#declaring my vehement resistance to it
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for the record: i, personally, do not care who reblogs from me on the reblogging website, especially since i struggle to remember who all expects me to reblog everything they post from the source myself. obviously no one should reblog roleplay/headcanon posts they're not involved in, and i do think it's generally polite to reblog a meme from the source if i don't send one in, but if y'all wanna reblog aesthetics or gifsets or whatever from me, idgaf. that's life.
#psa. ( stop lying stop manipulating just be nicer! )#ooc. ( a suspicious lack of dragons )#since this seems to be a growing trend in the rpc i'm like#declaring my vehement resistance to it#bc to be quite honest#it's not an accessible rule for people with adhd#at least not for THIS person with adhd#like literally the only way i could guarantee i never rb from sb#who has it in their rules not to rb from them#is if i made a list#and then referred to it every time i wanted to reblog something#on my own dashboard#on tumblr.com#the reblogging platform#and that's just not a reasonable ask for me i'm sorry#(which is why i warn about it in my rules that i can't promise to never rb from someone on the dash)#ppl can soft/block me if it suits them#no hard feelings#i get that sometimes needs/boundaries conflict#again: that's life!
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Breeding König
Warnings: 18+, Riding, Breeding Kink, Consensual Forced Breeding (male receiving), Consensual Dub Con/Non Con, Stomach Bulging/Swelling, Unprotected Sex, Spitting, AFAB Reader, Dirty Talk, Brief Slut Shaming, Sub König, Top Reader, etc.
"'M gonna suck you dry, baby," your breath hitched as you rolled your hips against König's, his cock bulging inside you. He could only whine, moaning when you hit a sensitive spot, only for you to abuse it, driving him to the verge of tears. Driving him to an end he'd come to fear.
"And you know what else?" You leaned down and grasped König’s thick neck in your hands, squeezing just the right spot to make his back arch and his eyes squeeze shut. He was completely physically incapable of stopping you, his hands bound together against the bedpost with rope, his voice unusable. You smiled, rocking against him, feeling him twitch inside you.
He was close. And so were you.
König's eye fluttered open, watching you. He wanted to know your secret. Your obscurity.
You bent down, bringing your mouth close to his ear. Your breath scorched the shell, making him shiver, goosebumps rippling across his chest. His laboured breathing was amplified as you drew closer.
"I'm gonna make you a daddy."
His eyes snapped open. He shook his head, growing harsher as your statement sank in, muffled noises barely sneaking past the duct tape you'd slapped across his lips. He began thrashing, trying to disconnect his hips from yours, trying to pull out.
But you didn't let him.
Retracting, you looked down at him, gripping the covers beneath him and creating makeshift reigns with which you kept yourself stable, kept König inside you. All the while, the panic in his brow only deepened.
"It's too late to resist, köni," you sang, giving him false hope as you lifted yourself up off his cock before slamming back down onto it, making him moan in a way that betrayed his actions - his resistance. He stared at you beneath ginger, half-lidded eyes, mere cracks of their whole circumference. And you smiled.
You slammed down on him again, hands settling on his chest. Pushing him down. Keeping him docile. "I know you want this, you whore."
König shook his head, vehement in his denial, but you disregarded it. It was of little importance to you. You revisited your killing pace, lifting and dropping yourself on his dick with haste. Electricity pooled in your core, waiting to break at any second.
"You're gonna father my children whether you like it or not--" you gasped as you hit your sweet spot. König only seemed to grow more panicked, eyes widening, brow creasing. Resistance futile.
"My pretty little house husband, all mine. I'll harvest you - breed you - as much as I like--" you took his jaw in your hand and forced him to look at you. You spat on him, making him flinch. "And there's nothing you can do about it."
König moaned, loud and long, his back arching into your hips, plugging you with his cock. You groaned, a sliver of a moan slipping from you, as you threw your head back, reaching your climax. König’s load filled you - all of you - to the point that you were sure your stomach would swell.
As your orgasm rolled through you, König shifted through the haze, still trying to retreat from you - trying to retreat from a future you forced onto him.
You would have applauded him for breaking free of the throws of his orgasm had you not been a disciplinarian.
"Oh no you don't," you declared, gaze coming to settle on Konig's frozen, petrified features. He ceased under your stare like a deer caught in headlights, or prey before its predator. You bit your lip as you took his throat in your hands again.
"We're not done here until I'm stuffed so full of your cum that I look pregnant." You squeezed. "Isn't that what you want, hmm? To make you mine? To bear your children?"
You already knew the answer whether König accepted it or not. He could only look up at you, eyes glassy with tears, mourning the fate you'd resigned him to - the future you'd stolen from him. You leaned down and licked a stray tear off his cheek. Rising, you cocked your head.
"Now then," you said, rubbing not-so-soothing circles into König’s chest, "shall we go again?"
Reblog for more content like this! It helps creators like myself tremendously :-)
Masterlist
Masterlist [Continued]
Masterpost
Modern Warfare AI Masterlist
AO3
Wattpad
#konig mw2#konig x reader#konig smut#König smut#könig x you#mw2 x reader#mw2 smut#mw2 fanfic#konig modern warfare#könig x reader#cod mw2 fanfic#konig cod#konig call of duty#cod x reader
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when tony started working for bucky, he never imagined that anything would ever, could ever happen between them.
for starters, bucky was a decade older than tony. not that he had a huge issue with age differences, but still. tony was only in his early 20s when they met.
but more importantly, as far as tony could tell, bucky was happily married.
so despite the immediate attraction that he felt the second he laid eyes on bucky and the growing feelings he began to develop the more they got to know each other over the years, tony knew that nothing could ever come of it and that he needed to be content with just admiring the other man from afar.
but sometimes bucky would say things, or just look at tony a certain way, and he’d wonder if maybe, just maybe, the feelings he had were reciprocated.
regardless, though, he knew he would never do anything about it. there was no reason for him to do such a thing and nothing could change his mind about that.
not even when tony complained about another failed attempt at dating during happy hour one day after work and bucky said, “i could never understand why these idiotic bastards would rather waste another day getting drunk with their equally idiotic friends instead of spending time with you.”
or when bucky took him out for a celebratory lunch after signing a major deal with a new partner and their knees kept brushing under the table, and bucky just kept smiling at him for the whole meal like they were sharing a secret.
also not when they were on the phone with each other at midnight trying to salvage an important client relationship and suddenly the conversation segued into personal relationships and when tony sadly confided that he didn’t think anyone had ever loved him before, bucky vehemently declared, “doll, how could anyone know you and not love you? hell, i’m pretty sure i’ve been half in love with you for years.”
and especially not when they were on a business trip and heading back to their separate hotel rooms after a dinner with their biggest client and bucky kissed him before the elevator doors opened on his floor, and tony’s lips tingled for the rest of the night.
no, tony didn’t do anything about his feelings even after all of that because bucky was married.
then tony meets steve at a big company event, where this big beautiful blond man looks adorably lost and alone in a room with four hundred people. tony can’t help but drift closer to him and introduce himself, offer a drink, and ignore everyone else if only so he could make steve feel more comfortable in this crowd of strangers.
they spend the rest of the night together, talking for hours and giving each other meaningful and longing glances, smiling like they both know where they’d like this to go next. tony’s fingers absently stroke along steve’s hand that is placed on the cocktail table they’re leaning against, and steve’s other hand is playing with tony’s hair and sending shivers down his spine when his fingers brush against tony’s neck, and tony has to resist the urge to rub against steve’s hand like a cat.
steve has just leaned closer, lips and breath whispering across tony’s skin to speak softly into his ear when bucky finds them.
tony reluctantly pulls away from steve, refusing to feel embarrassed or guilty in any way, especially when he knows bucky likely interrupted them just so he could ask tony to get back to work. this is a work event, after all.
but then steve looks at bucky and smiles, and says, “oh hey sweetheart, finally got some time for us?”
and bucky glances between steve and tony, sees how there’s barely any space between them and grins from cheek to cheek. “looks like you’ve met my husband, doll.”
and, oh.
oh.
well.
it looks like tony suddenly has a lot to think about.
#so i was thinking of writing a full fic with this premise but honestly idk if i have the time or energy#but god i do really want to write it#some things would probably change but the general gist would be the same#anyway#bucky only ever refers to steve as cap or punk when he talks about him so tony has no idea it’s steve#stuckony#stevebuckytony#buckytony#winteriron#stevetony#stony#kay writes things
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[“February 1986: Fifty freshmen, three resident counselors, and one head counselor are jammed into the lounge that is the designated meeting space for our floor. The room is a cinderblock rectangle edged with low orange institutional furniture—not quite “couches.” We fifty are one “unit,” sort of like a “bunk” at summer camp except that we will share the same dorm floor for the whole academic year. Many faces are red and angry, or red and embarrassed, or red and passionate. The Northeast Gay and Lesbian Student Union Conference is coming to Brown soon, and our head counselor had approved our lounge as a sleepover place for conference attendees. Two stereotypical jocks, in khaki shorts and backward baseball caps, are on their feet and demanding that the H.C. acted inappropriately by doing so. They demand a vote.
One of us, by which I mean one of us five who are queer, stands up too, and points out that we didn’t take a vote on whether the Princeton Marching Band could be housed here, which they were. I don’t remember now if I was the one who said it, or Nils, or Ellen, or who. What I do remember is that although we were all out to each other prior to the crisis, we weren’t out to everyone else.
The jocks finally make their stand: they’re afraid of AIDS. They’ve grabbed on to this thing which is barely a buzzword to them, as some kind of long-awaited justification for all the homophobic shit they would have kicked up anyway. They are practically high-fiving each other for thinking of it, because, after all, what self-respecting, intelligent person would share a bathroom with “that”?
And one of us, Scott or me or someone, finally says that if they think that by keeping the NELGSU Conference out of the lounge they’re keeping themselves separated from gay people, they’re wrong. That if they think they don’t already share a bathroom with gay people, they’re wrong. And, by the way, that if they think gay people cause AIDS, they’re wrong. But the issue of AIDS seems minor compared to the fact that we have just outed ourselves to the group. We have declared “We are everywhere”—and here we are.
The result of the debate was a “visitor bathroom” policy (people agreed to mark their bathroom doors “okay” for visitors to use or not), and many lacrosse balls winged blindly down the hallways at us from unseen attackers—as if we couldn’t guess who’d thrown them. By the time the conference actually arrived, the furor had died down, and we had a very festive gay pride week. Openly gay Congressman Gerry Studds gave the keynote address, and I still remember the climax of his speech. He said that if the message of Harvey Milk to the previous generation had been “Come to San Francisco and be gay,” his message to the current generation was “Stay where you are and be gay.” It was the second “We are everywhere” for me, and one that convinced me I should stick with the Lesbian/Gay Student Alliance, even though I seemed to be the only bisexual on the campus (or the only one admitting it). Stay where you are and be yourself.
I picked “bisexual” as one label I didn’t vehemently resist, partly because I liked that the definition of it was so nebulous. I had to “invent” bisexuality, I felt, which fit nicely with my antilabel attitude. It was a word everyone knew, and yet I had no bisexual culture to read about or participate in, no bisexual role models—unless you counted the old celebrity chameleon David Bowie himself. That suited me fine.”]
cecelia tan, from picture this, from a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories, 2000
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A piece of paper cut in the shape of a car reads: “Family trips are always prone to get a bit crazy, (the zoo incident for example) but family car rides are just contained madness. Any car ride that went particularly awry for their family?”
Ah long car trips, every large family’s bane. Boy the stories I could tell...
This particular car trip could have gone more badly, but it was definitely one of the slightly more memorable ones. Longer again, so it’s under the cut :)
(Also, little bit of carsickness here. It’s not too bad, but I tagged it anyways just in case)
———
“Dad, Wind says he has to go to the bathroom again.”
Time sighed, and resisted the urge to bang his head on the steering wheel. Why did Malon have to go ahead with her father to her cousins’ place and leave him to drive up with all six of their children alone?
At least Sky had agreed to come along and be copilot. He didn’t think he’d be able to handle things otherwise.
“Wind, we just stopped ten minutes ago,” Time reminded him, “there isn’t a rest stop for another hour.”
“I knew we shouldn’t have let him have any soda,” Legend huffed, and Wind short him a foul look.
“Least I didn’t almost rip the map in two when I tried to refold it!” he said, sticking out his tongue.
“Guys, calm down. We’ll find someplace to stop soon Wind,” Sky said peaceably, and Time once again thanked the goddess for his presence. “But in the meantime, don’t drink anymore soda, okay?”
“Okay,” Wind mumbled.
The car fell silent, and Time enjoyed maybe five blessed minutes of quiet before Wild spoke up.
“This car is so slowwww,” Wild groaned, resting his face on the seat in front of him. “Are we there yet?”
“Wild, Termina is already three hours away, and Romani Ranch is on the outskirts, we’ve got another two hours to go,” Time reminded him. “Try to be patient.”
“Also its only been like five minutes since you last asked that,” Hyrule helpfully pointed out, and Wild groaned again.
Twilight looked back at his brother with a sympathetic look, and held up the book he was reading.
“Here Wild, I brought some books, you want to read one?” he offered, but Wild shook his head.
“No way, my stomach always feels weird if I read in the car,” he replied with a vehement shake of his head. He poked his head over the seat, and peered over at what Twilight himself was reading. “Don’t you get like that too Twi?”
“Nah, not anymore,” Twilight shrugged.
“Why don’t you just enjoy the scenery, Wild?” Time suggested. “See how many different colored cows you can count.”
“Okay,” Wild sighed, and stared out the window.
A couple minutes went by with nothing but the sound of Wild counting under his breath, and Time focused back on driving again, enjoying the quiet. But then a smile twitched on Wild’s lip, and he looked over at his brothers.
“Bet I can count more cows than you guys!”
“Ha, I can count more than you in my sleep!” Legend shot back.
“I bet I can count more than all of you!” Wind shouted, and the backseats were immediately filled with yelling about numbers and cows and a scoring system they began to work out.
Time sighed.
Only two hours to go.
(...)
The cow game grew old after about half an hour, (Four was declared the victor, a fact of which the small boy seemed rather happy about), and the car had settled down again.
Sky had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, and Four was reading over Twilight’s shoulder, the two of them completely engrossed in whatever it was he was reading.
Hyrule and Wind had begun some game or other of naming various objects down the alphabet, (Wind squirming more the more time went by), and Legend was staring idly out the window, looking content enough.
And Wild... had gone back to complaining.
“This trip is taking forever,” he moaned, flopping his head on Hyrule’s shoulder. Hyrule looked down at him, and his brother let out a huge sigh. “Can we stop and get something to eat?”
“We’ll have dinner when we get there, I’m not stopping for food again,” Time said firmly. “If you’re really still hungry you can eat some of those granola bars we have back there,”
Wild sighed again.
“Fine, since we’ve got nothing else... Unless Twilight still has gummy worms?” Wild asked hopefully. He poked persistently at the back of Twilight’s head, and his brother wordlessly handed them back.
“You can have them,” he muttered, looking a bit pale.
“Are you okay Twi?” Four asked from next to him, and Twilight closed his eyes.
“Little carsick,” he mumbled. “‘ll be okay.”
Wild began slurping up the few remaining gummy worms, slapping Legend’s hand away when he tried to grab a few.
“Hey, come on Wild, share your worms!” Legend protested, and Wind broke into giggles. Wild clutched the bag to his chest when Legend grabbed for them again, firmly shaking his head.
“Twi said I could have them, not you,” he stressed. “Get your bunny paws out of here.”
“I’m not a bunny, I’m a rabbit, and you can’t even spare one worm?” Legend huffed, crossing his arms. “Geez Wild.”
“Can I have one?” Hyrule asked politely, and Wild immediately set one down in his outstretched hand.
Legend stared, and looked between the two with a disbelieving expression.
“What?!” he spluttered, and Wild grinned at him.
“You didn’t say ‘please’.”
Time sighed as the boys waged war over the gummy worms, keeping his eyes out for an exit so Wind could use the facilities. Traffic had been light so far, but as they got closer to the city it had begun to increase, and Time prayed it wouldn’t get too bad.
Only another hour and a half.
“Dad, pull over,” Twilight said suddenly.
Time frowned at his tone of voice. “Pup, I don’t know if I can, there’s a lot of traffic right here, we—”
“Dad pull over.”
Time looked at Twilight’s face in the rearview mirror, noting how his face had gone from merely pale to green, and immediately worked on getting over as fast as possible. He stopped the car by the edge of the road just in time, and Twilight jumped out and promptly emptied his stomach onto the grass.
A chorus of mostly-sympathetic ewwwws went up from the backseats, and Sky, who had woken up sometime during the gummy worm drama, quickly hopped out and went to Twilight’s side.
“Guess he was more than just a little carsick,” Four murmured, and Wild scrunched up his face.
“...You can have the gummy worms, Legend.”
“No thanks,” Legend declined with a grimace, then unbuckled himself and hopped out of the car. “I’m too busy stretching my legs anyways.”
“Out of the way!” Wind yelled, and made a break for the bushes nearby.
Time watched all of his boys scramble to get out of the car, eager for an opportunity not to keep sitting, and he got out himself, going quickly over to where Twilight was, who looked a little dizzy.
“Are you okay Twilight?” Sky asked gently, and the boy nodded, his cheeks pink.
“Yeah, I’m good. Sorry,” he apologized. “I guess I uh... read a little too long. And I... I probably shouldn’t have eaten those gummy worms either.”
Time sighed and patted him on the back. “Twilight, you really should have known better. You know you get carsick.”
“I know,” he murmured, gladly taking some water that Sky offered him. “Sorry. I thought I’d be okay.”
Time hummed and rubbed his son’s back a little, watching him sip at the water. He looked less pale now that he was out of the car. Perhaps he’d just needed a break.
I suppose I should have tried to stop sooner, he thought a bit guiltily. There really hadn’t been anywhere to stop though, and Twilight was stubborn and wouldn’t have asked for a break to let his stomach settle even if there had been an opportunity to do so.
“Are you alright to keep going?” Time asked after a couple minutes, and Twilight nodded, getting to his feet.
“Yeah, I’m good now, thanks dad,” he smiled.
“I’m good too!” Wind said as he waded back out of the bushes. “I saw a weird bug Twi, it had these really big pinchers and looked like it was watching me—”
“Come on boys, time to keep going,” Time called over to where the rest of his children were tousling in the grass, and they reluctantly got up and piled back inside the van.
He waited until he heard them buckle up, then got back onto the road, getting up to speed without too much issue.
“What’s that, Wind?” he heard Four ask after a couple of minutes.
“The bug! I named him Mr. Pincher! Isn’t he the— ouch!”
“Wind! You dropped him!”
“Where’d he go?!”
“GRAB HIM!”
Time sighed as the backseat broke into yelling again, and focused himself firmly on the road ahead.
Only an hour and a half to go.
#incredibles au#tw throwing up#all the links#minus wars heh#lu time#lu twilight#lu Wild#lu wind#just tagging the major characters#linked universe fanfic#answers from the floor#mad navi my beloved#incredibles au fic#one time our van was making this whining noise right under where I was sitting the entire seven hour car trip#my ears felt weird for a day or two afterwards ha#...that ride was pretty miserable XD
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Secret
Parings: Sarah Cameron X Fem!Reader
Type: Fluff
Warnings: Secret relationship, Kissing, work?
Words: 1004
As siblings, you and your sister Kiara often held opposing viewpoints, but your most vehement disagreement centered around kook princess Sarah Cameron. Kiara regarded her as a loathsome, treacherous ex-friend who had marred her time at kook academy. They had started out as pals, but the friendship ended inexplicably, causing Kiara to conclude that Sarah Cameron was a malevolent presence. She was the one who had callously abandoned your sister and never bothered to reconcile. Hearing all of this should have triggered an alarm within you, warning you about Sarah Cameron's unsavory nature.
Unfortunately, things didn't pan out that way. Perhaps you were not the best sister, or worse yet, a lousy person all around, but you didn't give it much thought. Sarah was magnetic, attractive, humorous, and intelligent, and you couldn't resist her charm. You soon realized your massive crush on her only two weeks into the school year. At a kook party months later, you finally mustered up the courage to talk to her, and from that moment on, you were captivated.
In light of all this, the sayings about blood being thicker than water didn't hold much credence in your book. You had resolved to wholeheartedly support Sarah Cameron, and you could never reveal your true feelings about her to Kiara.
While covering a shift for Kiara, someone unexpectedly poked you in the sides, causing you to spin around. It was Sarah, grinning slyly at you.
"What are you doing here?" you whispered, surprised to see her.
"I'm rescuing you," she declared, giggling before taking the empty tray from your hands and placing it on the counter.
"But I'm only halfway through my shift, and I'm supposed to be filling in for Kiara. If she discovers I'm gone..." You begin to fret.
"Don't worry. I'm incredibly stealthy, and no one will be the wiser," she reassured, leaning in to give you a tender and quick peck on the lips before you could react.
"Sarah!" You grabbed her hand and hustled her outside to the rear of the establishment.
It wasn't just Kiara who had issues with Sarah Cameron; after learning of their encounter, your father loathed the Camerons as well. They were self-absorbed, money-grubbing individuals who only cared about those in the Eight with fortunes comparable to theirs. You and Kiara were kooks and nowhere near their level.
"If my father catches us..." You panicked, while Sarah simply giggled and bit her lip.
"Calm down, babe. You're overreacting. No one will see us," she insisted.
"Look, my car is just over there. We don't even have to go anywhere else. We can head back to my place, take a dip in the pool, and hang out in my room," Sarah suggested, trying to be alluring as she ran her hand up and down your arm.
As she ogled your physique, you frowned and replied, "I'm supposed to finish a shift."
Sarah pleaded with you, "There's only a few more waiters there. Can't you just tell them you're sick, please? We haven't hung out in days!" A pout formed on her lips.
You thought about how you've been working relentlessly as the tourist season picked up, taking all of Kiara's shifts while she hung out with friends. For once, you wanted to enjoy yourself and do something pleasurable. "I mean, I guess," you finally relented, shrugging your shoulders.
Sarah enthusiastically exclaimed, "That's my girl!" and embraced you, locking lips.
As you reciprocated her affection, your tongues intertwined, and her hands wandered up and down your waist, while yours tangled in her hair, eliciting soft sighs from her lips.
As you heard the back door creak open, you hastily disentangled from Sarah and took up a casual stance. She quickly hid behind a stack of crates, ducking down low.
Kiara strolled in looking bewildered to see you outside. "Hey, what are you doing here?" you asked, coughing to clear your throat. It felt like a toad was lodged in there.
"I just got back from being with JJ, and dad told me you were gone – so I came out to look for you," Kiara explained, scanning the back alley of The Wreck with suspicion. "What are you doing out here?"
"Nothing...just chilling," you responded in a laid-back tone, trying to seem unfazed.
"Right," Kiara said, nodding her head skeptically. "By yourself, outside."
You fidgeted, "Yeah. But you know what? I'm not feeling so good. I think I might throw up, so I'm gonna go rest."
Kiara frowned, "Did you tell dad? Your shift isn't over yet."
"Not yet, but I will. I just need to get some fresh air," you said, bringing your nails up to your lips and lightly biting them.
"Fine, I'll tell dad," Kiara replied exasperatedly, turning to leave. She paused briefly, looking back at you.
"You're acting really weird, by the way." With that, she disappeared back inside The Wreck.
As Kiara left, the door slammed shut, and you heaved a sigh of relief. Sarah appeared from behind the crates and teased, "I think I got a cramp from crouching down like that."
"That was too close," you murmured, glancing back at The Wreck as she tugged you towards her parked car.
"I should tell them," you muttered.
Sarah stopped in her tracks, stunned that you were considering telling your parents and Kiara that you two were dating. They didn't even know that you were bisexual, let alone in a relationship with Sarah Cameron.
"Are you serious? You want to tell them?" She smiled incredulously.
You nodded assertively. "Yeah, I think they should know that I have a girlfriend. What's the worst that could happen? They tell me not to date you? We're already experts at sneaking around," you said, concluding with a chuckle.
"Alright, when you're ready, we'll tell them. And I'll tell my dad and Rose too that you're not 'just a friend," Sarah agreed, radiating joy.
#cloveswifey#outerbanks#rafe cameron#sarah cameron#jj maybank#rafe cameron imagine#imagine#obx#imagines#jj#sarah cameron imagine#Sarah#Cameron#Rafe#Maybnak#john b routledge#John b#kiara carrera#obx imagine#jj obx#obx smut#obx masterlist#obx fic#obx3#rafe obx#obx cast#obx jj#obx season 3#obxhub#obx x reader
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[ Gossip ] - Sure, the majority of attendees tonight have donned masks, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a delightful little chat about them all the same.
"Have you seen that RIDICULOUS hat Iago is wearing?" She can't help but sneer out his name. "And the way he came in trailing in after Xander? What does he think he's doing?"
As usual, her liege is absolutely stunning, and Selena wastes no time making sure she is but a complement to her image. Her gut response, especially in such an atmosphere, is a polite laugh; hearing the vehement declaration of Camilla’s statement, however, Selena can’t help but match her venom. She scoffs: “What a pointless existence. That worm is so pathetic he can’t help but find a new host to cling onto.” Unable to resist the delicacy in front of her eyes, Selena pauses, and substitutes her poison for perfume. “My Lady, you’re looking absolutely stunning tonight. I’m so happy to serve with you tonight.” And Selena can’t help but smile.
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Concilliabule with Lokane please. I miss them. 💚
Thank you.
Concilliabule - A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot.
Genre: Modern/Non-Magical AU, Spies, Drama, Angst
Rating: T
A/N: I tried to do comedy with this one. I really did. It came out…something different. Hopefully you still enjoy it! This is loosely based on this story summary of mine. (AO3)
BREAKING POINT
When Loki grabs Jane from behind, hand over her mouth, she resists like a rabid animal, clawing at wherever she can find bare skin, throwing her head back in a fruitless attempt to butt his. Just like he taught her. He’d be rather proud if it weren’t for the burning tracks her nails were leaving in his forearms.
“It’s me,” he murmurs and blessedly the fight goes out of her. He waits another breath or two before releasing her.
She spins around, steps back, a haggard look on her grey features. Moonlight drifts through the gauzy curtains in the otherwise dark hotel suite. There is something missing in the scientist before him, that ineffable spark he’s found both irritating and compelling during their time together.
“What’s happened?” he asks. If anyone dared lay a finger on her… His cold, apathetic mien threatens to crack under the bloom of perpetual rage that he keeps hidden beneath.
Jane doesn’t answer immediately but drops instead onto the sofa nearby, her head in her hands. He follows her, sitting on the coffee table opposite her. He reaches over her shoulder to the lamp on the end table, turns it on, and studies her for a moment. She seems smaller—broken—so unlike the fiery thing he brought on as an asset several months ago. Every step was a battle with her and her overwrought sense of right and wrong. She would willingly die on the altar of her principles if he didn’t find a way to work with the damnable things. But this woman before him is no longer her.
He gently pries her hands from her face and grimaces at the redness in her eyes, the hollowness written in them. “Tell me.” He wants to know who will meet an agonizing demise at the end of one of his knives. They don’t deserve the mercy of a bullet.
A ghost of her usual fire passes through her haunted gaze as she whispers, “You said you were going to protect me.”
The accusation pricks him. He did make that promise a half year ago, and at the time, he hadn’t minded that it would be flimsy at best. In the last week, however, those words became the steel in his bones as he searched for her. She left for the lab one morning and simply vanished. He had to call in every favor owed him, chased every breadcrumb, hitting dead end after dead end.
Until tonight.
His relief when she crossed the threshold of this hotel suite was as unfamiliar to him as it was staggering.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he says in a feeble attempt at their usual banter. When she only stares at some point past him, he sobers. “Pack your things. I’m getting you out.” They’ll lose months of careful work, but he finds he doesn’t care for the price of this gambit anymore. He’ll find another way into the shadow organization known only as the Heralds of Dawn.
“You can’t.” She looks at him then, anger clenching her jaw. “I’m in, and I’m going to take every last one of those bastards down no matter what.”
He’s unsettled by her vehement declaration. He might have liked this sudden no-holds-barred attitude back in the early days of their association, but a Jane Foster without an unfailing moral compass feels wrong.
He shakes his head, captures one of her hands in his. “This has—”
“You weren’t there!” she shouts, jerking out of his grasp as she stands up. “You weren’t there!”
“Jane.” He rises, reaches for her, but she steps back.
“They made a weapon of my work,” she says, pinning him with a glare. “They made me explain how it works to potential buyers. They made me participate in a demonstration yesterday. An entire village just…gone. Sent through a wormhole that leads to nowhere.” She squeezes her eyes shut. A tear makes a glittering track down her cheek. “I can still hear the screams.”
Loki refuses to trivialize this horror with insipid platitudes. She’s right, they must be stopped, but she’s wrong if she believes it has to be her. She’s done enough. He’ll take care of the rest. “I want names.”
“No. I’m doing this,” she says, jabbing a finger at him, iron in her tone. “They have Erik.”
Ah. Doctor Selvig, her beloved mentor. If Loki finds him, gets him to safety, perhaps—
“Either help me or get out.” The words are laced with finality. She won’t bend, not on this point.
Well, then. He closes the distance between them, cups her chin in his hands, and brushes his thumbs over the wetness on her smooth skin. “Command your servant, milady,” he murmurs. It’s a throwback to the derisive comments he’s made over the months on her unyielding, authoritative nature, but he’s entirely sincere now.
She bites her quivering lip, nods her head, and then sags into his chest as if trusting he’ll catch her. As if he’s her anchor. A novel role for the man who is usually the maelstrom. He wraps his arms around her, carries her to the bed where he holds her while she weeps into his shirt.
An hour later, after her tears are spent, she whispers, “We’re going to burn it all down.”
“Yes.”
~FIN~
#rosalysaoirse#my fic#lokane#lokane fanfic#lokane ff#loki x jane foster#jane foster x loki#star does prompts
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Its often on my mind, but i do find it generally odd how resistant people are to liking characters that can also be classified as 'bad people'.
yeah theres the matter of fandom purity culture and its growing if curious 'puritanical' tendencies as of late, but i do mean it in a very broad sense of people coming down hard on and vehemently denouncing characters who are bad people when that bad person aspect of their character is an intended design function and not a bug the author of the text somehow missed.
and to clarify from the gate, theres a major difference between being an unlikable character and a character who is a bad person. The two categories often overlap, and certainly authors will often missread aspects of their characters they are writing, but there is a difference and often times a character is a bad person for a specific reason [whether it be thematic, plotting or what have you]
luke in tales of abyss for instance is during the beginning portion of the story a bad person. hes rude, crude, egotistical, childish and all around annoying. that luke is a bad person is pivotal to the plot of tales of abyss, as its luke being a bad person that helps facilitate tragedy near the middle of the games story per the villains overall goal. it is also pivotal to the themes of tales of abyss, on matters of redemption and self improvement, on the question of nature vs nurture, self actualization etc etc.
thats a fairly tame example mind you, and an important aspect of lukes character writing is how the story applies a lot of scrutiny to lukes moral character. it just baffles me how deeply people will often let parasocial relations with fictional characters get so deeply personal/invested to the point they take everything as a representation or indication of their own morality and moral fibre depending on what they do and dont like.
mind you to an extent i think it stems from a very 'adolescent' mindset on these things and a general learned social condition people absorb from others in fandom [cause i remember that being the case for myself when i was younger]. its just, critical textual analysis and fandom in general becomes less fun if the sword of damocles is ready to fall on your head the moment you happen to like a rotten bastard.
mind you, im not gonna declare it illegal to dislike characters based on moral judgements. i dislike a number of characters based on moral judgements like the fickle ass i am, but i dont think its a good rule to use as a be all end all of who you should and shouldn't like.
#this rant brought to you by sylvain gloucester#sylvain fire emblem#who i realize now that i probably would not like as much/find as interesting if he wasnt a mysoginist#thats some interesting character ground to explore and analyze#and its equally interesting to consider why it feels unadressed/unresolved within the text itself#in terms of how fe3h chooses to present or study that misogyny#and also related to thoughts on shinobu sensui from yyh#categorically a reprehensible individual in terms of a lot of his actions#which makes him so fascinating to observe in action
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August: Chapter 6
( ao3 | ff )
Previous Chapters: [link]
Summary: Pushing boundaries and facing personal challenges, Chuck and Blair share a motorcycle ride.
Pairing: Chuck x Blair
Word Count: 4.3k
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Eating disorder
----------------------------
The garage was a display of opulent sports luxury cars, some of which belonged to Bart but were rarely driven, while others were Lily’s, left to gather dust. It was like a motor museum filled with vehicles that most people could only dream of owning in several lifetimes. The scent of gasoline mixed with cleaning products hung in the air. Much like every corner of Lily’s beach house, the garage was immaculate, every surface gleaming, in what was typically the dirtiest part of the house.
Chuck’s sport motorcycle occupied a corner of the garage, almost inconspicuous amidst the grandiose vehicles. Not that the motorcycle was in any way inferior. The red Ducati stood boldly in its vibrant color, a symbol of Chuck’s escape and freedom. It allowed him to feel the rush of the wind, the exhilaration of speed.
Chuck and Blair approached the two-wheeled machine, with Blair hesitating and following a few paces behind him. Her eyes darted around, as if she had never been in such a place. For someone accustomed to chauffeurs and being chauffeured everywhere, the prospect of a motorcycle was akin to stepping into an entirely alien world. However, that was about to change.
“I’m not getting on that,” Blair declared after a few minutes of contemplative silence.
Chuck reached for the all-black helmet resting on the Ducati’s seat and extended it toward Blair, expecting her to take it.
Blair vehemently shook her head. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.”
“Don't be so high-maintenance.”
“Pot calling the kettle black. I’m not ruining my hair with a helmet.”
Acting on impulse rather than thought, he reached out to tousle her hair, but she quickly retreated from his touch.
“Don’t you even dare.”
Chuck couldn’t help but smile at the look of absolute horror on Blair’s face. “Come on, grab the helmet. It’s as stylish as one of your designer hats.”
“Don’t insult my hairpieces like that.” Blair retorted.
He gently nudged the helmet closer to her until she had no choice but to take it. Meanwhile, she scanned the garage, searching for her next excuse.
“Chuck, I’m wearing a dress,” she pointed out.
Chuck burst into laughter at the obvious remark. “So?”
“It’s going to get ruined.” Blair wrinkled her nose in disapproval.
“There’s no one here that cares,” he assured her.
“I do! Blair Waldorf cannot be anything less than perfect, and that includes keeping this dress immaculate.”
“Maybe it’s time for her to try something different. Just trust me.”
“Don’t act like you wouldn’t be annoyed if I tore apart one of those purple shirts you love so much,” Blair countered with a playful challenge.
He would gladly let her.
Chuck’s voice dropped to a sultry whisper, his desire thinly veiled in his tone. “I wouldn’t dream of harming that exquisite dress of yours,” he said, his eyes moving down her body, tracing every curve as her dress clung to her figure. “Unless, of course, you’d like me to.”
“Ugh, get your mind out of the gutter.”
His fingers ached to touch her, but he resisted the temptation, maintaining a respectful distance. As the air became more charged, Blair shifted her focus.
"I’m not getting on a damn bike. Look at it, it’s dangerous. I’m sure you don’t even have a permit…” Blair began to list all the potential risks and dangers of the highway as well as his supposed under qualification to handle it. She was relentless, but Chuck didn’t care.
He had brought her there with a purpose, and if he knew one thing about Blair Waldorf was that she thrived on challenges and dares. To get her to step out of her comfort zone, all he needed to do was suggest she couldn’t do something, and she’d prove him wrong. So, he continued to push, because Blair wanted to escape, and Chuck simply wanted to be with her.
"Have you stopped complaining already? We're not getting…” he paused from dramatic effect. “On this one."
Her cherry lips formed a big ‘O’.
“You have more of them?”
“Yes, but—”
“I still can’t believe you know how to ride a bike.”
“There is plenty you don’t know about me, Waldorf.”
She shifted her expression, her eyes growing sadder.
“Don’t worry, that means I can still surprise you.” He touched her arm, signaling her to follow him.
Helmet in Blair’s hand, they turned and approached a room to the left. Chuck swiftly input a code and pressed a button on the wall, the reassuring success sound signifying the door’s readiness to open. With Blair closely in tow, he swung the door open. And there it was, his absolute favorite. While the red motorcycle might have been more expensive and extravagant, attracting the attention of all who beheld it, the one before them held a special place in his heart. The black cruiser, meticulously crafted from the ground up based on a Royal Enfield, had been entirely customized for him.
A white helmet with a red stripe down its center dangled from one of the handlebars, its open front allowing the rider to feel the wind. The motorcycle looked very impressive, and Chuck couldn’t help but swell with pride. Blair’s smile was almost imperceptible.
“Where are we really going?”
“Does it matter?” Chuck replied in a soft voice, knowing that question didn’t require an answer.
He grabbed the helmet and handed it to Blair, who now held both. With a swift movement, he removed the kickstand with his foot and began maneuvering the motorcycle out of the cramped storage room.
Once they were outside, Chuck pressed the button to open the main garage door and straddled the handcrafted cruiser, steadying it with his feet on the ground. He signaled Blair to pass him the black helmet and instructed her to put the other one on.
Blair scrutinized the helmet as if expecting it to transform magically.
“It doesn’t bite.”
“Are you sure?” She continued to study the helmet, her hands caressing its circular form. “Chuck, do I really have to?”
“Yes. I’m not negotiating that.”
“Turn your head.”
“What?”
“I don’t want you looking at me as I put it on.”
Chuck was about to protest, but he did as told. Blair was fraught with insecurities, and though he truly believed she had no reason to be, this wasn’t about him. Not at all.
“You can look now,” she said with a shaky voice.
She looked charming in her gray-blue dress and the white and red helmet. He couldn’t fathom why she complained so much; she looked great in practically anything. Chuck placed his helmet in front of him and reached out to her. Blair moved closer, allowing him to secure the helmet with a satisfying click. Her eyes remained averted as he gently patted the top of her now helmeted head.
“You’re going to pay for this.”
“I can’t wait. Hop on and hold tight,” Chuck said, placing his hand on the vacant leather seat behind him, a mischievous smirk on his face.
“You wish,” Blair huffed, her demeanor as dignified as ever.
With an air of determination, she balanced herself with one foot on the footrest and one hand on Chuck’s shoulder as she swung one leg over the seat and hopped on. Chuck shifted to accommodate her, his shoulders tensing.
Once she was securely seated, Blair positioned herself as far away from Chuck as possible, but Chuck didn’t say anything. No quick remark or innuendo. At that moment, the reality of the situation hit him. Here he was, as sober as he’d ever been, willingly revealing one of the most sacred parts of himself. What made this different was that he wasn’t just showing it to Blair; he was sharing it with her, all in the name of friendship and the simple desire to make her happy. He couldn’t quite understand why he felt this way, and the specter of his stoic father loomed, threatening to cast a shadow over them.
With a resolute shake of his head, Chuck refused to allow his father to spoil this particular moment. Bart had already ruined much of his life, but these quiet moments with Blair, where he could be unapologetically himself, were too precious to surrender. He was well aware that they would likely come with regret, and that ultimately he might end up hurting her. Nevertheless, he believed there would be ample time in the future to atone for his mistakes.
“Chuck!” Her high-pitched exclamation caught him off guard, nearly causing the black helmet to slip to the ground.
“What?” Chuck stammered.
“My dress.”
“What happened?” His voice was notably calmer.
“Nothing! It’s just... Everyone is going to see.. Well, everything.”
He tried to sneak a peek, but Blair smacked his shoulder.
“Don’t look.”
He chuckled softly, a mischievous grin spreading across his face. “Sorry,” he whispered, his voice tinged with amusement. “Just move closer and stick to me.”
“That was your plan all along, right?”
“You’ll never know.”
Chuck put on his helmet and ignited the motorcycle’s engine, unleashing a powerful growl that reverberated through the garage. The vibrations under his feet mirrored the electric tension in the air. Startled by the sudden roar and the motorcycle’s tantalizing instability, Blair inched closer and firmly gripped his shoulder, one hand still brushing the seat. Maybe, just maybe, if he could…
He let go of the clutch lever a bit abruptly, causing the motorcycle to surge forward, and a stifled gasp escaped Blair’s lips. In response, her hands left their prior position and clung fervently to the fabric of his shirt on either side of his torso. Her body pressed hungrily against his, seeking the warmth and reassurance of his presence. As the fragrance of her perfume blended with the scent of gasoline in the air, her grip on his shirt slowly relaxed, and her hands found a new tempting resting place on his chest.
A feverish heat enveloped Chuck’s chest, a broad smile stretched across his face. It felt better than he had ever imagined.
In that singular moment, with her arms coiled possessively around his chest and her thighs provocatively pressed against his, Chuck could have died a happy man. Concealing his ear-to-ear grin behind the helmet, he revved the engine once more, sending a surge of exhilaration coursing through both of them. Gently lifting his feet off the ground, they ventured out of the garage and onto the moonlit streets of the Hamptons.
With Blair nestled behind him on the motorcycle, Chuck could feel the tension that had clung to her throughout the day slowly melt away. The rigid lines on her face softened, and a serene smile began to grace her lips. As the bike hummed beneath them, the warm evening air played with her hair, tousling the meticulously styled waves.
Blair’s body adapted to the rhythm of the ride with every twist and turn of the motorcycle. Her hands, previously clasped tightly in front of Chuck’s chest, now gave her the space to lean back. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, letting the breeze caress her skin and whisk away her burdens, replacing them with a profound feeling of liberation. Chuck could sense every emotion she experienced.
Seated securely on the bike, Blair released her grip on him and extended her arms slightly, as if testing her newfound freedom.
Chuck couldn’t recall a moment when he had seen Blair like this, completely letting go, forgetting about everything and everyone. The serenity on her face was a rare sight, and he would give anything to witness it every day of his life. Why was someone who seemingly had everything needed to be happy so goddamn miserable all the time? It was a question he could just as easily ask himself.
To maintain her balance, Blair’s thighs tightened against his own.
She had no idea what she did to him.
He had to slow the bike briefly to prevent any mishaps, and she responded with laughter, like music in the night, filling the air as they navigated the streets without a specific destination in mind.
It sucked to accept that he would never be the one to bring her the happiness she needed. Blair was well beyond his reach, and he was acutely aware of it. She deserved an Archibald, someone seemingly perfect on paper, not a Bass, flawed in every sense. Blair was everything he desired, while he epitomized everything she despised. Chuck had pledged to himself on numerous occasions to avoid this perilous path, yet he continually faltered, letting down both himself and the esteemed Bass family name. He had tried to quell this desire, even attempting to kill it once and for all, but it persisted, a relentless presence. He could even admit that, at this very moment, with her on the back of his cherished motorcycle, it was stronger than ever. The contact of her thighs and the subtle touch of her hands served as a constant, torturous reminder that might drive him to madness. The most excruciating part was not merely knowing that she’d never see him the way she saw Nate, but the painful realization that even if she did, he would inevitably hurt her. And that was something he refused to do.
In that very moment, Blair closed the gap between their bodies, her arm draping over his neck, hand resting on the opposite shoulder, with her chin nestled upon it. There wasn’t a single inch separating them, and Chuck’s stubborn heart raced uncontrollably. Pleasure began to shift into pain, and he fought to maintain his composure, recognizing that the night was not about him or his unrequited feelings. He couldn’t afford to let it show, and he hoped that his body would cooperate.
They rode on for another hour until Chuck finally brought the motorcycle to a halt in front of a nearby convenience store. He removed his helmet and turned to Blair. The wind had given her cheeks a rosy hue, and her lips appeared slightly parched. She was surely going to have a fight once she assessed the state of her hair, but her eyes sparkled with a blend of determination and exhilaration.
“Why are we stopping?” she pouted.
“Now you’re enjoying it?” Chuck teased.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. I know you loved the feel of holding onto me for over an hour.”
“I… I didn’t,” Blair stuttered, her cheeks now a deeper shade of crimson. It was hard to determine whether the flush was a result of the ride or his words.
“Hey, you didn’t hear me complaining.”
“Chuck… Don’t ruin it,” she requested with a gentle tone. “Please.”
Chuck nodded and removed the key, swinging his leg over the bike and securing it with the side stand. He should have known better than to tease her at that moment. While their ride might have provided a brief escape, it wouldn’t solve everything. Healing would take time, a lot of it, but if anyone could do it, it was Blair.
As he moved to assist Blair in dismounting the motorcycle, she unclasped her helmet, allowing Chuck time to tend to the bike while she sorted out her hair. Blair fussed over her locks, attempting to rectify the tangle of curls.
“Don’t say anything,” she warned him.
“You are as beautiful as ever,” the compliment escaped Chuck’s lips, his words seemingly bypassing her previous request. He picked up her helmet from the sidewalk, now holding them both in one hand.
Blair’s gaze frantically swept her surroundings once she realized they were not in the upscale part of the Hamptons they typically frequented. They stood out in their designer clothes that cost a fortune, surrounded by pedestrians in cheap floral shirts, beach shorts and sandals. However, no one paid Chuck and Blair any mind.
Before Blair could voice her concerns, Chuck changed the subject. “When was the last time you had a proper meal?”
“This morning. Why do you ask?” Blair responded, distracted by the fashion crimes of the locals. “Ew. Is she really wearing flip-flops?”
“Since the cherries?”
She nodded, her hand smacking his stomach. “Look at those ripped jeans! I can practically see their entire leg. It’s an abomination. Why do they even bother?”
Chuck couldn’t help but laugh at her outrage.
“I’m not joking, Chuck. Why are you so casual about this? Since when did you become one of them? You’re scaring me.”
Chuck raised an eyebrow. “I’m simply having a little fun, Waldorf. I haven’t gone all ‘commoner’ on you, don’t worry. Leave the flip-flops to Humphrey; they suit him better.”
“Don’t even mention him.”
“If you don’t divert the subject,” he urged, nodding toward the store. “Do you want something to eat?”
“No.”
“It’s been nearly fifteen hours.”
“I’m fine.”
She was certainly not fine, but Chuck didn’t push further. For now.
“Well, I am hungry,” he lied; he wasn’t. He had dinner at the house before retiring to his room in what seemed like a peaceful and uneventful evening. Still, Chuck was willing to go into the dirty local store if it meant Blair would eat. “So, I’m going in. Are you coming?”
“You can’t leave me here,” she started following him inside. “They could assault me or something.”
“Or something.”
Though they were far from the Upper East Side or the extravagant beachfront mansions, they were not in a dangerous neighborhood by any means. Middle-class residents passed by, engrossed in their everyday lives and concerns.
When Blair reached his side, she grasped his arm and remained close as they navigated the store’s narrow aisles. She could get lost, or something. The old woman at the cashier’s desk peered at them and smiled warmly. Chuck deliberately ignored the beers and stronger alcoholic beverages that seemed to be calling his name, loud and clear. Instead, he chose a veggie sandwich, a fruit salad, and a bottle of water, fitting them inside their helmets as makeshift baskets. Not that Chuck was accustomed to grocery shopping, but paying was a familiar process. Money spoke a universal language.
Blair cast a quizzical glance at Chuck in response to his choice of food, and the cashier couldn’t help but interject with a sweet, grandmotherly tone, “Young love, isn’t it wonderful?”
“Oh, no, no,” Chuck began to protest.
Blair, however, couldn’t help but blush and glanced nervously at Chuck, who was equally taken aback.
The woman simply waved her hand dismissively and chuckled, “No need to deny it, my dears. It’s written all over your faces.”
Blair stammered as she distanced herself from Chuck. “We’re just friends.”
“Exactly, just friends,” Chuck chimed in, trying to regain his composure.
But the cashier beamed at them, amused, and began ringing up their items with a knowing smile. “You can’t fool an old lady like me.”
Uncertain of how to respond, Chuck paid for their purchases and turned to leave the store, his cheeks flushed and an unsettling feeling in his gut.
As they exited, the woman called out, "Enjoy your evening. And remember, love is the greatest gift of all."
Chuck loosened the top button of his shirt, the heat of the night becoming more apparent, or at least that’s what he told himself.
Resuming their journey, Chuck and Blair returned to the motorcycle, its engine roaring to life once more. They ventured through the unfamiliar streets, the distant memory of the cashier’s nosy comment lingering in the night air. Chuck had offered to take Blair back to the beach house, but her fervent refusal had taken him by surprise. The old lady’s remark had shifted the course of their evening, making it feel more real and unguarded, especially for him. However, Blair appeared unbothered, and Chuck was determined to follow her lead.
This time, Blair hadn’t uttered a word about her hair or the state of her dress. With swift grace, she had mounted the bike and held onto him firmly. It was a sensation Chuck was beginning to get used to, and that both excited and unnerved him, more than he was willing to admit.
The distant sound of crashing waves beckoned them to the beach, its magnetic pull impossible to resist.
As they parked and stepped onto the moonlit shore, the balmy night air enveloped them. Blair’s eyes met Chuck’s, and for a moment, it seemed as though something unspoken hung between them.
“Would you like to have something to eat now?” Chuck finally broke the silence. He had consciously avoided this conversation for most of the night, trying to respect her need for escape, but he couldn’t ignore her physical well-being any longer. That was rich for someone whose body was largely fueled by alcohol and drugs.
“I thought it was for you.”
“I know you don’t want anyone patronizing you, so I won’t answer that. Don’t act like a fool when you know damn well you’re anything but that.”
Blair crossed her arms defensively. “I don’t want to eat. I told you, I’m fine.”
“I’m amazed you’re still on your feet right now.”
“I said I’m fine.” At that moment, her stomach growled, and she quickly put her hands on her belly to stifle the sound.
The hospital was not supposed to be the next destination on this trip.
“Blair, I heard you.”
“What?”
“This afternoon.”
“Who do you think you are? My mother? Clearly not, because she would be thrilled that her precious child was starving to keep her calorie count down, wouldn’t she? ‘Avoid this, steer clear of that, and for heaven’s sake, no more of those. Keep that figure in line. That dress can’t afford any extra baggage. And what’s with that roll?’”
“I don’t want us to fight. I’m just worried.”
“Then stop worrying. I didn’t ask you to.” Blair dropped the paper bag that contained the food to the ground and quickly walked to an isolated spot on the beach, creating distance between them.
Chuck sighed. That went well.
Taking a deep breath, Chuck picked up the bag and approached Blair, his footsteps leaving imprints in the soft sand. She sat on the beach with her knees drawn up to her chest, gazing out at the dark expanse of the ocean. Though her hair was slightly tousled from the ride, it still looked impeccable.
Chuck settled down beside her, keeping a respectful distance. He didn't want to invade her space, but he wanted her to know he was there if she needed him.
“Blair,” he began softly, “I understand you don't want to talk about it, and I won’t push you. But you don't have to go through this alone. I’m here for you, whatever you need.”
Blair remained silent, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon. Chuck couldn’t help but feel a pang of powerlessness. He cared about her deeply, but he also knew the depths of her pride and independence.
After a while, she extended her hand to him, and Chuck, as if reading her mind, opened the sandwich and passed it to her. He mimicked her posture, drawing his knees to his chest and resting his arms on them, his head turning to face her. Blair took a small bite and then paused.
“Can you… not look at me while I eat?”
He smiled. “Of course.”
Chuck turned around, his back now facing her side. He focused on the rhythmic sound of the waves crashing against the shore, letting her have her moment of privacy.
“Thank you,” Blair said quietly.
“Anytime.”
“Not just for this. For tonight.”
“I’m really sorry about the way it ended up.”
“It’s not over yet.”
Then, why did it feel like it was? Chuck couldn’t shake the feeling that he had somehow irreparably damaged the serenity of the evening. He hadn’t intended to be the cause of more pain, and yet, here they were. She had sought an escape, and she had trusted him to provide it but, as usual, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, ultimately dragging her demons back into the forefront. He questioned whether his intentions were genuinely driven by concern and selflessness, or if he was merely the same egoistical individual as always, unable to bear witness to her suffering for his own selfish reasons.
He lay down on the sand, the stars in the sky shining bright, and Blair joined him after finishing her food. She turned to him, her hand gently touching his arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice soft.
Chuck let out a heavy breath, looking up at the starry sky. “Why are you asking me that?”
“You know you also deserve to be happy, right?”
“That train left a long time ago.” A melancholic smile touched Chuck’s lips.
“You don’t have to carry the burden of your father’s mistakes forever.”
“They’re not just my father’s mistakes. They’re mine as well. I can’t blame him for everything I choose to do. Some mistakes, some choices, they stick with you.”
“You can’t let them define your entire life. You have the power to change, to be different, to find happiness. That I know.”
“Do you? What if I don’t know how to be different? What if I’m too broken to change?”
“You're not broken. You've been through a lot, but that doesn't make you any less deserving of happiness. You have people who care about you, who want to see you happy.”
He wasn’t sure he believed that.
“I wish more than anything that you could see that for yourself, Blair.”
“Let’s both try.”
With that, they lapsed into a comfortable silence, the sound of the waves and the company of each other soothing their troubled souls. In that moment, the beach became a sanctuary, a place where their shared pain and understanding forged a bond stronger than ever.
#gossip girl#gossip girl fanfiction#chuck x blair#chuck bass#blair waldorf#chair#chair fanfiction#chuck x blair fanfiction#fics#*#the chapter that made me fall in love with this story
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8/26/23: r/SketchDaily theme, "Movie Week: Free Draw Finale." Well, I don't watch many movies, so couldn't think of any to draw, so decided to go off theme and draw one of my characters like I usually do for Free Draw Friday. (I feel guilty to skip a week as I plan to eventually draw them all.)
This week's character from my anthro WWII storyline is Noah Kirchheimer. He's not a major character, though does play a few important roles in the background, working for the resistance. He kind of has an attitude problem, though. There'll be more about him later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se.
Regarding his design, he should look a bit angrier rather than perplexed.
TUMBLR EDIT: There's quite a bit about Noah's role in the story in his cousin Johanna Wolfstein's entry. So I recommend looking at that. I don't really know his background yet except that something occurred to make him quite angry, bitter, and distrustful, as well as so overly protective of the much softer-hearted Johanna that Otto Himmel mistakes the two for husband and wife. There's nothing inappropriate between them, just that in the absence of Johanna's brother Jakob, Noah takes on a protective brother role and tries (a bit too hard at times) to keep her safe.
Noah and Jakob Wolfstein can easily be compared to Josef Diamant and Tobias Schäfer on the canine side of the story. While Wolfstein and Schäfer remain kind and moderate despite their awful experiences (both of them were incarcerated in labor camps, with Wolfstein being experimented on and tortured in Project Doomsday, while Schäfer was literally purchased for the price of a tapestry before he could be executed), and still try to believe in the goodness inherent in most people, Diamant and Noah go in the other direction, becoming angrier, more distrusting, and more militant. Although Diamant attempts to minimize civilian casualties as the leader of a resistance movement that often engages in bombings and attempted assassinations (the SS declares them a terrorist group), there are times when innocent people get killed anyway, and Diamant himself often engages in morally murky behavior including torture. He, too, was imprisoned in a camp, where he was deliberately targeted by the commandant, Ernst Dannecker, who subjected him to frequent physical and psychological torture (there's an instance of a sort of sexual abuse as well, though Dannecker uses a proxy for this) which left him badly traumatized and partly crippled in one hand; ironically, Diamant ends up taking on so many of Dannecker's personality characteristics, including his unnerving smile and his fondness for Russian roulette as an intimidation tactic, that Schäfer (who'd been in the same camp, yet at a different time) describes him as having "sold half his soul to the Devil," the Devil being Dannecker's nickname (der Teufel). In effect, Schäfer is saying that Diamant has partly become his own enemy and tormentor, Dannecker. And in some ways it rings true, the only real difference in Dannecker's and Diamant's actions at times is that they're on opposite sides. (Both Dannecker, if he were still alive (Diamant murdered him), and Diamant would vehemently deny this, which kind of proves Schäfer's point.)
Which brings us to Noah. Noah's attitude is described quite well in Johanna's entry; even well after the war, he's openly hostile toward Himmel, who had actually worked to undermine his fellow Nazis' efforts in wartime--largely with Noah's assistance. It doesn't matter to Noah (not until very late, at least)--like Diamant, he can use somebody to achieve a goal, yet then they become expendable, especially if they're allied with the enemy. Considering the circumstances, such a mindset makes sense; even Himmel acts in such a manner when he confronts Corporal Anna Julian. What is somewhat a mystery still is WHY Noah has such a militant attitude. He's the only one of these four, as it happens, who DOESN'T spend time in a camp, or end up nearly killed. Although he does have to go into hiding with Johanna, his life is relatively safe and much easier in comparison, as he has a wide network of resistance allies to help and protect them. So what's the basis of Noah's occasionally over-the-top rage?
Like I said, given the timeline of the story, it's not unreasonable for Noah to be this way just because he sees what's happening to others. His behavior strikes me as a little TOO aggressive at times, though. There's almost a feeling that he's overcompensating. And in fact, I feel this is what he's doing: He knows he's relatively safe and well off, he has people to help him, he has a good number of resources that many of his fellow Jews lack. He's working from a position of privilege, and I think it wears on him. He likely has not only a sense of guilt at being in such a position when so few other people are, but also more than a trace of spite that he can't approach this battle from the same angle of struggle that many of his peers can. Noah's never been a soldier, he's never fought in a war. He's never been in a ghetto and he's never been in a camp. No Nazi has ever experimented on him, tortured him, forced him into slave labor, played mind games on him or relegated him to death or traded him for a wall hanging. Aside from Himmel, he's never even directly faced a Nazi down--and Himmel was Noah's captive, not the other way around. Noah's entire existence, even during the war, has been pretty safe and cushy, and I think he resents that. He likely feels like a bit of a fraud and wishes he had a more appropriate background to be fighting from.
Result, he tends to overdo things. He acts like more of a tough guy than he actually is (Himmel nearly calls his bluff, and Noah ends up regretting it when he's thus forced to try to prove himself by following through on his threats--Himmel's son Kolten flies into a rage and turns Noah into a ragdoll until Himmel convinces him to stop), antagonizes both friends and foes far more than he should (even Wolfstein gets fed up with him more than once), and basically infantilizes Johanna by insisting she's too weak and gullible to effectively look out for herself or make her own decisions. Late in the story he nearly ostracizes himself from the rest of his family due to making every disagreement into the hill he's going to die on.
Oddly, it's Himmel who talks him down from this, or rather, Himmel's letters, written to his deceased wife since the birth of their son. Noah finally gets a glimpse of the human behind the enemy's face, and learns his reasons for making the choices he did. (Himmel never believed in the Nazi cause, joining the party only in the hopes it would protect Kolten.) Himmel may be a very rare exception to the rule, but that's the point. An exception exists yet Noah had been willing to pretend he doesn't, at the risk of losing his own family. His entire worldview doesn't change--he still rightly distrusts and despises others like Himmel--but there's a very slight shift. He realizes he can't just take at face value that everyone in a group is exactly the same...that sort of mindset is what got everyone here.
(PLEASE NOTE, I'm talking about fiction here, where I know all the characters' true motives because I created them. This doesn't apply nearly so cleanly to real life, where if somebody is wearing a swastika, you can likely correctly judge their mentality at a glance; I'm by no means saying give Nazis a chance. I know I wouldn't.)
Anyway, without taking a good deal of time to brainstorm Noah's past, and maybe not get anywhere yet (these guys reveal stuff on their own schedule), this is what I've got for him. I suspect his past was quite normal and tame, and that's ironically what helped make him so tense and hostile in the story; he feels he has to go out of his way to prove himself to everyone else who didn't have it so easy, and always worries that he's not good enough. Unlike Wolfstein, Schäfer, or Diamant, who each had concrete, external enemies, he put the chip on his own shoulder.
[Noah Kirchheimer 2023 [Saturday, August 26, 2023, 2:00:17 AM]]
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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.
I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.
This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.
Transcript below the cut.
FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??
Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.
I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.
Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.
Brace yourselves.
Some quick prehistory:
In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.
And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.
(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)
Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.
Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.
We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.
Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.
The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.
Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.
This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.
Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.
In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.
In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.
Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.
Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.
In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.
After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.
In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.
Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.
Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.
[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]
In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.
It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.
To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.
They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.
A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.
But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.
Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.
(sigh) Let’s take a breath.
Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.
In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.
Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”
Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.
The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.
What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.
This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.
The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.
Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.
In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.
Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?
And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.
So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?
The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!
Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,
How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.
What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:
you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.
MEMEIFICATION
So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.
Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.
A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.
You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -
ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.
If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!
If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times
that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?
So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,
this is a rape joke.
I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.
Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.
If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.
Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.
In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”
What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.
Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.
And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.
The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.
In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.
You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.
It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.
ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL
A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.
It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.
The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.
They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.
I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.
LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP
One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”
Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.
A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.
Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.
This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”
But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.
AD CAMPAIGN
George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.
GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.
Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.
PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING
One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.
Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”
People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.
This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.
This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.
This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.
THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END
Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”
The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.
This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.
This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.
The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”
And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.
But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.
WHY GAMES?
Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:
why not games?
Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.
This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.
And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.
The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.
And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.
Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.
Sorry this was such a bummer.
Thank you for your time.
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outsider pov deancas, 2.4k, based after the good finale. for @bloodsigilsandpie <3
"it's happening."
natasha returns to the kitchen, her otherwise suppressed glee betrayed by the glint in her eyes as she declares to the entire room. "they're on a date."
chloe's the first to react, or rather, the spoons in her hand that promptly drop back into the foam are. "no way."
"way." farah rushes close to natasha, gushing. "did they tell you?"
natasha sniffs, depositing the plates in the sink with her back turned to her eager audience.
"do you think they told me?"
she doesn't wait for an answer, turning around and leaning back against the counter.
"of course they didn't tell me. but i," she smirks. "i could tell."
"oh, you could tell." hutch repeats mockingly, and a few others snicker. "nat, we're talking about the trenchcoat dude who never smiles, and big-car-black-coffee-loyal-to-the-pie guy. no one has ever been able to tell anything with those two. and they don't look anything more than unlikely work friends to me either."
"unlikely work friends don't look at each other like that!" farah chastises immediately.
"fine. unlikely work friends with repressed homosexual urges from the 80's."
"hutch, if you're going to insult my date-dar, do it to my face!" natasha scowls, earning herself another eyeroll and a defensive palms-up gesture from the skeptic sous-chef.
"he literally just did." chloe mutters, ever the devil's advocate, before farah interrupts. she'd always been their resident 'trenchcoat dude who never smiles and big-car-black-coffee-loyal-to-the-pie guy' shipper. there tend to be one of those for all such couples the waitstaff discusses on the regular, really.
"so, how can you tell? what's different?"
"well for one," natasha grins. "trenchcoat dude's not wearing his trenchcoat."
a commotion of gasps come up from arguably most stations of the kitchen — even those who weren't a part of the discussion before.
"is it on the back of his chair? did car-guy help him take it off?" farah instantly pipes up, her eyes wide and hopeful. (hutch and her are the newest waiters, natasha remembers with a midge of distaste. sometimes it's too obvious.)
"no. it's nowhere in sight." she admits, eyebrows raised.
"maybe it ripped." that's hutch.
"maybe he finally realized that thing was doing nothing for him." dallas. everybody knows he's got a thing for trench coat dude though, so nobody bats an eye.
"maybe car-guy told him." chloe shrugs.
"hey, maybe somebody else did." hutch again.
"that's not the point." natasha butts in. "car-guy's better dressed too. i don't know much about old people fashion — chloe, if you don't stop looking at me like that — but i think ascots are supposed to be fancy."
"he wore a what —" several voices echo, and just then, freya enters the kitchen, beaming. (second year at the diner, loads of tattoos, and has a lovely girlfriend at the domino's across the street. natasha likes her.)
"you guys'll never guess what happened."
hutch and dallas sigh in unison, and farah giggles a little. "you won't guess what happened here either!"
"me first. trenchcoat dude and car-guy are on a date."
chloe snorts, picking up two prepared plates of food from one of the side chef's stations, and setting off out the door freya just entered from. important to find a job-gossip balance and all that.
natasha turns to the new informant. "what did you see?"
"car-guy asked trenchcoat what he wanted for dessert." freya beams.
"this just in, men can learn manners." hutch inputs before exiting with his own tray.
"car-guy might always order the pie but it looks mutual!" farah points out indignantly but he's gone already.
nevermind, he'll be back in five.
"and what did trenchcoat say?" natasha asks, ignoring the other two.
"milkshake," freya replies, writing it on a post-it as she says it.
"one shake, two straws." farah gasps. "come on, frey. tell me it was one shake, two straws."
"two shakes, two straws." she scribbles away.
"maybe they're gonna share both." farah quickly supplies.
"nobody does that, farah." dallas retorts, and natasha makes a face at him, not willing to kill the former's hopes just yet. farah tends to get this forlorn look on her face when things go wrong — and it always reminds natasha of her dead cousin.
she clears her throat.
"look, it can be a date without the shared milkshake, people." a few thoughtful sounds come up, the gates swing, and chloe walks back in. "plus, we've still got all the staring, the lingering looks over the menu, the soulful eyefu —"
"but that's everyday, nat." freya sighs.
"it's different today —"
"— you know it isn't —"
"— and i can prove it." natasha finishes, earning herself looks of surprise from almost everyone around. she can, though. the diner's got a valentines discount on milkshakes all month, she can approach them about it. trenchcoat and car-guy don't have to know it's not just for couples. and on the (really, really) offchance that they aren't one, natasha could always just minus the discount from the total anyway and no one would be the wiser.
the idea had just come to her but she was fairly sure she could swing it.
farah had already picked up a tray with two soup bowls and a dish of croutons, but she puts it down, and replaces the to-be-forlornness with excitement. "how?"
"i'll," natasha smirks again. "talk to them."
another round of gasps. in this kitchen, the people were nothing if not dramatic.
this time, freya's the one who asks, "how?"
"well, i haven't waitressed for twelve years just to go about rattling off trade secrets, kids." natasha winks, and a few of them make indignant noises because only about one third of the staff was what could broadly be called new. most of them had been there for years, and were practically a part of her family now. but she picks up her own tray smoothly, conveniently having been slid to her counter just then, and sets off — to an audience of hopeful believers (and dallas)'s matching stares.
(natasha isn't exactly free of the flair for drama she'd just accused everyone in this kitchen of.)
once outside, she makes a beeline for the table her tray is actually for, leaves them it, and quickly heads for the infamous trenchcoat and car-guy table.
this is so going to work.
"so then i cut his —" car-guy stops mid-sentence, spotting her. a part of natasha seethes to know what he 'cut off', but being fodder for the kitchenstaff's are-they-dating games didn't take away their rights to privacy, and she respected those. the car-guy smiles shortly at her. "what's the matter," his eyes flick down to her nametag, flick right back. (definitely a good sign; most men linger.) "natasha?"
she puts on her best smile. "it's about the milkshakes."
"is there a problem?" car-guy eases into a wider smile. "do you not have them, not a single one, and do we have to order pie instead?"
car-guy's partner shakes his head exasperatedly. "dean, i hardly think that's what she'd be here about."
"well, a guy's gotta dream." car-guy — dean — instantly says, and goes back to his burger while trenchcoat speaks up instead.
"what's the matter?"
natasha doesn't let her smile budge. it's a hell of a customer service smile, she's been told. "i actually came here to ask if you would like me to add the date dessert discount on the milkshake. it's an all-february thing. not on all items." she clarifies, a reflexive response for why it hasn't come up before.
genius.
dean looks a little cornered — trenchcoat just looks confused.
"i don't understand." he says, after a moment's pause. "the milkshakes cost less just if dean and i are here on a date...?"
"it's not —" she balks a little at his seriousness. "it's actually not that big of a difference."
"that's...alright." trenchcoat tilts his head, and natasha suddenly realizes she's physically fighting the urge to stare. shit, dallas isn't half-wrong. "but why just milkshakes?"
dean lets out an uncomfortable laugh. "capitalism trying to crap all over the free man's heart and the supremacy of pie not enough reason for ya, cas?"
natasha stifles a smile.
that's actually a good line. maybe car-guy deserves more credit than just loyal-to-the-pie.
trenchcoat — okay, cas, at least while she's out here — still looks a little doubtful (and she has no idea why) but he nods at dean, and then looks up at her and nods again. "add the discount."
natasha has to resist the urge to let her jaw drop.
this entire conversation, she'd practically been sure they were heading towards a rejection of the 'date' clause. and her gut told her they weren't lying either.
well, well. always thrilling to be right.
"and thank you for telling us about it." cas continues, and her practised smile returns immediately. probably a little less obligatory.
"of course."
and dean still looks like he'd rather cut more whatever-he-was-talking-about's off rather than be here right now, so natasha goes to leave. but cas stops her right before she's out of reach.
"excuse me." he's the one smiling this time. "if you're not busy right away, could you tell us what other items are eligible for the february date discount?"
dean facepalms. "come on, dude."
cas gives him a look — and natasha was right, of course she was right, that's not a exasperated 'friend' look. "i'd like to know, dean."
to natasha's knowledge, they've never had trouble paying for anything before (hernandez, she thinks one of their surnames is, she's seen it on a card) but she can't object to 'cas' asking, of course. curiosity is also a well-off man's right.
"why?" dean asks vehemently, before she can start to rattle off the list.
"because," cas answers levelly. actually, he kind of sounds like he's using his dad voice. maybe he is a dad. "i think it's strange that we've never gotten the discount before, while we've been eating lunch here almost this entire month."
it's again hard for natasha to not just stare gapmouthed at them.
"those have been dates." she realizes belatedly and out loud, and receives a weird, distasteful look from dean, and an immediate nod from cas that makes her blurt out, "so this isn't your...first date."
they're dating.
oh, farah was going to lose her mind.
"is that a requisite clause?" cas asks politely, while dean just scrubs his face with a hand.
"no." she tells cas truthfully. "i'm sorry, i just assumed it was. your first, i mean."
"lady, we certainly don't look first date aged to me." dean butts in, not hostile, but like it's something that irks him. "and we've been married four years, so one would desperately hope it's not our first date, y'know."
married.
they're friggin' married.
natasha is an idiot, and her date-dar is probably due for an early retirement.
they've been married for four years.
"i'm...very sorry." she apologizes, mortified. "i had no idea. i —"
"it's fine." this time, dean's smiling, and cas's confused frown is back. it's like they take turns. natasha is almost grateful for it, to be fair, because both those smiles directed at her would've been a helluva lot more distracting. "really doesn't matter. and yeah, sure, add the milkshake discount but don't worry about the list of items." he turns to cas. "just have sam look it up for you when we get home. please."
cas seems to be prepared to acquiesce to that but natasha can't help her own curiosity this time. "is that your son?"
and she's halfway to regretting it the moment she registers having said it, even though thankfully neither of them look too offended. in fact, cas is back to smiling.
"he's dean's brother." cas tells her. "he's the one with jack right now." he pauses. "it's easier because he and eileen live with us."
"yeah, an in-house sitter who doesn't even like going out is really a department we won in." dean grins, solely at cas. as if he's momentarily forgotten all about natasha's presence (that had clearly been making him uncomfortable talking in front of, earlier) in just looking at his husband. natasha sends out a quick pre-prayer for farah. "sucks for eileen though."
"eileen is very happy with your brother, dean." cas chastises, his eyes nothing but affectionate even then, and natasha's head reels with how much she has to tell the waitstaff today.
they're going to friggin' adore her.
"so jack is your son," she confirms, less wary of their reaction to her question now that they looked to have settled into their own silent conversation.
"he's our son, yes." cas replies, simply.
"like, you and him." she flashes a smile at dean.
"us and sam." cas corrects, and dean facepalms again. for her part, natasha can do little more than blink.
"but —"
"it's complicated." dean cuts her off suddenly, and she flinches. he didn't even deny it, just...sidestepped it.
"i — i see." natasha clears her throat, still looking at cas in bewilderment.
cas probably doesn't notice because he's talking to dean again. "it's significantly less complicated than claire's parentage, dean. she has over six parental —"
jesus christ.
"aaand that's enough trivia for date night." dean interrupts loudly again, definitely for the best, because natasha was standing there like a thoughtless statue at this point. his raised voice shakes her out of her reverie, and she vaguely calculates the chances of crashing into a table if she tried to walk away right away.
"i'll," she mumbles instead, drawing in a breath forcefully. "i'll be back with your milkshakes."
"thank you!" cas calls after her as she half wobbles on her heels back to the kitchen.
inside, she puts her empty tray on the metal counter and her hands on both sides of it, bowing her head, and almost immediately ending up surrounded by a plethora of people — most of whom, in normal circumstances, would just have been eavesdropping from their respective stations.
farah's the first to ask, followed by hutch.
"so?"
"what did you find out?"
natasha closes her eyes. "they're married."
this time, the commotion is the largest yet. but she isn't done.
"and every single one of their meals here have been dates." freya pumps her fist, chloe squeezes farah's hand, and dallas tsks under his breath. the 'gallery' watchers appear ready to join in the cheering as well today. but the entire kitchen senses she isn't done yet, and waits fidgetingly for the rest of it.
"and," natasha swallows. "they're almost definitely in a cult."
#destiel#third person pov#casdean#baby jack kline#mentions of saileen#spn crack#bluefirecas#userpris#casthyelle#evermorecastiel#rambleoncas#tearsofgrace#userstarry#holmesemrys#smiledean#oh writing my writing#userdori
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super sukuna
more of my gokushufudou sukuna au agenda; ~700wc
you find sukuna at the playground in a sandbox, constructing a sandcastle with an audience of devoted and wide-eyed kids. it's a sight, for sure: he's in his usual suit and tie, and his face is twisted into that determined scowl he wears so much; but his gruff voice gives out gentle instructions to the children, and his big hands carefully pat on the formed sand.
"—and an exit here," you hear him say as you approach. "it's defensible and could make a good escape point if your backs are to the wall and you need to run."
the gaggle of kids ooh and aah at his wisdom, and immediately follow his orders to construct the doorways.
"wow," you declare as you stop beside his crouching form. he looks up at you, and the scowl on his face instantly dissolves. "that's a pretty good castle."
it's so intricate you wonder how he wrangled kids to do it; a top-down view of a box with four towers on each corner, with the middle divided into various sections you can safely assume to be rooms. plastic green soldiers are lined up at the front, and a dragon riding princess is balanced on one of the towers. twigs and flowers are stabbed into the sand surrounding the structure, and scattered between them you could see hero action figures posed in fights against monsters.
sukuna stands and wraps an arm around you, gives you a kiss, before smugly declaring, "of course it fucking is."
a majority of the older kids immediately gasp, and scandalized cries of "that's a bad word! bad word!" go around. it's so loud that some of the parents on the other side of the playground look up to see what the commotion is.
sukuna immediately spits out a vehement "ssshhh!" as he glances nervously at the parents. he gives them a small wave. you stifle a laugh at the discomfort and panic on his face.
the kids blink up at him and one of the boys declare: "you said a bad word."
sukuna scowls down at him. "tell your parents saying bad words aren't bad."
"then why are they called bad words?"
"because your parents tell you they are."
the boy quiets as he ponders this knowledge, while a little girl tugs on his slacks. "what does fucking mean, then?"
he puts a hand on her hair. "just means super, kid. I'm just telling my pretty baby here that the castle was super good."
the girl brightens at this, says, "oh! okay!" before going back to shoveling sand with her hands.
"does that mean we can say bad words?" a different kid asks.
"sure, brat. why don't you try saying motherf—"
"okay!" you alarmingly pull on his arm. "i think that's enough life lessons from mister suit guy, now! say 'bye bye, mister suit guy!'"
sukuna grins at you knowingly before looking back at the kids. "bye bye, mister suit guy!" his tone drips with sarcasm.
you resist the urge to backhand his stomach.
the kids chorus their goodbyes, and sukuna gives away promises of more sandcastle ideas and playtime before you're able to get on your way home.
"cannot believe you're encouraging the neighborhood kids to say bad words," you grouse. sukuna simply laughs in response, a deep belly laughter that you know is genuine mirth. if only it wasn't because he was teaching kids to say swear words, you would've found it endearing. you whack him on his abdomen instead. "their parents know you! we know them! you'd have to face them with the knowledge that you taught their kids to say 'fuck'!"
sukuna catches your arm and slides his hand down to hold yours. "well. you didn't stop me, kitten."
you gasp. "excuse me! I pulled you away, you were about to say—"
"ah." he raises a finger at you. "but not when I said—" he stifles more laughter. "not when I said that fucking means 'super'."
you roll your eyes. "okay, okay. we're both responsible for corrupting the children of this town."
he tugs you closer, smirk on his face. "ah, a partner-in-crime. whatever will I do without you?"
"teach kids to say motherfucker." you deadpan, running a hand over your face. "god, imagine if you got that word out they'd probably think it means 'super mom' or something. think of the mother's day cards!"
he bursts into laughter again.
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The Old Taylor Swift Never Left
The Atlantic // February 13th 2021 // by Shirley Li
The artist’s first release from her re-recording project is much more than a nostalgia play. It’s a love letter.
When Taylor Swift, the pandemic’s most productive pop star, announced that she’d be re-recording her albums in a push for ownership over her work, the venture sounded risky. Swift cast her decision as both a personal vendetta against the music executive Scooter Braun and a moralistic stand against the industry’s treatment of artists. But at face value, re-recordings seem to offer little to look forward to for listeners. Ostensibly, these tracks are near-identical to the masters, with the same lyrics and production.
Yet “Love Story (Taylor’s Version),” her first re-recorded track, is no mere copy of the 2008 single that helped launch her to her first Album of the Year Grammy. Swift’s voice at 31 is much richer. Her tone is more controlled, her staccato more precise. She sings the name “Romeo” at one point with a cheeky clip - “Rome-ee-oh” - that suggests the “involuntary smile” on her face that she described in her note announcing the release of the new version of Fearless. Made with the same collaborators she used on the first Fearless, the song works in conversation with Swift’s original recording. If 19-year-old Swift’s eager, breathless vocals captured that thoroughly teenage sensation of fantasizing over a new crush, the older Swift conjures a mature, amused wistfulness. It’s as if the artist is reminiscing about writing the song with a fondness for her younger self’s melodramatic tendencies. She’s not making a passionate plea; she’s warmly recalling a memory.
The re-recording, which has already topped the U.S. iTunes chart, certainly marks another instance of pop culture’s obsession with nostalgia paying off. Many similar industry efforts - TV reboots, extensions of film franchises, covers of childhood favorites - service fans through cameos and casual references without meaningfully considering the original work’s impact. But Swift, through her stronger vocals, engages with her younger self, scrutinizing her lyrics. She joins in on the act of being a Taylor Swift fan.
And Swift, after all, is a master at knowing her fans. She lurks on social media, sends them holiday gifts, and rewards them on tour by playing deep cuts and mashups, reinterpreting the songs she wrote years earlier as codas to the diaristic lyrics she’s written since. She’s carried that intimacy into the rollout of her re-recordings: In packaging the new tracks not only as a business decision, but also as a chance to right a moral wrong, she mobilized her fans. In transparently describing her desperation, she made them feel like they could help.
These moves have culminated in the reframing of “Love Story,” which is now a love letter to her fans. The lyric video features her old photos with meet-and-greet attendees and candid vlog footage from the time of Fearless’ release. The new album art mimics the original cover, Swift with her eyes closed and hair whipping across the frame. The announcement letter included a secret message in capitalized letters, just like the ones she hid in the liner notes of early albums. This re-recording, she’s making vehemently clear, is not a simple throwback. It’s a shared appreciation: You know that old Taylor she once declared dead? She misses her too.
Swift’s next albums on deck for re-recording may be harder to reimagine through her new, grown-up gaze. After 2008 come trickier narratives - those she didn’t want to be a part of and those she created - that are perhaps more resistant to redefinition. But in the updated “Love Story,” she has successfully deployed a potent nostalgia that, like the lyrics to her best songs, reshapes time. The sentimentality of her re-recorded version comes not only from remembering a specific moment, but also from reflecting on the distance between that one moment and, well, now.
Indeed, “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” surprised me with its ability to extract a memory I’d long forgotten. As the chorus played, I recalled a friend in high school who had painstakingly held an audio recorder to the radio, waiting to commit to tape the line from the original “Love Story” where Swift pleads, “It’s a love story, baby, just say yes.” He planned to use the recording to ask his crush to prom, and I remember thinking this was the pinnacle of romance. (It worked, by the way.) Listening to the new version, with its sage, winking tone, made me feel an affection for my younger, more naive self, and a gratitude for the growth since. Any cheap nostalgia play can conjure a fuzzy burst of pleasant memories. But Swift, in this re-recording, merges those memories with the present.
#taylor swift#taylor's twitter#the atlantic#article#re-recording#love story#Fearless album#evermore era
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statue of ice
yes i am still updating this fic lmao
main masterlist ◈ maribat masterlist ◈ ao3 link
She only lasts a few weeks before caving and telling her brother that she’s Ladybug.
The Guardian – Fu is his name – was vehemently against revealing her identity again, already annoyed that she’d told Jason. Privately, Marinette thinks that Fu can “go fuck himself”, and maybe Jason would have said it out loud, but she does not.
Instead, she ignores his wishes and tells Tim anyway.
To his credit, her brother isn’t even surprised. He just quirks a smile during their scheduled video call and says in a light voice, “I guess it runs in the family, then, doesn’t it?”
Marinette is inclined to agree. After all, what are the odds that both of them ended up being protectors of two cities?
.o0o.
A week later, Tim calls her to confirm Marinette’s suspicions that Gabriel Agreste is Hawkmoth.
“He’s slippery. Paid to have all the security cameras around his home removed, but I traced akuma sightings on social media and marked them on a map and what do you know, his house was right in the center of the circle. I also checked out the property. He literally has a butterfly window, Mari. Everything in his house is butterfly patterned. It checks out.”
“Thank you, Tim-Tam. I’ll take care of it from here,” Marinette says. Her mind is already working, forming a plan to take Gabriel down. Permanently.
It has to be public. The city wouldn’t believe it otherwise, and some are already accusing Ladybug and Chat Noir of creating the akumas themselves so that they can make themselves look good by defeating them.
Exposing Gabriel as Hawkmoth would cause the downfall of his company and result in the loss of thousands of jobs, but Audrey Bourgeois had a Parisian branch of Style Queen that was still fairly new and looking for employees, and she knows that Audrey would most likely hire all of Gabriel’s employees out of spite.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to help?” her brother asks. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”
She knows. She wants so, so badly not to do it alone, to have her brother by her side as she faces down a magic user that could turn her into a puppet in the blink of an eye if she allowed herself to feel just a little bit too much, but she can’t bring him into this. Can’t bring anyone else into this. Tim already spends his nights stopping rapists and murderers and seeing all the horrors that Gotham has to offer. He doesn’t need to see what Paris throws at its people as well.
“It’s a miraculous matter, Tim-Tam,” Marinette says instead of voicing any of those thoughts. “Besides, bringing anyone else in puts them at risk of akumatization. It’s best to keep as few people involved as possible.”
“Okay then,” Tim responds, not fully managing to hide the disappointment and apprehension in his voice. “Good luck, Mari.”
The corners of her lips twitch upwards in a tiny smile. “I am the living embodiment of good luck, Tim-Tam. It will be alright.”
.o0o.
It is easy to poke and prod at Gabriel’s ego until he thoughtlessly lunges, crashing through his own window onto the street below when she dances out of his way.
Ladybug follows, dropping and rolling with a familiarity that comes from being forced to do that same motion countless times, and she toys with him, dodging, ducking, but never really attacking, until the news helicopters start circling overhead.
Chat Noir arrives just as she sweeps Gabriel’s legs out from underneath him, and he doesn’t quite manage to stifle his gasp of horror, all irritation at Ladybug for taking Hawkmoth down without him forgotten when he sees who is underneath the mask.
Ladybug may find Chat Noir (Adrien Agreste, she reminds herself,) a nuisance at best, but she is not heartless. She knows what it’s like, to want to believe that one’s parents are good people. She knows what it’s like when that illusion one tries so hard to maintain finally shatters, and it’s something that nobody deserves to experience.
Chat’s face hardens as Ladybug starts murmuring words in an ancient tongue underneath her breath, casting a spell on his father, who gave up the fight as soon as the butterfly was removed from his hands, to ensure that Gabriel will never be able to touch another miraculous again. He won’t be able to exist within three feet of one.
It’s a good thing she chooses that spell too, because it protects Gabriel from his son’s wrath.
As the authorities are cuffing his hands behind his back, something cold settles in Chat Noir’s eyes as he calls up a Cataclysm and lunges at his father, the clawed hand rippling with dark magic outstretched, ready to disintegrate a living, breathing human being.
Gabriel is yanked backward by an invisible force, pulled out of harm’s way, and Chat’s Cataclysm lands on a chunk of debris instead. The Black Cat is held back by his partner before he can try something else.
“Chat,” Ladybug hisses, as he struggles in her hold, still trying to go after his father, who is being put away into a police car. “It’s done. It’s over. He won’t hurt anyone ever again, and the justice system will deal with it.”
Chat Noir slowly starts to resist less and less at her words, and she takes that as a cue to continue. “It feels anticlimactic, and I know you want to do more. You think we should do more than just let them take him away, because you’ve been fighting on the front lines of this battle since the beginning. But our part is over. Our duty has been fulfilled. He won’t be acquitted, if that’s any consolation. There are mountains of evidence against him.”
Her partner turns around, suddenly, and buries his face into her shoulder as his body jerks with what she realizes are sobs. He’s crying,Ladybug realizes. He’s crying for his father. For who he thought his father was.
When was the last time she cried for one of her parents?
Ladybug reaches a hand up and awkwardly pats Chat Noir on the back for a moment before she spots the reporters.
“Let’s take this to our usual meeting spot,” she whispers to her partner, and he nods, composing himself in an instant. Janet would have liked Adrien, she thinks. Gabriel’s parenting style was evidently similar to how Marinette had grown up.
Five minutes later, they’re standing on the Eiffel Tower, overlooking the city they’d sacrificed so much to protect.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Chat Noir asks, turning to her. “This is the end? There’s no use for us anymore.”
Ladybug inhales slowly, taking in the view from above one last time and committing it to memory. Not that she needs to – her eidetic memory ensures that she’ll never forget. It’s for the sentiment, she supposes.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “We have to give them back now. Say goodbye to our kwamis.” She’ll miss Tikki’s company, she thinks, but not as much as she misses Jason’s. The kwami was sweet, yes, but she didn’t understand Marinette’s need to do something other than being Ladybug.
“Where do we even return them to?” Chat questions, and then she remembers that he’d never been told of the Guardian’s existence.
Ladybug unhooks her yoyo from her side, tossing it up and down one last time as she prepares to swing. “Follow me,” she says, and then she throws the yoyo and leaps off the side of the Tower.
.o0o.
Fu’s massage parlor is just as inconspicuous as ever, and somehow, no one is walking along the street when Ladybug and Chat Noir enter.
The Guardian has been expecting them – there are three cups of tea sitting on the table in front of him.
“Ladybug, Chat Noir, please sit,” he says in his wheezy voice. They oblige, but the tea remains untouched on the table.
“Chat Noir, it is time to return your miraculous,” Fu states, and the two of them stiffen, immediately picking out what’s wrong with that sentence.
“Why am I not included?” Ladybug inquires, her polite tone holding an undercurrent of danger. “There cannot be a Ladybug without a Black Cat.”
“Well, you see, you won’t be using the Ladybug,” the Guardian explains with a slightly condescending look on his face. “But there can only be one Guardian, and I’ve chosen you to be my successor.”
The sound of Ladybug’s palms slamming on the table makes the other two people in the room jump. “Absolutely not,” she declares as she stands up. “I did not agree to become the Guardian. This has never been discussed.”
Fu looks up at her with confused eyes. “But you became a candidate when you agreed to put on the earrings, and Chat Noir is simply not fit for the job.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Chat Noir wince, but he does not disagree.
“I put on the earrings because people were dying,” Ladybug growls. “Because this city needed something, someone, to look up to, and there was no other viable option. The Guardian is never in the light. They spend the rest of their extended lives hiding in the shadows to protect a box of magical jewelry. The Guardian is not a symbol of hope, because nobody knows the Guardian exists. I put on the earrings to be a symbol of hope, not because I wanted to, but because people needed one. The people don’t need one anymore, and I don’t want to continue doing this.”
“I was fighting a war, Fu,” she spits, furious words laced with venom. “I was fighting a war with one ally by my side and we were both children. Now that the war is over, I am no longer needed, so I am leaving. I want the shreds of innocence I had before this war back, but that is not possible, so I can at least try to move on from this instead. Let me move on.”
Without warning, she reaches up and carefully takes the earrings out of her ears. She would have loved to rip them off in one swift movement, but earrings were not that type of jewelry. The Ladybug suit disappears in a flash of pink, and then she is Marinette again, standing in a massage parlor with a pair of red-and-black earrings in her hand and two sets of wide eyes fixed on her.
“Marinette,” Chat Noir breathes. “Oh my god, I… I’m so sorry.”
Marinette drops the earrings on the table in front of them. “Are you sorry for being an ass, or just sorry because the person you convinced yourself you were in love with was an illusion?” she asks, not looking at anyone or anything in particular as she pivots on her heel and strides for the exit.
When she reaches the doorway, however, she pauses, eyes still fixed straight ahead of her. “Oh, and Adrien?” she calls, eliciting two identical noises of surprise. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. About your father, of course.”
Then she opens the door and walks through, never once looking back as she sees the city that once weighed so heavily on her shoulders from the ground looking up, instead of from above, gazing down.
.o0o.
She’d spent some time wondering how she was going to adjust to life in Paris after that, knowing what she knew about Adrien and Gabriel and what Adrien knew about her.
As it turns out, she only has to go through one week of feeling Adrien’s green eyes on her at every available moment in class and going out of her way to avoid him, because her mother dies.
It’s surprisingly anticlimactic.
Janet Drake was always such a formidable woman. Her mere presence in a room could make grown men cower. To Marinette, she seemed almost invincible – always superior to everyone else, untouchable as she lashed out with quick with and a sharp tongue and long nails digging into her children’s shoulders. If there were ever any cracks in Janet’s façade, if it even wasa façade, she’d never seen one.
And yet, in the end, it turned out that she wasn’t untouchable after all. She’d died because she drank poisoned water out of desperation, even as Batman was right there. Batman had arrived to save them, he had freed them from their bonds, and the first thing they did was drink water poisoned with nerve toxin. Jack had survived, though he was in a coma and paralyzed.
Janet did not.
And that was it. That was the end of a woman that had dominated Marinette’s life for so long, a woman whose voice still hissed and lingered in her mind, reminding her to sit still and be silent and never, ever let your emotions show on your face.
Tim – he’d never had that mindset thrust upon him as forcefully as she did. After all, Tim had a father that didn’t despise him for his gender. Jack took charge of molding the son, and so Tim is crying, when he tells her all of this. He thinks he’s being subtle, but she’s his sister. She knows better.
Marinette didn’t care for her mother much, but she supposes she could give the dead at least some modicum of respect.
So as she packs her bags and books the next available flight to Gotham City, Marinette honors her mother’s wishes and does not shed a single tear for Janet Lynn Drake.
statue of ice
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