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highsviolets · 4 years

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breathless, chapter 3: an obi-wan x 90s!reader au

summary: in which you and Ben discover that nothing is like the first time, but maybe time is a construct anyway

word count: 3.2k+

cw: kissing. light references to smoking, a lil angst, some language

A/N: this could not have happened without @afogocado. Thank you for encouraging me to continue this lil fic and an endless supply of ewan pics and listening to me ramble and omg ilysm

references // previous // next // series masterlist

“my curfew’s at midnight.”

Ben doesn’t look at you when he speaks. Well, he does. Just not right now. He’s busy at the moment, tinkering with something in the hood of his car. hunter green t-shirt — auburn hair — something out of goddamn salinger novel ((or maybe dos passos))

you look up at him. you’re settled on a skateboard ((he’s far too trusting of your ability to remain upright)). listless currents from a fan — somewhere, in the garage, you think — ripple in that nomadic space between his t-shirt and your skin.

remarks are so curious a thing, and you watch yours descend upon him. not quite a cascade. not quite a pittance of cleansing summer rains. it’s something other — but not ethereal — it’s here, it’s now, it’s taking you, too, holding you in thrall — words bump into skin ((sinew and sin)).

“it’s about doing the right thing.” the grind of one metal locking its relatives, corollaries, corrosions, into place has ceased. or maybe only paused. you’re not sure the car is done. but Ben looks at you, and you know he’s done. done explaining himself.

the skateboard’s wheels squeak and cry out against the pavement when you adjust. legs stretched out — ragged vans pointing above ((wherever that is)) — violet tipped hands clutching the back edges — knees exposed — just kissing the faintness of tangible ((affection or affectations, what’s the difference?))

“i know.” freckles gaze into the sun, his eyes, reflections. he expects your explanation to be plaintive. institutional. it’s not. “i just wanted to know why.”

Ben shakes his head, once, twice, thrice — face still half-soaked in the shadow of the hood — astonishment is plain to see in the flatness of his cheeks — the waltzing of his tongue on his upper lip.

Two seconds later he is right there, crouching ((muscles straining)) next to you, the leather tips of air jordans exotic and smooth against the external lateral bone of your left knee. His eyes, screwed up at the invasion of the sun against their tranquility, stare at the meeting of his shoes and your body and then he is gazing at you.

angels manipulate his mouth into a smile — Ben’s yours, now — hands are clasped — battles halt in the ceasefire. “I should really stop underestimating you.”

Ben reaches out. Two fingers ride the length of your cheekbone. They still as skin morphs into frizzled, sun-bleached hair at the crown of your head, in that space between your ear and eyebrow. your head nudges into his terms of surrender. “That would probably be best,” you say. The pause between conditional tense and adverb is like the space between you and him, an assured hesitancy, caught between becoming and being, trapped in an interstitial existence.

it’s so fucking americana it hurts.

hair , secured by a scrunchie the same shade as your fingertips, is given a light tug. let’s get you home, he says, and your presence wilts in upon itself , he senses the rush of photosynthesis exiting your body and brings your lips to caress his.

it doesn’t feel like the first time — nothing ever does — familiar in semantics — murky in meaning — singeing and sweet — a transfusion of significance between you and him.

the breaking away comes with a solemn sigh. he’s rising and bringing you with him. you resist the urge to stage a coup and use the skateboard to rocket yourself into his arms ((a safehouse you’ve found)).

___

time: a nebulous concept for you. it’s pages dogeared and how many days until the next cd is shipped to the store and how many t-shirts you’ve accosted from oaken drawers.

it’s a far more solid object for him. a tangible weave of textures and patterns that he notices in the scrunchies now in the car’s island of misfits ((he still hasn’t told you the make and model)) and how many times you guide his hand around your waist while you eat ice cream ((vanilla in a cone with sprinkles)) and the pens he’s busted through since you first met ((he knows the number , they’re immortalized in a tin cup on his shelf))

Ben’s holding one that has yet to join its brothers in the tin graveyard. The clicker rests against his teeth. It looks seductive in his mouth. Like he can make you keen with just an imitation of the real thing, with words and ideas. Words twirled around the air have power. You both know this.

You’re the one who’s twirling, though. spinning around his bedroom — boombox emitting a Billy Joel song at least ten years mature — mouth forming words you have yet to possess the courage to blare — so much like your kisses.

((the words come through in the translation , the body moves but he hears the soul))

he watches you and he is transfixed. he knows you do not know how much you are revealing to him. at least not consciously. but you want him to crawl into your soul and never leave. he does not see it or hear it or feel it as much as he experiences truth, the clumsy trio dotting patterns across his extremities and seeping into his essence ((what it means to be human)) like an antibiotic ointment. he is scared you will stick to things for which you are not designed. but it’s too late and he’s covered in the stuff, slick with you. unleashed in a trigonometric function of three sides ((him / you , other)). sins and signs and echoing sunlight.

your smile mimics his as you edge toward the bed where he’s sprawled out. you laugh and he matches you, shaking his head in rare & unguarded ((unabashed , unembarrassed)) regard. you are in harmony.

skin meets skin — heels arched into the carpet — he’s too strong too stubborn — and you fail and fall and spill over him — tumbling over his torso, legs mashed — the heat of his victorious grin burns the atmospheric bubble arching over the two of you.

You’re not sure if the record stops or if you’ve just ceased hearing it. he arranges you ((like a bouquet, like a song)) on the bed. he stares down at you. the eyes are stormy again, like before he kissed you the first time ((but nothing’s ever like the first time)). they say eyes are the window to the soul. Your hands whisk the hair that’s dangling there, like you can quiet him by quelling his independently-minded locks. it seems to work. he blinks and when you see the sun again it’s brighter, bluer, but maybe that’s because he’s so still now.

he does not move. He may not have danced but his soul is pressing into you like a dagger ((did you fall on a sword)). Ben cuts off your impending speech with conciliatory kiss. “i know , darling” , and the words etch themselves into reality against your body.

—-

Ben is distant and he is near to you all at once. There are corners of his being that you want to slide and drag and push to the surface. maybe if you do he will start to make sense. form follows function, he tells you, and the words feel as yellow as the pages on which they’re inked.

it doesn’t make sense to you — “you have too much sense, dear one” — elinor and marianne — but for all his purity he does not dance — no ricochets in his lever and pulley soul.

you are glass and flannel and he is steel and silk. he is not quite your sun, or your moon, or your stars, and not even your world. but you are rapidly terraforming to his sundry heights and arid permafrost and the devil’s sun that makes a home in his fingers, in his mouth ((yet he is not lucifer, nor abdiel perhaps he is raphael)).

Ben watches you soak in him. He takes note, n.b., nota bene, notes well, excellently, the stillness of your hands ((the tremors have lessened, but have they learned?)). your words are teal and vermillion and ecru and weeping with tannins. Ben deduces ease, easel, paint, art as you furrow into his chest. His mind infers souls through their bodies. Form follows function. Function follows form. Maybe it’s all the same, and Maybe It Isn’t.

Through your mirror he sees himself with you but he does not comprehend. He is bewildered.

nails boards cones sheets — teeth fingers knees breath — swerving form yielding function clutching grasping — all so very , sine qua non — aspectu sine logos — why does the latin transform into Greek

Morpheus, he thinks, nods sagely. he hurls ticket stubs and lipstick napkins and sense ((you)) into shoeboxes and mailboxes and shadowboxes. he refuses a photo of you, with you, for you and takes your knotted eyes and throws them, too, into the nearest body of water. you are close but you are not near ((droplets on tanned skin, drowning in the water)) and it is all he can do to obey his life and he does not know that sartre laughs at him and de beauvoir pokes her lover.

you are not at the middle of your life and neither is he. the path is still obscured by the trees. is charon delivering you to this threshold of the styx ((stones, bones, death)) or the tip of the world where the stars scrape into the heavens with a different edge? he is rising: he brings you with him. so it was in the past, but does the past presage the future? if he is raphael then he is virgil ((Maybe it’s all the same, and Maybe It Isn’t))

epic firestorm of righteous creation myths — empirical histories — imperial truths. but no. dante, where is dante, is he off in firenze, dancing in florid colors? no. dante is in exile, civitas ex nihilo : in need of virgil. guide him to transcendence.

____

you do not see him for several days. maybe it is weeks. you aren’t sure. time is not empirical, Ben has told you, it’s something you have to feel through its measuring ((sometimes vibrancy tips out of his ridges)). but you wish he had let you take a picture of the two of you. you are more like him than you realize , the truest truths are the ones you can touch.

it is the longest you have not seen him, and it is very hot. the pool, the lake, they’re not the same when you can’t thread sand through his hair and be abducted by his gaze as you read ((spirited away from his bookshelf)).

you’re running out of books — running out of time? — but time is not statistical — multidimensionality of you and him — there is no space where he does not compress himself to exist with you.

“it’s not a phase, mom,” you say, and take another bite of cereal.

“you need to make up your mind.” the crunch is effective at blocking out the noise, and your mind continues on its path. you wonder if DJ Tanner ever felt like this. hair surfaces in your bowl, and you pluck it out, grimacing. Maybe you should cut your hair. it’s hot out. DJ had short hair.

a rap on the table — spoon? knuckle? you can’t tell — strikes you. the words reality and wake up and decisions and wasteful are abrasions on your knees, still sore from too many tries on Ben’s skateboard ((he had smiled at your earnestness and kissed away the latent tears , let your body do its healing)).

you do not speak words so much as you give birth to emotions, agonizing and cruel and hideous. you do not know what you say or if you even say it ((dissociation)). but it is metallic in your mouth and turncoat shaking fingers and the sinking sound of unharnessed emotion in your ears.

it is hot and stifling and too much when you leave. nothing is feeling right — that stillness has lodged in your diaphragm again — opaque skies mock you — rain comes and you are colliding with nature and you are losing

Ben is standing underneath the overhang at the library ((it always comes back to the library)) and you wonder if you’re finally hallucinating. you voice forms itself to his name and he turns, damp hair following a few seconds later, and he drops his cigarette at the sight of you.

Exhilaration delivers specks of mud on your legs and arms but it is no matter. the time and space continuum has rectified and he is in front of you, giving you a cigarette, gray t-shirt abstracting to his muscles as much as your vans cling languidly to soggy toes.

he exhales smoke the way he says your name. it is precise and pious and it blooms over you like pink and purple hydrangeas.

Ben sees the gouges in your eyes and chastises your traitorous hands and absorbs you. cigarettes slump, abandoned, as he presses your cheek to his heart ((the conjunction of your logic and heat meeting his fervent center)). you cling to him and he does not resist but molds himself to you. time stops ((it’s an illusion)). rain continues. Ben’s kisses glide along your hairline, your forehead. it tickles and you laugh and his smile takes shape against your frontal cortex.

you pull him into the rain even as he protests ((but he’s laughing and the clouds pause, time takes a breath , are you time)) and you kiss him. it is like something breaks in him or perhaps the rain has induced erosion or maybe he is like you and there is a filigree thread connecting his head with his heart and constructing a railway through his body. Ben is all the lightning — the sky has crowned a new Zeus — you hold him as the thunder in his soul cracks and pulls

((maybe kant was wrong about time and heidegger was right about dwelling and nothing crystallizes in his soul like you do))

the two of you alight to his car ((still unknown yet cordial, native)) and when you reach his building he opens your door and scoops you up in his arms and it is like that first time by the pool ((but nothing is ever like the first time)).

your hand makes a fist in his soggy shirt and his hair is pasted to his forehead and you cannot censor the searing, violent, desideratum swooping over you ((nor can you pause the absurd laugh that gushes out of your heart at his display of exorbitant chivalry)).

“i can walk,” you say as he wades through water that’s now folding over his skin, lapping up his electrolytes.

“yes, dearest, but you can’t swim, can you?” he likes to respond with questions, but this one’s an answer. Ben’s clutching you so tightly that you can’t see his face but you feel the contentment in his tone—it dashes into you like the rain currently encompassing the Earth, hesitant with the effort of exertion, with the weight of metal souls. “I’m just preemptively forbidding a disaster, darling.” there’s a tenderness bridging Ben’s raw power and mischievousness — the network protrudes — extracorporeal ((does he know?))

He cherishes the rain, Ben tells you later, when existence reduces to you and him and incandescent petrichor and the pasticcio of kisses, heartbeats, palms on skin.

___

Ben is not carefree, but he is not serious. it is like he has learned that he can take up space ((empirical)). there is less constriction, tension, stenosis in his body ((the filigree is stretching his limbs)). movements are not languid but nor are they demonstrations of correctness. not slouching — just not strictly upright.

your hair gets tangled, like his sheets, like his legs in yours, and you tell him you want to cut it. An auburn eyebrow lifts archly, and he runs a finger down the length of your arm, tracing the veins ((your life)). “how will I teach you how to swim if you chop off your legs, darling?” Ben’s voice is charcoal. gray, yellow red orange burning, glowing at the edges. He draws up blueprints for cities in your open palm.

You make a quip about the ship of state and he snorts. When he shakes his head, his other hand — the one not serving as an architect on your body — shags through his hair, tanned skin meeting with copper effervescence in a ragged tryst. “i like its hows” he murmurs against your lips and you cannot protest, not when his caustic tongue ices, soothes, pacifies your conflagration.

The two of you are at the pool, again. He’s on his break. The air’s circulation is viscous, shoving over your skins. It straps you in — like the fanny pack around his waist. Ben’s donned his lifeguard pack for work, swapping out his array of gauche accessories for the traditional red and white accoutrement now fastened at his hips.

the most important things in his life, Ben thinks as he inhales the light spice of a Malboro, start with “l”. learning, lady, library, liberty, lake, logos, love. he doesn’t know from where last word originates; he must learn ((connaître ou savoir?)). in his experience, there’s no such thing as luck. He feels like a character in one of those war movies filmed right before he was born, smoking lucky strikes in a foxhole and just trying to stay alive, goddamnit, just trying to get through the war.

The two of you are always watching each each other. The obtuse phenomenology plays out like a courtly masquerade. veritas, quid est veritas, for here both object and deception are degrees of truth. He smirks around the cigarette and you blush but your eyes hold his and you catch his approval and stuff it inside your heart.

Ben takes your hand and places it on his thigh as you speak. the two of you are straddling a lacquered yellow beach chair, offensive in its self-confidence. he leans forward and touches his forehead to yours. he likes to take initiative — he is making use of his knowledge, he told you once, mumbled and sleepy, when you had whispered the question against his shoulder late one night.

Ben brings himself nearer to you. sweat — splashes — dangling exertions — smoke — sunscreen. it all plays about your lips and in your blood and in his hands that keep yours pressed against his flesh. someone yells at him to get his ass back to work and Ben rolls his eyes.

“duty calls.” his actions, the chair: they embolden you to dip your voice, your thoughts, mayhap you actions to a lower register.

He ducks his head to peer at your face, like that first time when you were falling over ((but nothing is like the first time)). as he passes the remainder of the cigarette to you, the words he speak sound like him, carry his weight, refracted starlight from coal. “we all have a duty. even you.” Ben doesn’t need to say his duties; they are his life, his schedule, the notebooks in haphazard stacks under the bed, his tin cups of pens. you wonder if you are part of his list ((if the cables have let you traverse the journey from his heart to his head)).

when you tell him that he is diamond but you a like one of those new gems they make in labs — what are they called — moissanite, he shakes his head. “you are not so scientific, darling.” fingers squeeze yours. “you are burning skies and delimitations and biting stars — the most natural things that exist.”

((you are not sure if you believe him, because nothing is like the first time)).

#obi-wan x reader #obi wan x reader #obi-wan x you #obi wan x you #obi-wan imagine #usernobie #fic: breathless #afogocado #i had so much fun writing this #am v emo for ben kenobi #can he pls kiss me in the rain #(that's all i want)#is this an idfic?#idec #cris writes

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ourcollectivefantasy · 4 years

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OC Profile

The Basics ––– –

Age: 480 (Human equiv. 48)

Birthday: October 18th.

Star Sign: Scorpio.

Race: Sin’Dorei / Blood Elf

Gender: Cisgender Male

Face / Body Claim: Ewan McGregor

Marital Status: Married, but separated [for over 10 yrs]. No plans for divorce.

Relationship practice: Polyamory

Server: Wyrmrest Accord - Horde (Faction Neutral)

Physical Appearance ––– –

Wardrobe: 80s London Punk. Black on black, otherwise greyscale or muted, cool colours. Studded leather jackets, spiked combat boots, vintage punk rock band t-shirts. Prefers solids with classic lines. Almost all clothes are second hand from Charity Shops.

Hair: Bright ginger. Short faux-hawk style with long sideburns. In the Winter months, keeps a trim beard.

Eyes: Emerald green.

Height: 6′7″

Build: Swimmer/Jogger's athletic, slim build. Slightly under weight but muscled.

Common Accessories: Wears lots of rings of bone, metal, and stone on his fingers. A plethora of necklaces and bracelets on each wrist. Carries a Dwarven vintage carved silver cigarette case & matching lighter. Never without his comm and his motorcycle keys. Concealed throwing daggers in inside jacket pocket, as well as a coil of steel guitar strings, and full dagger in his boot, always. Wears a small silver hoop earring in right ear.

Distinguishing Marks: Sprayed with freckles all over his body and face. Missing both middle fingers. Thin white scar across his throat (affects his voice; graveled). Silver coin sized scars on fronts and backs of hands and feet. Banishment symbol burned into his chest. Small K scar over his heart; large K scar on right shoulder.

Tattoos: Small sound wave behind left ear. Maiden’s Anguish at base of throat/along trapezius. Pirate ship (enchanted) on left bicep. Two birds holding banner that says ‘BAD SEED’ over a skull on right bicep. Troll-style boa constrictor wraps from right knee, up thigh, and across hip. Small gypsy clan symbol (skull ontop of a rose) on lower back.

Personal ––– –

Profession: Founder and CEO of Blacksong Records.

Hobbies: Partying - frequent patron of Succulent Tart, Howling Owl, and Red Moon. Recreational drugs & drinking. All things music: goes to punk rock concerts, buys and trades vintage records, plays mech-guitar, repairs broken guitar pedals and amps. Riding and repairing motorcycles. Extreme sports, primarily stunt biking and surfing.

Languages: Traveler (Native), King’s Common, Dwarven, Thalassian, Orcish Common, Sign Language.

Residence: Lordaeron Coast, and sometimes Silvermoon.

Birthplace: Quel’Thalas

Religion: Mildly Old Ways/Traveler (Pagan).

Relationships ––– -

Spouse: Kharris Dawndancer-Blacksong

Dating: Aelberyn & Jericho Bloodsword (Primaries), Saeil Moonblade, Se’lysona Riverblade.

Children: Aelenna Sinead “Sean” Bloodsword & Fib Bloodsword, both almost 5 yrs.

Parents: Maebh Blacksong & Daigh Blacksong (deceased).

Siblings: Younger brother, Kieran Blacksong.

Other Relatives: One female younger cousin, Fox. Status unknown.

Sex & Romance ––– –

Sexual Orientation: Pansexual

Preferred Role: Dominant | Submissive | Switch

Preferred Position: Bottom | Top | Vers

Libido: Extremely High

Turn ons: Power, confidence, high intelligence, witty sense of humor, empathy, submissiveness, great conversation, flirty.

Turn offs: Trying-too-hard, mind games, wall flowers, air heads, big egos, pretty but no substance, bad conversationalists, people that only talk about themselves, drama queens, brats.

Love Language: Quality Time & Physical Touch

Kinks: BDSM, WAM, leather & latex, sensory deprivation, mask play, blood play, knife play, age or pet play, dirty talk, phone sex & sexting, being watched/performing or watching, sharing/group sex, cuckolding, orgies, sex clubs, casual sex.

Relationship Tendencies: Prefers casual sex and FWB. Romance adverse, and very selective about who he gets into commitments with. Once committed, stays in relationships a very long time and plays the emotional role of Dominant, with a focus on care giving and very protective.

Traits ––– -

* Bold your character’s answer.

Extroverted / In Between / Introverted

Disorganized / In Between / Organized

Close Minded / In Between / Open-Minded

Calm / In Between / Anxious

Disagreeable / In Between / Agreeable

Cautious / In Between / Reckless

Patient / In Between / Impatient

Outspoken / In Between / Reserved

Leader / In Between / Follower

Empathetic / In Between / Apathetic

Optimistic / In Between / Pessimistic

Traditional / In Between / Modern

Hard-working / In Between / Lazy

Cultured / In Between / Uncultured

Loyal / In Between / Disloyal

Faithful / In Between / Unfaithful

Additional information ––– –

Smoking Habit: Often. Smokes mainly bloodthissle. Drugs: Often. Very into party drugs. Long history of struggle with heroin. Alcohol: Often. “Defaults” to functioning alcoholic, but can get crazy at parties.

RP Hooks ––– –

Music Fans - He runs a small but successful punk rock music label. If you’re into rock, punk, or even just a music fan, you’ve probably heard of Blacksong Records or even one of his bands. You may even know his face from music magazines; he’s often in the background at concerts or industry parties. Feel free to mention it!

Pirates & Sailors - He used to run a very successful and well known salvage company (Atlas Treasure Salvage, or ATS). They were well known in the Booty Bay, Bilgewater, and Orgrimmar ports. It’s possible you saw him around “in the old days”.

Drugs - He’s well connected among drug dealers as both a buyer and seller. Got a big party you want to sell to? He’s your in. Or maybe you’re looking for pure quality and tired of thugs selling you stems in the Drag? He’ll get you the good stuff if you’re willing to pay top coin.

Motorcycles - He’s a frequent shopper at gear head garages around Quel’Thalas. He also stops off at biker taverns for a pint on the way home from work. You may have seen him. Or maybe you just notice the brand of his jacket or boots are a familiar favourite amongst aficionados.

Gossip Rags - Is your character SUPER into Silvermoon tabloids? Iloam is “reportedly” dating one of the hottest couples of the SMC Elite crowd, Baron & Baroness Aelberyn & Jericho Bloodsword. Paps frequently snap them slipping into vine covered cafes and exclusive night clubs. Your character may have a theory on the whole ‘are they or arent they’ debate that keeps socialites guessing on the trio’s relationships status.

OOC Info ––– –

Mun is 21+ in age. Dark themes/ERP friendly.

I have been playing WoW since the beta for Vanilla and gone through many phases of enjoying PvE aspect (including a raiding guild), but at this point I only play for RP and have no interest in game play. I prefer Discord text RP for 1:1 or small group scenes. I generally only login to game for RP events or by request.

For text RP, I am very bad about forum style/casual post RP and will generally lose track of it quickly. I also try to stray from forum style post on Tumblr for the same reason. The best way to RP with me to set a date/time to both login to Discord or game and set aside several hours to write out a scene together.

I’m a very fast typer and tend to do multi-para for scene sets only, and then fall into a more natural rhythm as the scene plays out. I do not ask that partners match my post length.

Communication is very important to me. OOC discussion of dark themes or comfort level with ERP will be discussed first. I am happy to FTB or avoid topics that are triggering. I also ask that my partners always feel comfortable letting me know if for any reason big or small, they need to cancel a scene or are not feeling up to it. Real life will always come first.

Contact Information ––– –

@ourcollectivefantasy is Iloam’s In-Character blog, shared with characters of Aelberyn and Jericho Bloodsword.

@blacksongrecords is Iloam’s record company blog. Look here for event announcements!

All follows from my OOC blog @desolatedangel.

I am reachable in-game via mail on the name: Ilóam

Feel free to send me an ask or message for my Discord handle, but if we haven’t met before I prefer we mutually follow each other’s Tumblr and interact a little bit before giving that out.

#character profile #iloam blacksong #please boost #if you so desire #:)#UPDATED #although I realize Ive never done one of these??#lol

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 47 [First-Class FLASHBack] - The Matrix Has You

First Thursday of the month, so that means going First Class. This time around on First-Class FLASHBack, we're checking back in with LegendaryFrog AKA Joseph Blanchette. Like all our First-Class Flash Artists, he was a prolific creator who had an influence on the overall genre. In particular, he organized several early large collaboration projects, bringing together teams of Flash Animators for compilations that dwarfed the typical uploads of the day. Two such collaboration projects that LegendaryFrog spearheaded demonstrate something that I've mentioned in the past: Flash Animators on the early web LOVED the Matrix movies. It is fitting that this would be the topic this week, as sixteen years and two days ago, the final installment of the Matrix Trilogy was released in theaters. On 28 March 2004, Blanchette would upload The Matrix Has You to Newgrounds, and a half year later on 20 September 2004, he would release The Matrix Still Has You. Both times, he and his team would be awarded Newgrounds Daily Feature.

The Matrix Has You consisted of the following short segments:

There Is No Spoon -- animated by Metal Maverick: A parody of Neo's visit to the Oracle, with Legendary Frog providing the voice for SpoonBoy

Château -- animated by the Super Flash Brothers: A recreation of the iconic scene where Neo faces down the Merovingian's goons in Matrix: Reloaded, this short features cameos by Astaroth from Soul Calibur, Ewan MacGregor Obi-Wan from the Star Wars Prequels, Legendary Frog's OC Kerrigan (in statue bust form), the swords Soul Edge from Soul Calibur, Ultima Weapon from Final Fantasy VII, and the Master Sword from Legend of Zelda, the toppling of a statue of Sadam Hussein, and Legolas from Lord of the Rings.

Zion Rave -- animated by Luke de Ayora: An excuse to bust out with any and every gif of people dancing, including the Peanut Butter Jelly Time Banana and the game sprite of Michael Jackson from the Moonwalker video game. It then veers off into left field when Luke decides to insert himself into the story instead of animating Neo and Trinity getting it on. It ends with a visit from Strawberry Clock from Newgrounds' Clock Crew, the self proclaimed "King of the Portal" (who is a topic for another day).

Burly Brawl -- animated by Richie Zirbes: A humorous take on the famous scene from Matrix Reloaded where Neo Takes on an Army of Agents Smith. This probably would have become the defining Flash Animation parody of the scene, but for the fact that just four days earlier on 24 March 2004, paultervoorde uploaded Super Mario Reloaded, a masterpiece of custom sprite work.

The Architect -- animated by Chris Boe: For some strange reason, Blanchett gives The Architect the exact same voice he would later use for Tom Bombadil in his One Ring: The Hobbit Flash 3 years later.

Final Fight -- animated by Joseph Blanchette: Legendary Frog's scathing critique of the ending to Matrix Revolutions.

The Matrix Still Has You featured a whole new crop of collaborators:

Agent Training -- animated by Cycon: A spoof of the "Woman in the Red Dress" scene from the first Matrix, this features shoutouts to other movies such as The Godfather, and A Few Good Men, a cameo by Jesus Christ, and an AOL advert.

Subway -- animated by Serge: A comedic take on the subway platform showdown between Neo and Agent Smith in the first movie. Watch for the blink-and-you'll-miss-it call back to the Bill & Ted franchise right at the beginning of the clip, stay for the well deserved dig at the reliability of Windows Millennium Edition.

Twins -- animated by Joseph Blanchette: The scene from Matrix Reloaded where Morpheus and Trinity face off in a parking garage against the ghostly albino twins working for the Merovingian is turned into a Public Service Announcement for seatbelt use. Includes gratuitous product placement (but no worse than the original source material), and a practical demonstration of Godwin's Law.

Mobil Ave -- animated by Joanime: a very anime-esque take on the part from Matrix Revolutions where Neo is stranded on a subway station that represents an interface between the machine world and the Matrix, because the Merovingian's Trainman refused him passage.

The Seige -- animated by Gerkinman: a downright silly parody of Zion's final stand. Features some heroic moments by Kid. Now if you'd only ever watched the movies, you might have been confused about who this Kid character was, because Reloaded and Revolutions set him up as a pretty significant secondary character but never elaborated on his backstory. That was because his backstory was actually revealed in one of the Animatrix shorts.

Legendary Frog had toyed with the idea of doing a third Matrix collaboration, to be titled The Matrix Has You Again, but did not get much past the preliminary animations of his own contribution. He did however do collaborations on other subjects, which we will cover in future installments of First-Class FLASHBack. As for next week's regular FLASHBack, we'll be looking at a work inspired by a different story of multiple iterations of the same hero having to save the world again and again.

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steamberrystudio · 5 years

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So, we see Nora's lovely blue bedroom in the demo... if it's not spoilery to ask, what does everyone else's bedroom look like? (LI's + Ally)

There actually was originally going to be a scene in Elliot’s bedroom, but it was cut out unfortunately.Ally - Has a really typical teenager’s room. It’s kept tidy and probably has a darker color scheme in muted mauve and purples. She probably has some fun and cozy lighting in it - like fairy lights or something else strung up over the bed or something.Corvin - Has a bright and airy room in blues and whites. His bed is always unmade, and there are usually a few things scattered about the floor. Not a complete wreck, but not perfectly tidy either.Danny - Has a really typical teenage boy room. Probably has lots of wood, with a lot of earthy tones as well. Everything is kept fairly neat, but it’s definitely a room that screams “A SPORTY DUDE LIVES HERE.” There is also a small aquarium for his fish.Elliot - Lots of band posters. Darker colors. A fair amount of space dedicated to his gaming console. He lives in a little apartment above the garage, so there’s a small kitchenette, but he doesn’t use it - so it’s just kind of empty. I imagine his room to have a cool hang-out vibe when it’s neat, but it probably tends to get a bit messy between cleanings.Ewan - His room is probably very cozy with a lot of well cared for plants, and lots of books. I imagine it having a very nature sort of feel to it. Lots of earth tones and sunlight. Marc - Massive, beautiful, immaculate and elegant. It’s like a room from a show home, probably. And it’s always kept very neat. He probably has a soft, neutral colors and lots of textured throws and pillows. And a massive bed of DOOM that you can just sink into. And a fireplace. Because, you know, he’s a brat.William - I imagine his room as small and very simple. He probably doesn’t have much outside of the necessities. No fancy decorations or anything like that. His bed is piled with a lot of warm blankets and pillows, though.

#asks #characters #bedrooms

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dreaminghour · 1 year

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Hayden/Ewan RPF - Prompt: List

Event: @domaystic Fandom: Star Wars RPF Rating: General audiences Prompt: 03 List Ship: Hayden/Ewan Context: References to real people are used fictiously. Words: 865

Hayden rounded the curve of the drive to find the garage door was already open, music playing from a beat up little radio, Ewan standing with hands on his hips and squinting at him.

"Well this is a pleasant surprise," he said, crossing toward him before he had even gotten out of the car, slapping him on the back as he hugged him. "Figured out the address after all, huh?"

"Well, I mean." Hayden shrugged but couldn't keep himself from grinning. "Turn about is fair play, right?"

"Is it?" Ewan said, a kind of faux lightness to his tone. "Can I get you something to drink? A coke or a water?"

"Nah, not right now. What're you working on?"

"Nothing at the moment," Ewan said, "just finished changing the oil and was cleaning up."

"Don't let me keep you."

So Hayden leaned against a bit of workbench that wasn't currently strewn with tools and things, sipping the cold pop he'd been handed while Ewan ran commentary on the machine he'd been servicing. Hayden hoped he sounded appropriately appreciative.

"So, to what do I owe the honor?" Ewan asked, finally washing his hands at the sink with pumice soap, scrubbing at the lines of grease under his nails. "I don't suppose you're finally doing a bit of housewarming as well?"

"Haven't you been here years now?"

"Yeah, but its the first time you're here, isn't it?"

"A gift for the unsuspecting host." Hayden just rolled his eyes. "No I, er, don't have a gift, but I have this."

He pulled out the notebook he'd stuffed in his back pocket and flipped open to the bookmarked page for Ewan to read once he'd finished wiping his hands. He opened his mouth as he began reading, but then paused, glancing up at Hayden.

"What is this?"

"You tell me," Hayden said with a shrug, keeping his expression mild.

"'Excuses Ewan Has Used to Drop By,'" Ewan began reading. "'Number one, housewarming gift.' You know as well as I do that barbeque tongs go missing, its always good to have tools. Even if you'd already had some, I assumed it would be… Yeah yeah."

At Hayden's look, leaning back once more, crossing his arms, Ewan resumed reading.

"'Number two, had to regift a bottle of whiskey.' You know I don't drink!" He sounded outraged but he was grinning. "And that was a 40 year old single malt scotch, not just any bottle of whiskey! I knew that you'd appreciate it, or if not, I could rest easy that someone I liked was drinking it in their coke."

Hayden covered his smile with a hand but just gestured with his eyebrows as Ewan went on.

"'Number three, wanted to show me his new bike.' Alright." Ewan snapped the notebook shut and shoved it against Hayden's chest. "I'm not reading anymore. If a man can't drive his bike into the hills and visit a friend as he passes by, then…"

"But were you?" Hayden asked, laying the book aside, amused that Ewan was apparently getting a little heated, even if it was all in good fun.

"Was I what?"

"Just passing by? Because you told me you got a new bike, a Moto Guzzi or something."

All the visits over the last two months still remained pretty clear in Hayden's mind, so clear that he'd written them down in an attempt to figure out why Ewan would drop by, chat for a few minutes and then leave again.

It hadn't been a remarkable day in any other way. It had been hazy and gray. Surprisingly cool. Hayden had gotten in only a couple hours before and was looking forward to curling up in front of the fire with a book when he'd heard the motorcycle coming up the hill. He'd met Ewan in his leathers at the door, in his socks on the pavement while Ewan had guzzled cool water, long hair falling into his face, helmet tucked under one arm.

"What're you doing here?" Hayden had asked at some point.

"Just out for a test drive," he'd said, turning to grin at the spotless machine, as though it were able to enjoy the compliments he was about to bestow upon it. "Thought I'd show her off."

"She is something," Hayden had said, because it really was a nice bike.

"Not new," Ewan said now, turning to look at the bike in question. "Just wanted to make sure everything was working correctly."

"So you drove for an hour. To see me."

"Is that so bad?" Ewan asked, cracking open his own drink.

"It isn't, if that's what you called it. I just don't understand why you can't just say you want to see me. Instead of coming up with a dozen different excuses to drive over. We could have met somewhere, or I could have come over. I just don't know what you wanted to achieve. If you wanted to see me."

"You're here now, aren't you?" Ewan asked, raising his eyebrows. "So it worked, didn't it?"

Hayden scoffed.

"Yeah, alright. You don't have to be smug about it."

"Never crossed my mind," Ewan said, still wearing that shit eating grin.

#real person fiction #domaystic2023 #2023day3 #sfw #dreamy does fic #dreamy does domaystic #star wars rpf #actor rpf #hayden x ewan #ewan x hayden #haywan

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jayne-hecate-writer · 3 years

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A whole new me-ish...

Dear friends, it has been so long and I have become a new person! Well, no, not really. I'm still me. I still have a filthy mouth and a foul mind, but writing has taken a back seat to the other things I have started creating.

Since the Covid lock down I have been experimenting with model making and painting, taking a particular interest in lighting said models with LEDs, better known among us nerds as Light Emitting Diodes. LEDs come in many shapes and sizes, plus they produce a very good variety colours, they also draw relatively little power and finally, they can be run from a watch battery. As you can see, there is lots to like with LEDs, but there is a downside, to them if you want to use a lot, for a start you need to use more power than you get from a watch battery. Connecting LEDs to a larger battery pack or power supply is a great way to pop them completely, or build them up into a slowly failing system. The way to avoid doing this is to use a resistor, to reduce current flow into the LED and prevent it burning out. Calculating the value of resisters is fairly simple, but I have to reply on the resistors I can salvage from the various pieces of broken equipment I have access to. In this case, I was able to scavenge the resisters and LEDs from the three broken printers I had in my stocks of trash electronics.

Now speaking of F**king printers, I made a discovery while taking apart my failed Cannon printer/scanner. It had a reservoir inside where the ink got dumped during use. Basically, it had a series of tubes that took the ink from the head and dumped it into a wads of cotton wool at the back of the machine, that made the inside of the printer case absolutely filthy with wasted ink. The two HP printers I dismantled, did not have this system and it led me to wonder, was this the cause of the constant need to replace ink in the Canon? Was it really continuously pumping horrifically expensive ink into the waste bin? If this was the case, what a terribly wasteful system and I can confirm that having seen this system, I will never buy a Canon printer again. I am sure that it had another purpose, other than to rapidly waste ink, but it was a terrible system in which a brand new ink cartridge lasted less than a week.

My model projects started fairly simply, with a small Hotwheels car that I found and then painted, as reported in a previous blog post on here. The second model was a scratch built Star Wars Pod Racer, made from recycled bubble bath bottles, hand sanitiser bottles and bottle tops. Again I fitted different coloured LEDs to resemble engine glow and the strange energy binding that holds the jet engines together. I made the base from scrap wood and cardboard and added stones and pebbles from the garden, all covered with a Papier-mâché and baking soda. The paint was acrylic from the local cheap shop and it is surprisingly good.

From here I moved onto another hotwheels car, this time with a zombie theme and full LED lights. I went on-line and found an inch tall figure from the TV show Walking Dead, who was a character called Daryl. In the show he wore a lot of black leather black leather according to the photos I found on line and in this case, used a large kitchen cleaver. With model railway grass and another twig from the garden to look like a felled tree, the scene was set and I was very proud of this creation. So much so in fact, that I gifted it to a very dear friend of mine who like me loves a good zombie movie.

The next project was a repair and build for a Snap On Tools branded toy break down truck that my lovely wife had been given along with a set of Snap On sockets she bought when she was working as a motorcycle mechanic. Over the years, the truck had been played with by children, dropped into toy boxes and it was looking really rather second hand. The wing mirrors, door handles, rear facing lights and both cranes needed repairing or replacing and I sculpted the replacements parts from superglue and baking soda or from lumps of solder, all of which I carved with files and a scalpel. The broken parts were repaired and finally the truck was stripped down to the component parts and thoroughly cleaned, before being put back together. Once the truck was finished, it really needed a place to sit, so I designed a garage from the 1950s for it to sit in, with an old style petrol pump and a couple of oil barrels.

The petrol pump was a 1/24 scale resin model kit purchased on line and the rest of the garage was built using recycled cardboard and lollypop sticks. I used a series of garden stones and then a tub of sand brought back from Bermuda by a close family friend, some time ago. The sand was a lovely pink colour, made up crushed coral and shells. It is perfect for modelling because it is not the boring granular sand of my local beach, which is gritty, fine and easily wind blown sand. By this time I was experimenting with colour washes, applied to painted base coats. The depth of the colour achieved is just lovely and the lighting effects really bring out the glow of the paint. With the garage finished, a few Easter egg details were added that only the most observant nerd will notice. But there was still a large hole in the model that needed to be filled somehow. Dearest wifey went web browsing found a scale model of a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle and it fitted perfectly into the gap, to be illuminated by a soft white LED. Once finished, I could not have been more pleased than when Wifey took the model and plugged it in. Oh yes, this time I had used a PSU or power supply unit with a timer circuit to run the LEDs as a night light in our hallway to the bathroom. Given how many of the LEDs I had used to light the garage forecourt, the shop window and parking bay, mains power was really the only option. On this occasion, I purchased a set of pre-wired LEDs that already had a resister fitted in series with the LED, meaning that it is safe to run them on the mains power.

My next model was a Motorcycle diorama, a classic Kawasaki Zephyr, a model kit found on e-Bay that was then imported from Japan. The kit was perfectly formed, it was hard to believe that they had been moulded from plastic, however the detail was so fine, my old eyes needed a magnifying glass to see them clearly for paint or glue. Once the bike was fully assembled, I built a small ten centimetre squared street scene, with a graffiti covered wall and a drink machine for the bike to sit with. The Pepsi dispensing machine was purchased from e-Bay yet again, for just a few pennies and it is beautifully printed onto photo-paper, meaning that the finished model when assembled is exquisite. The nearly completed model once again needed something else and I was at a loss of what to do. Yet the thought of lights never strays far from my mind and I designed a street lamp with an orange glow to look like an old sodium lamp. My childhood was spent in the gloom of sodium lamps, both here and abroad, when catching ferries at four in the morning to travel across Europe. The lamppost was made from a sliver of scrap wood and some tissue paper to give it a concrete like texture, with two orange LEDs secreted in the head. Once finished, I was not overly happy with the result, but by that time, it was too late to go back. The lighting effect was really nice though, but the weathering and fake litter were really effective additions, making it look like the bike was parked on double yellow lines in a very run down city street.

This led (snigger) me into my most recent model, another Star Wars inspired diorama, this time in 1/18 scale, with Hasbro Clone Trooper action figures and an old, rather broken Maisto motorbike. Normally, Star Wars has little to do with motorcycles, but while filming the Obi Wan Kenobi series, Ewan McGreggor was photographed during a break, sitting on his own motorcycle reading a copy of a motorcycle newspaper, while in his full Obi Wan costume. This was all the inspiration I needed and I found that the broken motorcycle model was just the right size for the action figures. Once again, I devised a plan, found the LEDs and used the parts from my destroyed printers. I even managed to use the scanner light head, at first using a variable resistor to adjust the glow. Sadly I over ran the strip and the LEDs burned out. Luckily I had a spare to play with and used a recovered resistor to run it instead. This has the opposite problem to the variable resistor which had too little resistance, being too high a resistance to allow a full glow from the strip of LEDs. I gave one of the Clone Troopers a bong made to look like it was made from the leg of a battle droid, with a flickering orange resister to show the burning spice in the bowl. The other clone was given a spray can of bright blue spray paint, modelled from plastic scraps and superglue. Again, once the model scenery was constructed, I really enjoyed the weathering and dirtying of the street. The washes have made all of the plastic parts look like rusted metal girders or filthy litter soiled streets or heavily corroded chemical pipes. I absolutely love the process of weathering, taking something shiny, well painted and nice looking and turning it into something filthy, damaged and rusted, with just a few washes of colour and stain.

So this is what I have been doing, as well as writing the occasional short story for a Christmas book release, editing the writing club book in time for another Christmas release and even working on the sequel to my first novel, Letitia. So how does this make me a new person? Well, I have finally embraced the fact that I am an artist and I absolutely love playing with paint. I may not be able to draw particularly well and I certainly cannot sculpt in clay or stone, but I can build and paint model scenes scratch build my own kits from trash to compliment the model kits or other parts acquired else where. I have to be honest, it is all such fun.

#diorama #scratchbuilt #starwars #hotwheels #hasbro #clonewars #electronics #art #newartist #painting #modelmaking #snap-on-tools #art-from-scrap #recycledart

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tellusepisode · 4 years

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I Love You Phillip Morris (2009)

Biography, Comedy, Crime |

I Love You Phillip Morris is a biographical black comedy drama film based on a 1980s and 1990s real-life story of con artist, impostor and multiple prison escapee Steven Jay Russell, as played by Jim Carrey. While incarcerated, Russell falls in love with his fellow inmate, Phillip Morris. After Morris is released from prison, Russell escapes from prison four times to be reunited with Morris. The film was adapted from the 2003 book I Love You Phillip Morris: A True Story of Life, Love, and Prison Breaks by Steve McVicker. The film is the directorial debut of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. It grossed $20 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics.

Steven Jay Russell is on his deathbed, recalling the events of his life that led him to this point. He spent his early adult years in Virginia Beach as a police officer. He plays the organ at church, has unenthusiastic sex with his wife, Debbie, and spends his off-hours searching for his biological mother, who had placed him for adoption as a child. Steven locates his biological mother, but she rejects him.

He then quits the police force and moves to Texas and works for Sysco, the family business.

After a car crash on the way to a homosexual tryst, Steven leaves his family and life behind, though he keeps in touch with his wife and young daughter, and explores the world as his true self – a gay man. He moves to Miami, where he finds a boyfriend, Jimmy, and they adopt a luxurious lifestyle. To keep themselves in the style to which they have become accustomed, Steven becomes a con man. He is pursued by the police, and, after jumping off a parking garage, is sent to prison, where he falls in love with inmate Phillip Morris.

Directors: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa

Writers: John Requa, Glenn Ficarra, Steve McVicker (book)

Stars: Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann, Rodrigo Santoro, Antoni Corone, Brennan Brown, Michael Mandell

youtube

►Cast:

Jim Carrey…Steven Russell

Ewan McGregor…Phillip Morris

Leslie Mann…Debbie

Rodrigo Santoro…Jimmy

Antoni Corone…Lindholm

Brennan Brown…Birkheim

Michael Mandell…Cleavon

Annie Golden…Eudora

Marylouise Burke…Barbara Bascombe

Sources: imdb and wikipedia

The post I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) first appeared on TellUsEpisode.com.

from WordPress https://www.tellusepisode.com/i-love-you-phillip-morris-2009.html

#Biography #Comedy #Crime #Movies #Antoni Corone #Brennan Brown #Ewan McGregor #Glenn Ficarra #Jim Ca

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acehotel · 6 years

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INTERVIEW: Bicep

BICEP are icons of the underground. Their pure, unadulterated passion for electronic music led them to the top of the DJ game, with stops as bloggers, producers, promoters, label-owners and live acts along the way. The Belfast-bred duo met as kids on the rugby field, but have since toured the world, with their ecstatic love of forgotten tracks their guiding torch. Justin Strauss, a legend in his own right and an old Ace friend, sat down in London with Matt and Andy for this month’s edition of JUST/TALK.

Justin Strauss: So, let's go back to the beginning. When and how did you guys meet? What year was it?

Matt McBriar: We were like eight years old at mini rugby.

Justin: Where was this?

Matt: In Belfast. Also, the other guy that we produced with, Hammer, he played in rugby as well. We actually properly met when we both went to secondary school and we were 11. We were at the same school until university.

Justin: And you became good friends then?

Andy Ferguson: We kind of went different ways after that. I went to Manchester, Matt went to Newcastle. Did our degrees. But at the same time we were making music separately. It was kind of after university that we started making music together.

Justin: Musically, what was inspiring you back then?

Andy: I think I started off a bit minimal, quite minimal. Then just moved into more Italo stuff. We actually started producing together as an attempt at an Italo band.

Justin: What year was that?

Andy: 2008?

Matt: Yeah. 2008, maybe 2007.

Andy: 10 years ago.

Matt: About the same time we started the blog. It all started very loose. We just started the blog and it was just kind of a place just to really share.

Justin: What was the inspiration to start your blog?

Matt: We were liking a lot of Italo-disco songs and a lot of weird film soundtracks, more like, if you think of Optimo. Optimo would be a good example. We were going to a lot of Optimo shows.

Justin: So, you were sharing music and people were sharing stuff with you?

Matt: Yeah, and there were really no rules at all in terms of what we were putting out there. It was very, very, very broad. And it wasn't really set up to share with so much the public, but more a place where we could archive for ourselves. Just a cool place to share playlists or our digs and our finds. Obviously now everyone can do it on Spotify and YouTube.

Matt: But this was way before online playlisting was a thing.

Andy: We’d rip the records and upload them to their server and each post took maybe 20 minutes.

Matt: An hour. Sometimes an hour. By the time we wrote it and then we went and found the artwork and stuff. Like yeah, it's kind of crazy to think now someone logs on to an app and goes,"Share".

Justin: And you were starting to DJ as Bicep, then, or ...

Matt: The funny thing is with the name and all. The name was never really Bicep. All the blogs around about that time had stupid names. It was a thing to have a silly name for your blog. We thought we'd call it Feel My Bicep and it was going to be quite Italo, disco-y.

Andy: Like a reference to that whole imagery, the old kind of vibe.

Matt: Skatt Bros, "Walk the Night." You know, that sort of thing.

Andy: Well, we didn’t want to be called 'disco' something, but wanted to be like—

Matt: Sleazy sort of—

Matt: And then we started getting some gigs and getting booked. We originally were DJ'ing under Feel My Bicep and it just sounded...Well, I mean, it was funny in general, but we just cut off Feel My, and then just started doing it under Bicep but it was still very much a kind of joke. And then put out a couple records and then it started to become serious.

Justin: And as far as DJ'ing goes, was there a DJ that you guys were inspired by?

Matt: Weirdly it was a mad mix of people at the time. I used to like Optimo, obviously, but then I also loved Ricardo Villalobos and Omar-S, just his mixes at the time. To be honest, there's quite a lot of DJs at that period including Maurice Fulton and Ewan Pearson.

Justin: Were you hanging out at Sub Club in Glasgow?

Matt: I was a lot because I was at university in Newcastle, so I was at the Sub Club like once a month for Optimo. Before that, in Belfast, we'd been into like super heavy techno and you'd go and see just a set of one style. Then going to university and seeing stuff like Optimo was definitely a game changer ... A chance to see people like mix a power ballad into techno, into Italo and Disco and just sort of go everywhere.

Andy: ... I was in Manchester and Optimo played there quite often. And then also he'd go to the Electric Chair, which is the Unabomber's night, and that was the kind of same thing but eclectic in a different way even.

Justin: I believe that's kind of how New York was, when I was DJ'ing in all these clubs and going to the Paradise Garage and all these amazing places where anything goes, then it just all makes sense and the people come with an open mind.

Andy: People were just putting on nights because they enjoyed doing them. It wasn't like a business. You know what I mean? If you went there, it would always be the same people every week and it would be like five pounds in, cheap, just cheap beers and a kind of full on party.

Justin: So your blog started to get a lot of attention and good things and better opportunities started coming to you?

Matt: I really don't know.... We got in through ...

Justin: Persistence?

Andy: Yeah.

Matt: We were posting a lot. It was 80 posts a month at its peak, but sometimes you'd sit in for an evening and do like eight posts in one go and you'd be in all evening posting. ... But it would all be so varied. This was before SoundCloud, and before Facebook was around, but it was definitely very early.

Andy: We didn't have Facebook for the first three years of the blog. We didn't post on it. We only posted on Twitter, I think. Twitter was there before Facebook ... And Hype Machine was really popular. People used to use Hype Machine all the time.

Matt: People probably find a lot of tunes from our blog through Hype Machine. At the time, it was a popular way to find to find a blog.

Andy: There was a lot less competition out there. Maybe that's the best was to describe it.

Justin: And It couldn’t happen like that now I suppose. Have that kind of impact?

Andy: Impossible to happen. You get these YouTube channels that do explode, but I suppose they don't have the same level of artwork and vibe.

Matt: Not the same type of interaction.

Andy: In YouTube's format, everything looks like YouTube. You go to all YouTube's recommended sites.... It's not intimate in the slightest, so it's definitely cool to do something that was like it was your little area of it. Your little corner. We got to choose the colors, backgrounds.

Matt: Yeah, we kept a zany kind of shittiness to it all. We kind of liked that. Didn't want to update it, you know, like the new software and like a jazzy website basically. We always wanted to feel like a stripped down magazine.

Andy: But we said no to all advertising because we always used to get requests. Nowadays, advertising on the Internet's just part of everything, but I remember feeling really, really against ever having any adverts on our site, just because it felt like it would ruin it.

Justin: How many people were subscribing or following the blog?

Matt: I think at the peak it was it like 130,000 a month, different people.

Andy: Hit wise it was a quarter million a month.

Matt: In terms of actual clicks, it would have been a few million a month.

Justin: So, at this time, as the blog’s happening, you're putting out a few 12 inches?

Andy: Yeah, we actually did the first one for Dennis Cane and his Ghost Town label.

Justin: Oh, wow.

Matt: Yeah, it was an edit of Brothers Johnson, Strawberry Letter 23. And it was mixed on laptop speakers. I mean, I made the edit on Abelton...I didn't understand anything. I just put it on MySpace and then he contacted me and was like, "Whoa, I want to put this out.”

Matt: I think they had a pretty tough time mastering it. It sounded pretty shitty. But, yeah, that was funny.

Justin: And that was your first release as Bicep?

Matt: I think the vinyl actually says Bicep B. The vinyl was Bicep B. I don't know how that ever happened. It never meant to say that. Then we did a couple of edits for Roy Dank’s Mystery Meat label, and then something for James Friedman’s Throne of Blood label.

Justin: So, your first releases were all New York based labels?

Andy: Yes. It was mad. It wasn't like we purposely set out to do that.

Matt: I just think that at the time those records made more sense in New York. It just sort of picked up there. That sort of style we were going for. I think in the UK, it was more minimal techno and sort of quiet. At that time what we were doing was not popular at all.

Justin: I first met you, when your Throne of Blood thing had just come out.

Andy: Yeah, we got gigs in New York before we got them in London.

Matt: Yeah, we couldn't get booked in the UK even after I moved to London, which had been five records deep and we'd been around for a good three or four years. Couldn't really get booked in London.

Justin: When did you notice things change?

Andy: I think we just started playing really small gigs.

Justin: You didn't have like a residency at London club?

Andy: No, no, no.

Matt: It was very gradual. It wasn't like one day we were like, boom.

Matt: Europe as well. Like Germany, for years, couldn't get booked there. It's funny looking back now because there was definitely a good three or four years of bubbling. I think 2012, when was when started to do a bit more House stuff. We did the “Stripper” EP, and then we did “You”, and then we did “Vision of Love”, that EP. Those three in a row, a couple of months apart. Suddenly we were able to get booked and things were working out a bit smoother for us.

Justin: Did you guys have day jobs?

Matt: We had jobs beforehand. I worked as a designer and Andy was working advertising, but we basically decided if we're going to do this, you have to spend all day working on music. You can't just do it the odd evening after a full time job. Because you've got to put out more than one record a year, and we were like, let's try and do something every month. Maybe not a record, but either like a mix or a record. We try to have something out every month.

Andy: Yeah, we were doing edits and stuff then.

Matt: And spending loads of times on mixes. We used to spend like three weeks, trial and error, trying to really create these tight sort of mix tapes. Like all the Disco ones and Italo ones.

Andy: A nightmare, those ones. Trying to do like really tight disco mixes. You'd spend fucking like a whole month trying to get that together.

Justin: And then “Vision of Love” comes out and I remember when I first heard it, I was like, “This is such a proper anthem.” There's just so many records now that don't translate to a lot of different places. But that record could play like in any club basically anywhere and it was the biggest record of the night. It sounded amazing on any system.

youtube

Andy: I think the thing is that after that, though, we suddenly quickly understood that once we musically got it together and mixed, it was still very much like kind of a starting block record. Do you know what I mean?

Matt: We were listening to a lot of 90s House records at that time. Those drum sounds, the kind of feeling. But it didn't actually have much equipment then.

Justin: Did you have a studio?

Matt: No, we were producing at the end of my bed. With one monitor. It was a super basic set up still. But that record gave us a springboard to kind of tour more, get more money. So we started investing in a few bits of equipment but it was really when we did “Sacrifice”, the following year, with Simian Mobile Disco, and that was obviously a totally different type of record. It was all analog Synths and drum machines. Very heavy type of record. More of a Techno feel.

It was just proper and obviously Simian Mobile Disco are pros and really kind of led us around the studio for the first time and that was like a light bulb moment for us, where it was like,"Whoa."

When we did Sacrifice, it was very much a case of four of us in a room jamming for four, five hours, not really getting anywhere, going for lunch, coming back, jamming more, taking little bits and pieces and then the next day, coming back and starting again and getting there and then I think that was like a new ... like a totally new way of looking at how to make music. And basically we just devoted all our spare money buying synths and buying equipment. But still, it was in my bedroom, so it was like we had a couple of keyboard racks and a table and slowly everything was getting pushed away. It was just like keyboards had to be lined against the way because we could only plug in two at a time and we were just piecing things together bit by bit by bit.

Andy: Yeah, we only had certain cables and stuff and couldn't plug everything in at once.

Matt: Yeah, it was really basic. But it was cool. It was definitely sort of bedroom beginnings and at that stage, then we did the next release on our label “Satisfy” and “Snack Bar” there.

Andy: That was the first step into us kind of understanding what we're doing a little bit, recording wise.

Matt: It was a huge thing to learn, obviously, from doing stuff before when you're playing with samples a lot, to then actually recording stuff live in and obviously there was a whole new world of mixing stuff down, EQ'ing, compressing. You're not dealing with a beautifully recorded piano sample from the 70s. You got a little thin synth that you've got to then mix to make it sound good...So, we had a real transition period of sort of learning kind of the ropes of like that.

Andy: I would say it took at least two years. The first year we couldn't plug anything in. Some days we'd turn up and be like, "Okay, never mind. It's not running. Everything's out of sync. What do we do?" Then we'd look at manuals, do everything, and then it was literally the cables just were plugged in wrong. There were some days you just have to turn it off and just leave it and come back later and it's all in sync.

Justin: Yeah, I could tell you many stories about recording sessions before any computers and trying to make stuff work and sync.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. They just live and breathe, don't they?

Justin: Mind of their own. And then your focus was shifting more on productions and DJing rather than the blog?

Andy: Yes. I think also then suddenly, as much as we loved doing the blog, there was a real rapid transition towards instead of spending half the week typing up and digging for other people's music, it was more like we wanted to just spend the whole week working on our own music. Do you know what I mean?

Justin: Priorities shifted.

Andy: Yes, for sure.

Matt: And also as YouTube was getting bigger people could share music way easier, so it became less important.

Andy: It didn't feel like it had the same impact. You know what I mean? You noticed less people would be interacting with it.

Justin: But you still do the blog or no?

Andy: Yeah, we do. For the blog, we were trying to think of the best way to have fresh new music up there without it taking up an entire week to put together and without having to change the blog into something that was basically sharing Spotify playlists. We tried lots of different ideas. We basically got more onto the idea of guest mixes, but instead of aiming at trying to get people from the RA Top 20 like every other mix website, we really aimed for lots of residents, lots of local DJs, lots of friends that have people who have maybe one record we've heard. And it's like, "Oh, this guy looks interesting."

Justin: So, it became a way to expose new talent.

Matt: Yeah, provide the blog as a platform for people just starting out and then...I think some of the most interesting mixes were ones you'd hear from people who spent several years in their bedroom with a bag of records that they haven't been playing out and they haven't been exposed to like 20 years of crowds that want build-ups. You know?

Justin: Well, it's like a band, their first album is usually always amazing because they worked their whole lives for it, and then following it up, that's not so easy.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Justin: At this point were you feeling things were really starting to happen for you in your career?

Andy: It's hard because everything happened so slowly, but I think the thing is though, after we put out “Vision of Love,” there was this heavy stigma — we'd been pigeonholed as 90s house ripoff DJs, and we'd get booked on those types of bills. Even if we put out records and mixes that were more techno influenced.

Matt: Always in the second room and not being considered for the main event.

Andy: Yeah, which was cool, but we needed to really break out of that so we really focused the next few years on learning the the studio. 2013, 2014, we DJ'ed loads. We put out a couple records. Nothing ... It was good, but we were learning the studio and also really focusing on learning piano, getting way more into music theory, taking it very seriously, reading up about compression, mixing, really getting beyond the obvious just high stuff. You know what I mean?

Justin: Yes. Learning your craft.

Andy: Totally.

Justin: Did you ever work with an engineer?

Andy: Never. We'd done everything ourselves. There's some records that we really got into compressing and EQ'ing so much that the record just sounds too booming and too big. We were focusing so much on making things sound huge and then it was too big. So, we were like, "Shit," okay, right. We'd gone from a record sounding too quiet to sounding too light and too boomy and then it was like another gap and then we did “Just”.

Justin: I love that record.

Andy: And so that's the first one, the first one ever that we were happy with. And the parts were played totally live. That was a jam where we were just hitting record, and the melody was a bassline originally that we had pitched up a couple of octaves and suddenly we had a bassline that suddenly became a riff, and we never considered writing it as a riff.

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Andy: We'd been dabbling to bring a vocalist in because we were tired of using samples. We were obviously at this stage we were organized in terms of when we record vocals. We'd be like, okay, this session's in D minor. We'd have some D minor chords, she'd sing in D minor and then we'd save the file. We'd do lots of ad libs and then we'd save a file as D minor vocals. But then it would be a case of we didn't necessarily use those chords, but we'd have that vocal and then if we wrote a track in D minor, we could pull her vocals in and see if it was just a little something that worked. So, we had this library of vocals that were in different keys.

Matt: We thought can we make it work as a full vocal?

Andy: Yeah. We tried to drop in some of her actual vocals. Nothing was really working, and then we were just moving across the loop, okay, and there'd been a period in between two recordings where I'd be like, "That was perfect, but can you just do that, loop it again?" And then she just replied ”Just the same?”, "Okay." And it was only as I was skipping through that that spoken part, just her calm speaking to us and then I heard it over part of the track that became “Just”.

Andy: It was like, "Whoa, this is weird."

Matt: We just left it. It was perfectly in the loop, as well, when it was playing.

Andy: Yeah, and it just didn't sound like something that you'd expect. We didn't sound like we were trying to create another record there. You know what I mean?

Justin: Yes, when I first heard it, it reminded me of something New York electro. I don't know what it is. It's a very modern and amazing tune. It was one of my favorite records to play out and I still love to play it.

Andy: There's loads of our records I can't hear again. I hear the record and I'm going, "Oh, right, next. Click. Get it off." But there's a few that we've done that you can still hear them and not basically want to turn it off. I think that was for us definitely the one that was like that. And then it changed everything in terms of how we were viewed. No longer just seen as sort of 90s house ripoffs. People thought, "Whoa, okay."

Matt: That one bubbled quite slowly as well.

Andy: I think the timing was right. Coming off the peak of the 90s house thing was killing people; it was too much at that time. It was definitely a grower in that sense of you could see it just rising in popularity, even until now it still keeps going up. It's not like it's flattened off. It's still rising, slowly rising.

Justin: It's a special record.

Andy: It definitely gave us a lot of confidence. We knew we were going to try to attempt an album, and I think we saw that record with “Celeste” as a pre-album tester of sorts. Those records were made out of a few days jamming and we recorded it. We really weren't thinking , "We need to make a techno record today," or, "Let's do something ambient." They were really sort of mistakes. Not mistakes, but just ��trial and error. And then once we had that and it was well-received, we finally felt kind of comfortable in our own ears.

Andy: It's the hardest ... It's like you can't really ... No matter how many people say your records are good or bad or how many good reviews, how many bad reviews, it doesn't really matter what other people say. If you never really have that feeling that you can just trust your own gut. And maybe even if 20 people tell you they don't like something, if you really like it, you're happy to release it. You believe in it. Then I think that's when we kind of got to that stage when it's comfortable.

Matt: That's why we had to do this full time. We were in there, we were coming in at 9:00 in the morning, staying there until we had to leave on Friday to another gig and DJ Friday, Saturday, come back Sunday, back in the studio Monday. We did that for two years ... We still do that pretty much.

Justin: Do you guys have separate roles in the studio?

Andy: We’re very much on our feet the whole day as opposed to sitting on a chair, on the computer. You know? I think that definitely means that we can kind of interchange quickly in roles and maybe one of us is going through a sample library, trying to dig old world music records, some jazz records, little bits and pieces that can sometimes add ... Because I still think having samples of music brings something new.

Justin: It's always an inspiration, even if at the end you never use it in the final mix.

Andy: A weird belly noise that's sort of slightly out of key was recorded on some sort of African instrument or those little things can trigger a whole wave of your own stuff. It can be one noise, it can be a little vocal, it can be just a drum ... Like two little taps of hand drum.

Matt: We had loops playing all day. We go through that PC and we’ve got hundreds of samples now as well. You change the clip. We go through around 50 clip. We'd be like, "Whoa stop," and go back and listen. That's how we work. It's kind of more listening rather than waiting. I think it's different when you're on a computer and you're like clicking through things. It's not the same as actually playing things.

Justin: When did you decide that you wanted to bring a live element into your shows?

Matt: 2015. We worked till April, just demos, and then in April we agreed that we'd do one month of building a live show and we'd do a couple of live shows that summer just to sort of test the waters.

This is more of our management who kind of knew if you finish an album and you've never done live shows, it's going to be very, very scary when you're tired to deal with all the pressure of having to do a live show, so we agreed that we'd do four that year. We did one test show at Corsica Studios, but then we ended up doing the closing set of Field Day. It was, I don't know, 10,000 people. That was our fourth ever live show, and dealing with that level of attention... And we kind of went in pretty much with the setup we've got now. We changed it a bit, but we spent a month really thinking about how we could make a live show that we wanted.

We cut up all of our tracks, the pieces, had them all on Abelton, but then we had some synths, a mixing desk, guitar pedals, reverbs, a little mixer. An actual mixing desk and the little MIDI mixer so we could mix some samples together. We brought a little mini studio with us and from the beginning that was pretty much what it was. It was never more basic than that. We just did four and we got through them. They were good.

Justin: Do you also use a computer?

Matt: Yeah, we have a laptop with some samples and stuff because in terms of how our music is, there's so much going on, it would be impossible to realistically do stuff well completely live. I think you'd always end up being sort of a lot more techno-y. Like “Just” I can never imagine, but what we have is just the riff as a single file that we can manipulate and we can jam with and we can echo it and sort of put reverb and then we have another synth that we can jam over the top of that and then all the drums can come in live. So, they sound very heavily deconstructed. We have a laptop as well that triggers some samples and I think for us that works the right balance of stuff.

Justin: Dealing with vintage machines can be sometimes very frightening live.

Matt: Yes. The year of basically complete and utter fear.

Justin: How do you balance between the live shows and DJ sets?

Matt: We barely DJ'ed at all this year. Very, very little. We DJ'ed a weekend here and there. It's kind of hard because you really need to be DJ'ing every week and digging every week to peak form. But we've been trying to keep on top of it. We're preparing a few mixes, but yeah, it's definitely quite hard stepping back in to DJ'ing after you've been focusing all your energy on writing and live.

Justin: How do you feel playing in front of that many people? From going from a club situation to this massive sea of humanity at festivals? Do you still feel connected to the crowd?

Matt: It depends. It really depends. That's the weird thing about being connected, because I suppose a DJ set, any good DJ set, you won't have your track list pre-prepared, you're going to be interacting. And you're going to be taking off the crowd and giving back and answering, reacting to things and deciding to go down or up based on what you see, whereas obviously the live show we have to plan it. So it's very much a one hour performance so it's different.

Andy: Sometimes we can speed it up and go more techno. We've got songs we can make it way more loopy.

Matt: You can't let the crowd influence how you do it.

Yeah, this is our show, we're doing it, this is what we want to do, and that's it. It's hard. 10,000 people doesn't suit our show, we tend to do more that are a few thousand. We've been focusing a bit more on doing a lot of concert venues. Like we did the Ulster Hall in Belfast. The orchestra played there. Coldplay played there. But there's this huge like 40, 50 foot organ behind you. We do the lighting show. We weren't too far away from the crowd, and that one really felt like, you know, like we were part of the crowd. I think when you do get up to those 10,000, it's sort of like ... You feel like the quieter moments don't work.

Matt: The intimacy gets lost and I think that's where the sort of like EDM, pyrotechnic vibes, come in you know? That's why that stuff's popular and that's not really where we’re going to go. But I think at the same time, it's maybe a challenge to think about a live show that could work at that scale because obviously Chemical Brothers, the big electronic live shows from the 90s , they obviously knew how to work on those stages, but I think for our current one, it's definitely suited to more intimate size crowds.

Justin: Well, I think you're an inspiration for a lot of young DJs and producers.

Matt: I think we're stuck in this period where it's just a lot of very similar sounding things. I mean, it's easy to say it wasn't like that back in the day, but I'm sure there's times in the 90s when you're sitting there and the one house record that was inspirational came out and then 40 replicants came out after it.

Justin: But not that many people would know about it, because it was a small group of people who cared and wasn't on the internet.

Matt: Yeah, exactly, and now it's quite sad and uninspiring to see these top 10s of ten of the exact same track with the same high hats, and for us it's definitely wanting to try and develop our song and push things forward.

Justin: Keep pushing.

Matt: Yeah, but with this new album, we definitely moved away from probably exactly what people expected us to do.

Justin: That's great, because you're at a point where it would be easy to just keep it going and just churn out a few more banging House records.

Matt: But it was definitely a big step because beforehand, we really believed in what we'd done, but you can't help but have that creeping feeling of like ... You're just stepping out of your comfort zone and there's always going to be the sort of feelings associated with doing something different than people expect, especially when you're at a period when people were so heavily associating you with festival club tracks.

Justin: Absolutely, yeah.

Matt: So I think it's really good now to be even more comfortable going into the next one. To branch out further, you know. In fact, the next one we're going to really try and push it a lot more. I think this one was ... I would say it was a stepping stone.

Justin: What was the inspiration behind the new album ?

Matt: I think we did do 60 demos.

Justin: 60 is a lot. And how did you whittle it down to the final selection?

Andy: Just listened to them. Sometimes we'd come in on a Monday, when you're not in a good mood, after a weekend of DJ'ing. We’d listen to the tracks and you can hear certain ones work together, or you know, there's like a vibe between a couple, and we just color them and you come back maybe a couple weeks later. We chip away at those tracks.

Matt: The coloring process was with green orange and red. Red was don't ever work on it again. Orange was this has got potential, but needs to be totally new direction whether its like remove all the drums and then rewrite them, and then green was like this is a demo that we think's pretty decent. Let's finish it. And so out of 60, it became this big huge folder of like all these different colors.

Matt: The funny thing is, honestly, we got to November of 2016, so that had been 11 months of working on the record and I think only two or there of what we thought was going to be the album got on the album.

Matt: We were so stressed out because we'd gone away on this tour. We'd done Africa, all around Asia, Tokyo, China, Australia as well, and we were jet lagged and tired and we had this pressure of trying to basically have the record finished by the start of the following year and we had only those demos. We didn't hate them, but they weren't working as songs on albums. It would have been very much a dance music producer's album. It was just not really up to the level that we wanted.

Andy: There were three tracks I think that we had but there was also one or what had ended up being “Aura”, although we didn't have a name for it at the time.

Justin: I love that you have such simple names for all the tracks.

Andy: Well, we deliberately just wanted to make it nice and simple, and “Glue” and “Aura” we'd done. So we knew we had two that we were happy with.

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Andy: And we got back after this huge big long tour and we were and not really feeling that we had gotten anywhere with it, and then we had a two week run in late November before Christmas and just got nearly a demo done a day.

Matt: Our first week we got nothing I think.

Andy: Well, yeah, okay, we got nothing and then we had one week where we did almost half the album, and it was just a case that we'd been down every alley way and had dead end, dead end, dead end and suddenly you had like this week of clarity and it was like we just did loads in a row and then we just sort of like we were like free almost to sort of like just write stuff. We just got something. And then yeah, and then basically by halfway through January it was kind of done, and we just started to mix it, and It was funny, it was just all those demos that came out at once at the end.

Justin: I know the artwork was something very important to you. What was the process with this one?

Matt: We found a design company that we really liked. They're pretty conceptual in terms of their approach to stuff and we knew we wanted an artwork to definitely reflect the album.We didn't want an image just slapped on the front cover. So we contacted them and said we want you to listen to this album and just interpret the album as a piece of art and design.

Andy: Incorporate some organic elements, like textures. But still edit it digitally. Like we recorded the album. We used all this analog equipment but we edited it on a computer.

Matt: We wanted to feel like it was replicated in the design of the cover and we like sent them over lots of references we liked.

Matt: References like Gerhard Richter and some nice photography we'd seen, bits and pieces, some paintings we saw, some Turkish artwork we really liked to do, some printmaking and all these different ideas.

Andy: There's a piece that we've put up online on Facebook documenting the whole process.

Andy: They made a few different cover variations. We got through the final week and then they sent us five covers and it was just like we couldn't pick one out them. We just couldn't pick. And it was never meant to be five different covers. Then when I thought about it like those are five interpretations. They stopped and listened, laying out every cover and they were really trying to like interpret. So those were genuinely five different interpretations of the music and then we thought well ,why not have five covers.

Matt: I mean, how many records I bought just on the cover alone. The designers were amazing. I think an album artwork project could take a week. This was three months. Very quickly sometimes when you're working with a load of people on a creative project that haven't worked together before, the relationship could break down halfway through where it's just too many dead ends, people have other things to work on and they just stayed at it 100% to the end. Kept going, going, going. And now we've become like friends. We met up with the in Portugal and we're going to work together in the future.

Justin: You have a team now.

Matt: Exactly.

Justin: It makes sense. I mean, you guys spend a lot of time with each other, are friends and have a great working partnership.

#yes #interview #bicep #dj #just talk #justin strauss #music #nyc #london #belfast #duo

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mrs-mikko-rantanen · 4 years

Text

Speech and Debate

Ok so I’ve been thinking about this all day long and I just had to write it....so here you go: 1558 words of Lost Boys content. A baby Adair, age 16 in 2015, cold, shivering, and heavily concussed!

Concussion, two broken ribs, broken thumb, split lip, pretty sure my nose is broken, and I really hope my wrist isn’t broken. Adair’s head throbbed as he went through the list of injuries he’d sustained. He’d lost a few matches before, but never quiet this badly. He’d been so desperate after loosing the first match that he’d begged for a second match. Some way to salvage the night. He’d broken his ribs in the first fight, and had spent the second match panting heavily through his teeth, trying not to let the pain distract him. Trying, and failing.

In short, he’d gotten his ass kicked.

He groaned and dug his phone out of his back pocket, checking the time. His heart sank as he saw the missed call and three missed texts from his brothers. He looked up as a bus pulled up to the stop on the corner, and he frowned. He wasn’t exactly sure a bus was a great idea tonight. A cab wasn’t either. His concussion was making it difficult to focus on smaller details, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he’d be able to give the right address. And if he got off the bus at the wrong stop, he didn’t want to wander the city alone in this state. He sighed, and the action sent a wave of pain through his chest as his ribs screamed in protest. Glancing back down at his phone, he hit the button on the missed call notification, and then hit the option to return the call. He winced as the phone rang in his ear, and he turned the volume down a bit. The phone only rang twice before his older brother answered.

“Addie, hey. I was starting to worry about you. Everything ok? How was Speech and Debate?” Adair could hear the concern in Castor’s voice as he spoke, only thinly veiled by relief.

“Hey. Yeah, I’m fine, I guess. We just got a little carried away.” Adair stuffed his free hand into his pocket as he looked around for somewhere he could sit. “Look, I know it’s late, but could you maybe come get me?”

“Of course. I’ll be at the school in five-”

“I’m uh, I’m not at the school.” Adair admitted.

“What? Where are you?”

“Umm…” Adair glanced around, stumbling a bit closer to the corner to read the street signs. “I’m at that diner on the corner of 7th and Baker. Kassidy’s?”

“You’re on Baker Street? What the hell are you doing all the way down there?”

Adair’s head flopped back as he looked up at the sky. The motion had been inspired by a wave of frustration and guilt, but he was met by a sudden spike of pain as his neck protested and his head throbbed. “Look, can you just come get me, Cas? Please?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be right there. Go sit in the diner, I don’t want you on the street, ok?”

“Right. Thanks, Cas.”

“I’m on my way.”

Adair hung up and walked over to the diner. Despite what Castor had said, he didn’t go inside. He would have felt bad not buying anything, and he knew for a fact he didn’t have any cash wadded up in his pockets. Instead, he leaned up against the wall, his backpack slung over one shoulder while he waited. He pulled the hood of his jacket up and put his headphones in. Usually he would have put on some music, but anything more than the white noise he was playing to drown out the sound of the traffic made him nauseous. Every breath hurt worse than the last one had. He’d originally thought that he’d only broken two ribs, but as he stood there waiting, he was starting to think that maybe there were a few more broken too. His eyes slid shut and he leaned his head back against the brick wall, whimpering slightly as he gently probed his chest. He pried his eyes open and blinked furiously, trying to tell if his vision was blurry because of the blunt force trauma, the tears, or some combination of the two. He sniffed and wiped at his nose, then immediately regretted the action. A car pulled up to the curb, and he staggered over to it as the window rolled down.

“I thought I told you to wait inside.” Castor said as Adair pulled out an earbud.

“Thanks for coming to get me.” Adair said, wedging his backpack into the space by his feet as he ignored his brother.

“Wow. When you said your debate team got a little carried away, you weren’t kidding.”

Adair leaned his head against the window and caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror and groaned. He looked almost as bad as he felt. His right eye was swollen almost completely shut, his left cheekbone was covered in an ugly purple bruise, and there was blood dried under his nose, and all down the side of his face from a cut above his eyebrow that he didn’t even know he had.

“Wait here.” Adair’s head came up and he frowned as he looked over at Castor, who was undoing his seatbelt and reaching for the door handle.

“What? Where are you going?”

Castor shrugged a little. “You tell me, Addie. Where’s the asshole that’s been doing this to you every week for the last three months?”

Adair rolled his eyes and leaned his head on the window again. “It’s not like that, Cas.”

“I don’t care. I’m done with this. I’m tired of you coming home beat to hell every week.”

“Cas just drop it, ok? It’s fine, really.”

Castor clenched his jaw, his hand clenched tight around the steering wheel as he thought things over. “Fine. You’re right. You’re sixteen, you’re old enough to stand up for yourself, and God knows you’re more than capable enough. I won’t get involved.” He shifted back around, pulling on the seatbelt and putting the car back into drive. “Let’s get you home.”

“Thank you.” Adair said, looking back out the window. His stomach churned a little as the lights of the city began to flick by, stinging his eyes and setting his head spinning. He groaned a little and closed his eyes as they drove on, back towards the base. As his head swam, he decided that maybe it was better if his brother knew what was really going on. Besides, it was going to be a while before he and Ewan could get their permits, and who knew how long until they were able to get another car or a way to drive around. Chances were, there were going to be plenty of days that he was going to need Castor to come get him and drive him home.

“I’m not really on the Speech and Debate team.” He admitted, his eyes flicking open as he stared out the windshield.

Castor said nothing, but Adair could feel him thinking obviously.

“I, uh. I’ve been fighting. Competitively.” Adair said, shifting a bit in the seat.

“Like for a team with the school? Or some gym?”

“Neither. It’s...not exactly legal. It’s--” He fought the sigh, not wanting his ribs to burn anymore than they already were. “It’s a gambling ring. I’ve been fighting to earn some extra money.” Adair glanced at Castor, not sure how his brother would react. Castor’s face was a mask, unreadable as he took in the new information.

“Are you being safe?” He finally asked as he pulled into the parking garage of the base.

Adair shrugged a little, taken aback by the lack of lecture from Castor. “I mean, as safe as I can be. It’s a bit shady, but yeah, I’m….taking care of myself, I guess?”

Castor nodded and got out of the car. Adair hesitated a little and got out slowly, shrugging on his backpack before he followed. Castor was leaning on the back of the car, arms crossed as he chewed on the inside of his cheek.

“You’re not mad?”

Castor shrugged again. “Why would I be? You’re finally branching out a bit in your interests. And it gives you something to do outside of the Revolution, gets you some space.”

Adair fought not to smile too much, but the right side of his mouth twitched up in a bit of a crooked grin that pulled on the split in his lip.

“You’re not gonna make me stop?”

Castor snorted. “Yeah right. If I tell you to stop, would you really?”

The grin finally won out on Adair’s face, “Probably not, no.”

Castor shrugged as he stood up from the car. “As long as you’re being at least sort of safe about it, I don’t see a problem with it.”

They stood in silence for a while, before Castor reached out and pulled Adair into a hug. Adair’s body ached in protest, but he wrapped his arms around Castor anyway, grinning as he shook his head a little.

“Let’s go get you patched up a bit, yeah? Hungry?”

“Not really.” Adair wasn’t even lying. His stomach was still churning and his spinning head wasn’t helping any.

“Well you’ll drink some water, anyway.” Castor took the backpack from the younger boy, shrugging it onto one arm, the other draped over Adair’s shoulders to keep him steady and moving in one direction.

#castor #adair #the lost boys #ahhhhhhhh #little bitty mayhem and his older brother #I love #this is a lost boys fan blog now #sorry not sorry #adair insp #castor insp #concussion #broken ribs #post fight #whump #sorta?#idk #i'm gonna tag my whump taglist on it anyway lol #but that's mostly just bc it's been a while since I tagged yall in anything

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