” he said again, continuing to pepper affectionate kisses.   “And when you think on your desires,” his hand reached between your bodies and pat your cunt, causing your hips to buck, “then maybe next time you will heed my instructions.”

“Castiel—”  You began when he grunted in protest.   You sighed, a broken, jagged sound.   “Father, please.”  

“The penance is for your soul,” he said, and you whimpered as he licked below your ear, easing a finger inside your wet, sensitive sex.   “The will of God, broken child.”  You moaned at that, and he was fucking you with two fingers before long.   You thrust against him even though he offered no stimulation to your swollen, needy clit.   But he slid a third finger inside you, his other hand pushing your hair out of your face as he looked down at you.   You scrunched up your features, made a little noise with each quick thrust.    He slowly pulled his hand away and you moaned again, attempting to follow with your hips.   He held you down before climbing off.   “Touch yourself again,” he said.  “And don’t finish.”   You weren’t sure you could manage but you tried, gently touching your sensitive clit and rubbing a circle over it.   You made a strangled sound, continuing to slowly circle it while he undressed.   Then he grabbed your hands again, pressing them above your head.   “I trust bindings are unnecessary.”

“Y-yes, Father,” you said, yelping when his hands dropped to your hips and suddenly flipped you over.   You grabbed the headboard, locking your fingers around the bars as he lifted your hips.   You groaned in agony as he bent behind you and started kissing and licking your outer lips, teasingly dipping forward and flicking that over-sensitized nub.   You thrust your hips back but he pulled away, holding you steady as he aligned himself to your entrance.    This wasn’t a usual position of yours but you were already pressing against him as he eased inside of you.   You moaned, long and low, as he filled you and leaned over you.   He pulled your hair back and dropped his lips to your ear.

“You seem to enjoy your own immorality,” he said, rocking his hips and thrusting forward again.  You yelped, shoving your face into the pillows.   Your head turned slightly as he continued to speak into your ear, all the while riding you with a ruthless intensity.   “You want to be fucked?” he asked, nipping your shoulder.  “It’s a depraved word… suited to demons and whores…. who take each other like animals.”   He spread your legs a bit further, panting against your ear as he hit you deep.   You made a sound at every thrust, breathing hard in-between noises.   “If you insist on that behaviour, you will be punished accordingly, girl.”

“Father,” you moaned, almost sobbing into the blankets and pillows.

“Yes,” he rasped, “I am your priest, your path to heaven.”   The headboard of the bed was repeatedly hitting the wall.   With all the racket, you could only be grateful he was the only resident priest.   You were not quiet, yourself, panting and moaning and whimpering, whispering his name as he bit your shoulder.   “You will do as I say,” he rumbled, “make your body mine so its spirit might be saved.”

“Yes,” you managed, “yours.  Yes.”    You groaned as he moved off of you, pulling out and sitting back.

“Come here,” he said.   Your shaky arms somehow lifted you and you turned around.   He held out a hand and sat waiting.   You gripped his arm as you moved closer, climbing onto his lap.  He was inside you quickly and you shuddered, gripping his shoulders, this vantage filling you much differently.    He pinched a nipple and you squeaked, rocking your hips.  “Show me,” he growled, “show me what good this body is.”  With another faint tremor, you fucked him how he asked, trying to fight the way this position affected you, managing to provoke your clit on each thrust.  

“Oh, Father—”

“Don’t finish,” he said, almost too kindly.   You released a choked noise, a cry caught in your throat as you tried to reign your body under control.   He must have taken pity (or grown impatient) because you were on your back in the next moment and he was driving into you.   You wrapped your arms around him and held tight, eyes closing as his thrusts turned erratic.  He pulled out of you before coming, making a bit of a mess between your thighs before he practically collapsed on top of you.   You clutched him, your legs still loosely hooked around his waist, his hands running soothingly up your hips and sides.   You still teetered on that brink, sweat sliding over your skin from every exertion.   You just lay there breathing hard until Castiel leaned over you and kissed you tenderly.  

“Do you want to finish?” he asked, mouth barely parted from yours.    Your body screamed yes but your mind calculated everything as a collective, and you imagined finally coming after a prolonged wait—and you thought about all the plans you had for him and you smiled, shaking your head before kissing him.

“I’ll wait, Father,” you whispered, “just like you said.”

He groaned, deepening the kiss before finally separating.

“Let me care for you,” he said, kissing your temple then moving away.   “Let me clean your body.”   You lay there, watching him gather the usual supplies before he made good on his promise.   You rested in his arms as he minded everything, and it was a nice change of pace.   He cleaned your inner thighs and you bit your lip as he gently wiped at your sex.  

“Oh god,” you whispered.  “I won’t last the night.”   He kissed your cheek, cradling you in his arms.

“You will,” he said with certainty.  “And you will be rewarded.”   Oh, you could sign up for that.

You made sure he was okay as well, sharing weak little kisses through it all.  Once everything was cleaned, your bodies included, you were lulled to a pleased, hazy stupor.   You snuggled under the covers and allowed sleep to overcome you.   He stroked your arm as you drifted off, and you might have murmured a hazy, “love… you…” before sleeping.    Had you been fully conscious, you would have panicked at such an admission.  The ridiculous sex was one thing—and you called it a love affair because that just rolled off the tongue—but surely this added unnecessary complications, even as it rippled through every muscle and nerve.   You thought back to the lack of classification for your so-called relationship… but it was all pushed aside to a distant morning.  

You had fallen asleep with the tickle between your legs receding, but you awoke right on the cusp of an orgasm.    Heart already beating quickly, you opened your eyes to a blurry white ceiling before blinking down.   You moaned brokenly, morning voice weak, all the blankets pushed aside and Castiel’s face buried between your thighs.   You plucked at the bedsheets beneath you before coming, crying out and shaking.   He slowly, gently ate you out as you fell from that height, murmuring nonsense as he still slowly swiped and licked and sucked.   Your chest heaving, you gripped the bedsheets and pressed your head back, his name falling from your lips as he brought you over a second orgasm.    You collapsed against the bed, panting, sated, as he kissed your inner thigh before returning to your side.   You flopped against him, kissing him messily.   He pulled back minutely, speaking into the kiss.

“Your feelings are reciprocated,” he rumbled, “for better or worse.”

“Oh, Father,” you teased, smiling up at him.   You reached down and found he was delightfully hard, and you took him in hand and squeezed gently.   His features fluttered with the appropriate expressions and you kissed him again.   “We’re just a couple of sinners beyond hope, aren’t we?”

“Beyond hope,” he repeated, “yes.   That sounds correct.  The revelation I prayed for has been delivered; there’s nothing to hope for anymore.”    You made a surprised noise when he rolled you onto your back, your legs spreading and wrapping around him.   He pushed inside of you and your fingers laced, your fucking turned to a sort of lazy lovemaking as he kissed you, mouth then resting against your shoulder.

“What revelation is that,” you finally asked, rocking your hips against his.

“I anticipated God’s word,” he said, speaking into your ear, “a calling from beyond—confirmation I was on the right path.   And I received you.”   He kissed below your ear and you turned your head, granting him all the access he desired.  

“I’m a match for God’s word, am I?” you teased.  He kissed your throat and sighed against the skin there.

“Yes,” he then groaned, hips moving faster so your own breath stuttered.   “You are every glimpse into the glory of earth.  Heaven takes what it will, its bindings not easily severed, but there is nothing to stop the well-deserved worship of humanity.”

“Castiel,” you sighed, tightening your legs around him.

“Y/N,” he returned.   “I recognize one named sin between us—to love something more than God is a… profound offense.”

You laughed lightly, squeezing his hands in yours.  

“He’ll have a hell of a time stopping me,” you said, and Castiel likewise smiled against your skin.

“Hell could not stop it either,” he said, finally pulling his hands from yours so he could move one between your bodies.   You wrapped your arms around his neck and panted with the building sensations.  

“Guess that leaves just you and me,” you said, pressing your fingers into his skin as you came apart with a shake and breathless moan, Castiel moving harder.

“Enough,” he said, “that would be… enough.”

And there wasn’t any real sense of direction, even as he came inside of you, but you held each other for a long moment after that.   And the future never seemed all that clear, and the details forever evaded you, but there was an honest truth in his smile and you were not unnerved or uncertain or scared.  

You kissed him and swore you tasted heaven.

castiel x reader masterpost