#he did NOT live his life as a shut in for almost a whole decade to be drawn SKINNY! not by me at least | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

boldlyvoid · 1 year

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Bigger than the Whole Sky | Part One: Peter Losing Wendy

Aaron Hotchner x Reader

Summary: Reader has been with the BAU for 2 months when she walks into the bullpen with a fat lip and a bloody nose. Her husband's been keeping secrets and breaking her heart for almost a decade now. However, it takes her 10 minutes to decide she's done with him.

Aaron has been harbouring a crush on our dear reader for as long as she's been on the team... he knew it would never go anywhere when she was married, but that crush goes from a hopeless dream to a heartstopping love faster than he could say "be mine."

Warnings: spousal abuse (physical and mental), infertility, self-esteem issues, friends to lovers, divorce meetings

word count: 8.1k

fic Masterlist

When she transferred to the BAU, everyone knew she had a husband. The thing no one knew was that her marriage was dangerously close to falling apart. No one ever suspected it in her personal life, however, in a room full of profilers… she couldn’t hide the problems for long.

At this point, the BAU had gone through enough female profilers to know that there was no telling what was going on in their personal lives. Between JJ’s secret time at the Pentagon and Emily’s time with the CIA, they had no reason to suspect their newest agent was in an unhappy marriage… especially not one where she had been trying to get pregnant for years and gaslit the whole time that it was her fault that they couldn’t conceive.

Peter, her husband, was happy to start trying in the beginning, they ditched condoms a few months into their relationship and she discarded her birth control a few months after they tied the knot. At first, the sex was fun, the first handful of negative tests just caused them to fuck more often and in different positions and times of the day… then the heartbreak settled in as her friends and family around her age started popping out babies while she only saw negatives.

This went on for years. 8 years to be exact. 8 years of monthly devastation means her heart was broken 72 times and Peter never cared. Each month he told her to get over it and try again… It wasn’t until she brought up going to a fertility specialist that her he finally snapped at her. He said she could go, she could get her hostile uterus checked and get the broken title while he stayed at home. He refused to test his sperm, he refused to go to appointments, he said IVF was a waste of money and a surrogate was too “unnatural” for him to feel comfortable. He didn’t even want to adopt or foster.

For a year she left it alone. Too busy with work, she put her focus into trying to climb the corporate ladder and land her dream job with the BAU. There, she made friends, she made connections, too… JJ gave her the number for a fertility specialist that she was seeing in private and Y/N made the appointment.

“Hey, Pete!” She called from her closet as she got ready for work.

“What?” He showed up in the doorway, buttoning his shirt. “I have to leave, the markets are open already.”

“I know… I made you an appointment at the fertility specialist I talked to you about, it's tonight at 6. All you have to do—

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He blew up, turning redder than a stop sign. “I said I wasn’t going to one of these fucking—

“WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?” She yells louder, “They said it’s not me, I’m fine, it’s clearly you—

He charged her, pushing her against the organizing cabinet and holds her there by her throat, “I’m not fucking broken.”

“No?” She croaks out, afraid but trying not to show it. Treating him like an unsub. “Seems to me like you are. Maybe we shouldn’t have any fucking kids if you’re going to be so controlling.”

The words hurt enough and then he swung, he let go of her throat and punched her right in the mouth, hoping to shut her up. It was just 1 punch but it felt like an earthquake, taking her dreams and turning them into nothing but rubble. He jumps back, realizing what he just did, and his whole body shook with rage.

She remembers it in slow motion. The crunch of cartilage in her nose, the rush of blood down to her lips that caused her hand to come up and cup her chin saving her white shirt from an inevitable stain… if it wasn’t the bloody nose that ruined her white dress shirt, it was the way he ripped her heart out of her chest and threw it on the ground with the rest of her broken dreams.

He didn’t even apologize. He just stares at his hand, “Do you see what you’ve made me do? I was never going to be the husband who hit his wife. I was never going to become my father. If you didn’t push and push and push to have fucking kids we wouldn’t be here, Y/N! Do you want to know the truth?? Why we haven’t had kids yet? I had a fucking vasectomy before we met. Okay?! Is that want you wanted the doctors to tell you? I don’t want your fucking kids!!! I don’t even want you anymore!”

“Okay,” is all she says. Her eyes are wide and her breathing is heavy. She’s stuck there, frozen in the moment. She can’t believe that just happened. “Okay.” She repeats, mainly to calm herself.

She can’t say anything else. She just watches him turn and leave, she hears him gather his things and then the front door slams. He’s gone. Just like that, he’s gone.

At that moment she decided she couldn’t do this. The gaslighting, the name calling, the loneliness… for almost a decade of marriage, she’s spent more time alone than with him. And not because they were working or busy with their separate friends, he just stopped spending time with her after they got married, like tying the knot made her his property and now he didn’t have to try to make her like him. Once he had her, he kept her.

Not anymore.

That same day was also the marker of her being with the BAU for 2 months. Everything had been ramping up to this point, she can’t lie and say she was surprised that he snapped and hit her. He’s been getting angrier and she’s been losing interest in him… all she wanted was a baby. The only person who suspected anything at work was Hotch, and in his own Hotchner way, he was dropping little hints that he knew something was going on. He’d ask her about her nights at home, he called her into his office to share takeout when he saw her at her desk well into the night, he always says he’s there for her, but she didn’t know what he meant until now. He was waiting for the day she told him about the abuse. He could sense it.

Now that she’s staring at herself in the mirror, wondering how she could hide the bruises before work, she realizes he was trying to tell her she was a part of their family. One that would go to war for her if she needed them. So she took him up on that offer and arrived to work with her fat lip and swelling around her eyes on full display. She didn’t even change her shirt.

“Oh, my god?” Penelope reacted first, rushing over to her with the click-clack of her heels alerting everyone in the room that she was in a hurry. She cups Y/N’s face gently, “Who did this to you?”

“Holy shit,” Derek says a bit too loud, alerting JJ and Spencer over at their shared desk, who turn and ask “Are you okay?” At the same time.

She was already close to tears before she walked through the double glass doors of the bullpen, saying his name only made her burst into tears. “Peter, he-he—“ she buries her face in Penelope’s shoulder and lets out her cries, sobbing as reality finally hit her as well.

Penny is quick to get her up the stairs and into the briefing room, away from everyone else, she closes all the blinds and politely asks Anderson, who’s already in there, to get some ice and the first aid kit, all while Y/N takes a seat in her usual spot. “I’m so stupid, I should’ve known. I should’ve—

Derek is quick to follow them, he sits beside her and rubs her back, soothingly. “No, no, sweetheart,” Derek stops her, “It is never a woman’s fault when a cowardly man uses violence to feel powerful. No matter what you said or did, it is not your fault. This is all on him. He’s the problem.”

“I just wanted a baby,” she admits, lip quivering.

“Oh, honey,” Penelope’s shoulders drop and she tilts her head to the side, “he’s not the kind of man—

“I’ve been trying to get pregnant since a few weeks after our wedding and he always made it feel like it was my fault that it wasn’t working…” She takes a deep breath, shaking her head, she can’t believe this part is even true. “When in reality he had a vasectomy before we even met. He’s been infertile for the last 10 fucking years and made me feel like it was me who had the problem the whole time.”

“Are you serious?” Penelope can’t believe it. “And he just never told you?”

She nods, “I think he thought I’d give up trying at some point and just deal with it… but I want to be a mom. I’ve always wanted to be a mom and he just never thought to tell me he didn’t want the same things. He really thought I’d just give up on my dreams like they’re nothing.”

The icepack and first aid kit don’t show up with Anderson, instead, it’s Hotch who is standing in the doorway, listening to what’s going on before he makes himself known. He clears his throat and starts to enter. “Penelope, Derek, could you give us a minute?”

“But— yes sir.” Penelope is quick to give up, and Derek follows suit, the two of them don’t want to leave but they know Aaron has it covered.

“Aaron…” She doesn’t know what else to say. She feels ashamed, she wants to hide. She doesn’t want him to see her like this but then again, he’s the whole reason she showed up at work like this at all.

He takes a seat beside her and hands her the icepack, “has he done this before?”

She shakes her head, “no.”

“Alright,” he believes her as he opens up the kit. “This is fresh… did it happen this morning or last night?”

“Before he left this morning,” she answers, shaking her head as the tears start. “I made an appointment for him to go to the clinic after work and he lost it. He finally told me the truth about his vasectomy after he hit me.”

“My divorce lawyer is really good,” he explains, peeling open a bandaid for just above her eyebrow. “If we take some photos of this and document it then it’ll help with your case. Did you have a prenup?”

She shakes her head, “no, he said we didn’t need one, we were in similar tax brackets when we got married and he said he didn’t see us ever getting a divorce anyway. I believed him.”

“You make more money than him, now, this will ensure he can’t sue for spousal support or anything. I’m going to be frank, you need to leave him before this gets worse.”

“I know.”

They just stare at each other for a few moments after that. “Aaron?”

“Yes?”

“What am I going to do now? How do I just start all over again? I want kids and I’m already old enough, I can’t just wait to see if I fall in love again and then wait for the right time to ask them for a baby. I want kids now,” she explains. “But I can’t do it on my own, I can’t. I wanted to do it with my husband.”

“It’s going to be hard, I won’t lie,” Aaron is honest. “But, if I can be honest… you’re beautiful and smart and when you’re ready, love will find you. I know it.”

“Thanks,” she tries her best to believe it. It’s just hard to do right now. “What’s your lawyers name?”

“Andrea Cortez, she’s the best in the business… but if you really wanted to hurt him back, you should call all the lawyers in the area, pretend to fish around so that when he goes looking for a lawyer, everyone that’s good will have to turn him away.”

“How do you know this?”

“It took me a while to find someone who would take on my case,” Aaron admits. “Haley didn’t do it on purpose, she was just trying to find one who didn’t go to college with me but it ended up fucking me over in the long run… and then I found Andrea.”

“Was it awful?”

He shakes his head, “We didn’t go to court, we had a mediator and we settled it all ourselves. She got 70% custody, I’d see Jack on weekends and if I wanted him over spring break or during my vacation time then I just had to ask… it’s a lot harder when you have kids already.”

“So I’ve been told…”

“Have you thought about leaving him before?” Aaron can hear it in her voice.

She nods, choking on a sob as she covers her face, her voice comes out in a quiver, “I just never admitted it to anyone.”

“You have my support when you leave him. You’ll have Penelope and Derek, JJ, and Spencer, too. We’re going to be here for you while you adjust to this and we won’t ever let him hurt you again,” he says in the softest voice, he reaches out for her hand and holds it tight. “I’ll be here, especially. We can have dinner together more often and we can talk… I know how hard it is. I can be your friend through this.”

She can’t help it, she’s so overwhelmed with emotions that she reaches over and pulls him into a hug that he gladly accepts. He rests his chin on her shoulder and holds her tight and he doesn’t plan to let go until she’s ready.

—

A few nights later, after a week-long case, Aaron follows her home in his SUV with his gun still on his hip. He makes sure she gets into her home to pack her things without issue from Peter. She packs a few suitcases worth of clothes and Aaron helps her get them into her own car, “is this everything?”

She nods, “Clothes wise… I’m just going to grab some of my favourite things, too, I don’t imagine he’d break them but I also never thought he’d hit me, so.”

“If you need to put stuff in my car, you can,” he offers as he follows her back inside.

She uses some laundry baskets and fills them with pots, pans, throw blankets, trinkets, candles, you name it. She didn’t trust him at all, so she took almost everything that she knew was hers or just things she held dear since their wedding. As soon as it’s all in her car, she realizes just how real this is and she starts to cry again.

“It’s okay,” Aaron runs his hand over her back. “Are you still going to stay with Penelope?”

She nods, “Yeah, she said I can have her couch for the time being.”

“You know what? Derek might have a place for you?” Aaron can’t help but think of when he was leaving Haley, Derek offered one of his houses that he was renovating to him.

“How?”

“Hold on,” Aaron digs his phone out of his pocket and calls him. “Hey… do you have any unoccupied homes right now?”

Her eyes go wide, she didn’t know Derek as well as Hotch did, mainly because she hasn’t worked with him as long.

“Can Y/N stay in it?… She’d really love that, thank you, Derek. We’ll meet you there… yes, you can bring Penelope,” he says with a smile before hanging up. “You’re in luck, he’s between renters on one of his properties.”

“Aaron, thank you, really, you’ve made this so much easier than I ever thought it could be,” she can’t even express how much she appreciates him.

“We’re a family,” he reminds her. “You can follow me, I know the way.”

And so she does.

It’s a quick drive, not too far from where she was living but also closer to work now too. She’s going to have to go grocery shopping and… fuck, she never even asked if this place is furnished.

When they pull up, Aaron takes the road and she parks in the driveway, they sit on the front steps together and chat. Derek said he wouldn’t be too far behind them, he was close by but he takes longer than they expect. When he does pull up, however, he has his pickup truck and the back is full of furniture, including a mattress.

“Thank you,” she whispers so she doesn’t cry.

“No problem… I have a storage unit with things for when I stage the homes after I flip them, you can use all of it if you want, but I thought we’d start with a bed.”

“I literally love you,” she rushes out.

“It’s nothing,” he brushes it off and hands her a key. “Now, while we carry in the heavy stuff, would you get the door for us?”

“Anything for my knights in shining armour.”

—

Hotch is a lot more open and soft than she ever expected. On the nights Jack is with his aunt— which are normally reserved for Aaron to do paperwork and stay late at the office, Arron instead, now has dinners with Y/N and watches movies with her on her new couch well into the morning. He even accompanies her to the lawyer's office to be her emotional support when recounting the years of abuse.

And the abuse has continued even when she’s not in the same house as him or even talking to him. Peter texts her almost daily to say mean and terrible things, calling her a whore and accusing her of sleeping with someone else. He thinks that the reason she was able to leave so quickly is because she’s already with someone new… he even sends her pictures of their security footage from the night she moved out, already forgetting what her boss looked like as he accuses her of cheating with him.

She wants to block his number but Hotch tells her not to, all the harassment will only help her case going forward. She keeps every message and Penelope prints out the text logs for her every few days to bring to her lawyer, who is astounded by what Peter is able to say every time.

The day she had the divorce papers served to him, they were on a case in California and he called her phone 23 times. She didn’t answer any of them, she didn’t even listen to the messages he left. She had Penelope go in and forward them all to her lawyer, then delete them all off her cell for her.

She sends him one last message to Peter that read: “If you have something to say, say it through your lawyer. Please don’t contact me again.” And then she blocks his number.

They’re at Aaron's house this time, she doesn’t want to be alone tonight of all nights. With a couple boxes of Chinese take-out, they’re sitting at his dining table just talking about their days, like always, when her mind stumbles across her darker thoughts.

“I took a huge step back in my life today.”

“No, you haven’t,” Aaron assures.

“I had all these plans, I picked out baby names that went well with his last name, I imagined our nursery and what mothers days would be like and everything… every dream I had with him died and today I buried them.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but did you really want him to be the father of your kids knowing what you know now?” Aaron asks. “What if he hit your children?”

“I know… it’s just hard,” she can’t help but feel awful.

“I’m sorry, I know. I know it’s hard, I shouldn’t be saying—

“It’s okay, I need to look at the bright side… I mean, sure, I had some big dreams that will never come true but I can make new dreams. I can become a new person. That girl I was with him is dead but I can make a new me. A better me,” she sits up straight and nods a few times while taking a deep breath. “It’s going to be okay.”

“See what I mean?” Hotch teases, “you’re so strong, this is all going to work out for the best.”

“Thank you,” she smiles, feeling bashful, compliments like this mean the world to her.

“You know… something I tell Jack pretty often is that if we talk about things, memories can’t die and I’m pretty sure dreams are the same. If you ever want to talk about what you wanted, I’m always here to listen to you.”

“Jack is very lucky to have you,” she compliments him first, her heart is too full to do anything but smile. “I really want a boy… I would be happy with any child but I’ve always dreamed about having a boy.”

“I was fairly certain Haley was having a girl the majority of Jack's pregnancy, she just had such a tiny bump and I could picture us with a little girl,” Aaron shares. “I don’t think I ever told you, but I have a younger brother who is 12 years younger than me, I practically raised him, so I wanted a little girl to get the whole experience, but having Jack was easy because I already knew what I was doing.”

“You’d be fantastic as a girl dad,” she compliments him again and can’t help herself from imagining having his babies and imagining a whole life with him.

“Thank you,” it’s his turn to smile and blush a little. “I even had a list of girl names picked out, so figuring out a boy name was what was hard for us.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“I really like J names, apparently? My list had Jane, Juliette, Juniper… I think they all sound good with Hotchner,” he explains and it’s the cutest thing.

“I love that, I don’t know many men who would admit to having a baby names list,” she teases.

He shrugs, “I guess I’m not like most men.”

“You most certainly are not,” she says with an arch of her brow. “And according to Peter, you’re my ‘hot’ new boyfriend.”

Hotch just laughs, “Men like him are so insecure they can’t handle the 1 woman who tolerated them giving any other man some attention. He would’ve done the same thing if it was Morgan or Reid at the door.”

“I just can’t believe I let it get to the point where he hit me.”

“You loved him,” Hotch simplifies it. “It’s hard to just drop that… you’re a rare case where the second he laid his hands on you, you left.”

“For about 20 minutes I just stared in the mirror trying to figure out if I was going to call in sick or just cover it up with some makeup,” she admits. “I didn’t want to hide it from you guys and I didn’t want you to think I’m weak. I couldn’t take everything I’ve learned and abandon it just because I loved him… and then I realized I don’t remember the last time I loved all of him. I loved our memories, I loved the version of him he was when we got married, but I haven’t really loved him in a long time.”

“You’re incredibly strong, it takes a lot of strength to figure that out,” Hotch can’t help but compliment her again.

“Thank you,” she says, reaching her hand out over the table to hold his. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.”

—

Aaron is sitting with her on the plane, on their way to their next case, when she gets a text from her lawyer.

“His lawyer has reached out to me, he is fine with keeping the house and taking on the rest of the mortgage, he just wants you to pay him back for his half of the downpayment, he says it’s not fair that he will be paying the rest of the mortgage when all you did is pay that original $25k. He is fine without spousal support as long as the abuse stays quiet, he doesn’t want this to affect his own job. If you’re okay with that, I’ll tell him and he will sign the papers.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She says out loud, getting everyone's attention.

“What happened?” Aaron asks, leaning over her shoulder to read the text as well. “oh… if that’s all he wants, I think it’s a good deal.”

“I’m going to lose all my savings again,” she admits. “We put up 50 grand together and I gave him a thousand dollars each month for the mortgage, I lost— Reid?”

“25k with 1k a month for 8 and a half years that’s 127 thousand dollars,” Spencer answers right away.

“Thanks… I have paid more for that house than I currently make in a year,” she can’t believe it. “I also bought all the groceries, all the cleaning products I used to clean the fucking house, I paid to pick up his dry cleaning, I did the laundry every few days, I made sure he had a lunch packed every morning… I did so fucking much for that man, I’m not giving him any more of my money.”

“So let’s go back with that, we can have Penelope gather all the information from your bank statements and previous taxes and she can total up the amount of money you’ve spent on him and that house and we can argue that he should pay you for your time. He treated you as a maid, you should be paid for your services and if they equal out to 25 grand or higher, then he has to pay you the difference or shut up,” Hotch explains, knowing how to play these games as he was once a lawyer and he’s been divorced.

“Okay,” she agrees, “yeah, I think that would work.”

Hotch leans over her, towards the TV is, and presses the button on the screen to call Penelope. It dials and calls quickly, and she answers just as fast. “Yes, my lovelies?”

“Can you do me a favour and gather up all of Y/N’s financial records over the last few years and find out the total she spent on groceries, dry cleaning, house expenses and the money she’s transferred to Peter’s account?”

“I can,” she says and then looks at Y/N through the screen. “You’re okay with this?”

“Oh yeah, total it all up and send all the findings to my lawyer as well, I’m taking Peter down,” she agrees with a smile spread over her face. “He’s going to wish he never met me.”

Penelope hangs up after that, slipping into Y/N’s life and doing the lords work, basically. It would take her accountant months to do what Penelope can do in 30 minutes. And god bless her.

She settles into her seat again with a sigh, everyone else goes back to what they were doing, except for Hotch. They share an armrest between them, he places his hand over hers and looks at her with a soft smile, almost like he’s saying with his eyes that he’s proud of her and that it’s okay. She just smiles back, turning her hand over and interlocking their fingers, “thank you,” she whispers.

“Anytime.”

—

Normally on away cases, they all had their own rooms, unless the hotels were overbooked, and this was one of those times.

Derek is with Emily, Spencer is with JJ and that leaves Hotch with Y/N. She changes into her night clothes in the bathroom, her pyjamas consisting of a plain shirt and blue butterfly-covered pants, nothing too scandalous. When she comes out, she finds him sitting up in his bed, also changed, reading over a case file with his glasses on… she didn’t even know he wore glasses?

She just stands there in the bathroom doorway and stares at him until he looks up at her, “You okay?”

She nods, “when did you get glasses?”

“A couple years ago,” he shrugs. “They’re readers, sometimes I have a hard time reading at night.”

“They look nice on you,” she compliments him, sending a soft smile his way before she puts her work clothes back in her suitcase.

When she turns back to her bed, Aaron is putting the files on his night table and taking said glasses off. “Are you tired?”

“Not really,” she admits. Turning the comforter down, she slips into bed and turns to him, “Are you?”

He shakes his head softly, “I was going to call Jack and then I remembered it’s well past midnight over there, I did text Jess, however, and she said he had a good night.”

“You’re such a good dad, I hope he tells you that all the time…” it just rolls off the tongue, she didn’t even have a chance to stop herself. But the smile on his face is worth the embarrassment she felt for telling him how she feels.

“Thank you,” he’s so soft about it. “You’re going to be a great mom too, I know it.”

She just presses her lips together and hums, shaking her head slightly she bites her lip so she can hold back the tears that want to start coming. “I don’t think it’s going to happen for—

“It will,” he cuts her off. “You’re doing the right thing by getting away from him, I promise you, it’s going to work out for you.”

She wants to cry, normally she spends most of her alone time crying in her lonely bed, be it at the house Dereks letting her crash in or a hotel somewhere in the country, she always ends up crying her eyes out. Tonight she can’t do that. “I hope so.”

“It will,” he’s serious about it. “Do you need a hug?”

She just nods and he gets out of his bed in a hurry to make it over to hers, he slips under the covers and pulls her into a hug and she can’t help but cuddle into his chest. “It just gets loud in my head sometimes, like everything he’s said to me starts to echo around and I can’t help but believe it… like maybe I’m not ever meant to be someone's mom?”

He just rubs her back and lets her get it all out. “Can I be honest?” She nods against his chest. “I didn’t trust him when I first met him. He seemed off and now I guess I know why. He was keeping secrets and he knew the better you got at your job, the closer you’d be to figuring out all the lies he was telling and he’d be alone again. Men like him tell lies because they know that they can’t keep wonderful women like you when you know the truth about them. And now that you know the truth, he’s making it your problem.”

“I just can’t believe he was going to let me believe I was broken instead of just telling me he didn’t want kids. Do you know what that does to a person?” She asks as she sits back up and looks him right in the eyes. “I haven’t felt good enough in years… I’ve hated myself for so long, Aaron.”

“I don’t think you’re broken, I think you’re miraculous and wonderful… exceptional, even,” he admits, staring deep into her eyes like he’s found her soul in there. “And I know what it’s like to try for a long time, Haley and I tried for years and I watched it slowly suck the life out of her, any man that can sit by and watch that and not care, is a sociopath.”

“Did you and Haley want more kids… before everything happened?” She asks, eyes trailing down to his lips and then back to making eye contact with him, she can read the hurt on his face.

He nods, “I’d still love to have more kids.”

Her eyes light right up, “really?”

He nods again, “I would… I wasn’t going to ask you out until well after the divorce was final. I don’t want to get in the middle of everything or ruin the chances of you getting away from him without issue… but I’ve thought you were beautiful since the moment I first saw you.”

“Aaron?” She really can’t believe it. “What are you saying?”

“If you want to have a child, I’d gladly show you what it’s like to have a real man love you,” he rephrases it with a lot more confidence and passion in his voice. He knows what he wants and every part of him hopes she wants it too.

She can’t believe it. The words don’t seem real. Part of her thinks she fell asleep quickly and this is all a dream. There’s no way her boss— and the most handsome man she’s seen in her life, is saying this to her. “you want to sleep with me?”

He laughs, “More than that… which is hard for me to admit because I’m your boss, I shouldn’t like you as much as I do. But I do. I would love to see where this goes… After the divorce.”

“Aaron, am I dreaming? Are you serious?” She shakes her head and shuffles further away from him. “What the hell is happening?”

“You’re awake, I promise,” Aaron assures her while also keeping his distance. “I’m sorry, if you don’t feel the same, I’ll back off—

“No, no, it’s not that, I just— I’ve just never been with anyone but Peter, he was my first real boyfriend, I never thought anyone else would ever want me?” She’s honest. “Are you serious?”

“I’ve been with 3 women,” he admits, it’s not like his number is crazy, but it’s still not what she expected.

“Really?”

He nods, “Haley was my first, back in high school, then I slept with someone during my time doing security for U.S. diplomats— Haley and I were on and off again all the time before we got married... And then Beth, last year.”

“You worked for Emily’s mom,” she knows that story… “did you and Emily—

“It was just a one-time thing. She was an adult and still living at home and also still rebellious as hell… she wanted to piss her mom off, but I didn’t know until after the fact,” Aaron is exceptionally honest. “We’ve always had a good friendship. That’s the one thing all 3 women have in common, actually. They were all my friends first.”

She hums, following along with a nod, “You are my closest thing to a best friend, currently… I think you’re actually the best friend I’ve ever had in my whole entire life. I just don’t know if I’m ready yet.”

“That’s okay, it’s more than okay, actually,” he rests his hand on her knee. “I was never going to say anything about how much I like you, I wasn’t going to ruin your marriage or convince you to cheat, I’d never do that—

“I know you wouldn’t, believe me, I know you’re a good man,” she places her hand on top of his and holds it tight.

“Thank you… I just mean to say that I would wait forever for you.”

“It won’t be that long, I can promise you that,” she smiles, moving back in closer to him. “Best friends can sleep in the same bed… and my marriage is already over, so it’s not cheating no matter what anyone would say if they saw us cuddling.”

“Should I turn the light off?” He says with a smirk.

She just nods, “yeah, get comfy, Hotchner, you’re not leaving my bed tonight.”

—

Turns out, she’s spent close to a quarter of a million dollars on taking care of Peter and their home over the last 8 and a half years.

That’s not even including the time they were living in an apartment together, before and a few months after their wedding. She has her lawyer go back to his lawyer with this information and the fact she will Not be paying him for his half of the downpayment. He doesn’t like that. So, they come to an agreement to meet with a mediator. This way, she can voice her concerns, he can voice his and they can hopefully get the papers signed without going to court.

Standing her ground and sitting in a chair opposite him was going to be the best way for her to win this. He is so much more confident on the phone, sending her threats and derogatory comments, he’s not that confident in front of her. Especially not when she has her boss in the chair beside her.

“Why is he here?” Peter says the second he walks into the meeting room of her lawyer's office. He sits down aggressively and leans back in his chair, exuding an air of fake confidence that both she and Hotch don’t believe.

“He’s my boss, he’s here to ensure my safety and my lawyer's safety,” she stands her ground. “I’m not about to get choked out again."

“You’re that afraid of me?” He laughs.

Hotch flips open the folder in front of himself and holds up the photos of Y/N’s face the morning she came into work beat up. “You did this to her, what else are we supposed to think about you?”

“There’s no proof my client did that,” his lawyer speaks up. The man can’t be more than 30, he must be a new lawyer with less experience than Andrea or Aaron. “She works a difficult job where she gets tossed around by criminals—

“We have the footage from the security camera inside your shared home,” Y/N’s lawyer cuts him off.

“What?” Peter can’t believe it. “Since when is there one inside the house?”

“We got them installed after the neighbours were robbed, or did you forget?” Y/N looks at him like he’s an idiot. “You signed off on it, you wanted to be able to see who was in our house if we got robbed like the neighbours did. There is one in the front hall, the living space, your office and our closet. You sent me photos of me and Aaron packing my things. You know it’s in there.”

“My client—

“Is a liar,” Y/N’s lawyer cuts him off once again. “we have his signature and testimony from the security company saying he was the one who called and asked for internal cameras. They even kept the call logs and we’ve got a copy of the work order from the men who set them up.”

Peter slumps in his seat. His tongue runs along his top teeth as he shakes his head, “what do you want?”

“I want out.” Y/N simplifies. “You wasted the last 10 years of my life, you lied to me and you abused me. I want you to sign the papers and let me go.”

“So you can go fuck your boss?”

Y/N stands with such force her role chair goes flying back, she slams her hands on the table and stares him down the way she would in an interrogation with an unsub, “What I do with my time isn’t any of your concern! This is a 1 party divorce state, if you give me a hard time I will not hesitate to take you to court and get a judge to sign off on this. I don’t need your help, I just thought this would be easier for you, but if you want the whole state of Virginia to know you’re a wife-beater, I can do that.”

“And she’ll win,” Hotch offers, “I’ve been inside enough courtrooms to know that with this much evidence, you’re never going to see any money from her.”

“Fine,” Peter gives in with a wave of his hands. “Where do I sign?”

She sits back down then, biting back a smirk as she’s filled with pride. She really did it. She won.

“So you’re agreeing to keep the house and she doesn’t have to pay you anything to get out of the mortgage?” Her lawyer clarifies.

He nods, “Yes.”

“Okay,” Andrea hands the paperwork over to Peter's lawyer. “This is the original agreement I sent you. It states what items still in the home belong to Y/N and if I remember correctly, you already agreed to her taking those with her at an arranged date and time with a mediator on the premises.”

“That’s correct.” Peter's lawyer reads it over quickly, assuring it’s exactly what she says it is and then hands it over to Peter, “Sign there, there and on the last page, each spot is marked.”

“Got it,” Peter says, not caring at all. He signs the 3 spots and slides the papers back across the table. “What now?”

“What time is good for me to come get my things?” Y/N asks, trying not to smile with happiness.

“Are you okay to do it tonight?” Peter asks, “I moved most of it into boxes and put them by the door… I’ve had a lot of time to organize. I think I’m going to sell it and move closer to where my parents are.”

“That would be good for you,” she agrees. It’s weird to see all his aggressiveness fade now that she’s no longer his wife. “Aaron’s going to come with me, is that okay?”

He nods, “I’m surprised you’re so comfortable bringing your boyfriend around me already.”

And there it is.

“You know, I’m not surprised this ended. You’ve always been so insecure about every single man in my life, even my brother and my cousins? Did you really think I’d just stay single my whole life after you? Did you really think you were such an amazing husband that I’d be so broken and damaged I’d never be able to move on? You weren’t anything spectacular and I think you’ve always known that.”

“I’ll put your shit on the porch,” he says with a huff as he stands up to leave. “Have a nice life.”

“We will,” Aaron answers, digging more salt into the wound as Y/N waves at him with a smile.

Finally, she’s free.

—

It doesn’t take long for them to load all of her things into Aaron’s SUV and with Peter's lawyer in the house to supervise. She does one final sweep to make sure she has all her things. It looks good, so she gives Peter one final smile and a wave and then she’s gone.

She watches the house fade to nothing in the passenger side mirror and her smile only grows. It doesn’t feel like an ending like she thought it would. All those dreams that seemed bigger than the whole sky are nothing but rain clouds that were once disguised as happy shapes… the rain that burst from them washed away all her sadness and left her with a blank space of sidewalk where she could once again be decorated with beautiful chalky colours.

“So?” Aaron asks, looking between her and the road with a mighty smirk. “What’s next?”

“I thought you were going to ask me out on a date?” She teases.

“You’re ready already?” He’s a bit shocked, “I thought we were just pushing his buttons?”

She shakes her head, “We were… but I’m also ready to be loved by a real man. The same man who’s always there for me, the man who would do anything to protect me. I want you too, Aaron.”

“Well, okay then, Agent (your maiden name), where should we go for dinner tonight?” He asks, “Do you want to go somewhere fancy or should we order from our regular place?”

“Hmm… as tempting as that sounds, I think I’d like to get dressed up and go somewhere with you.”

And so that’s what they do. While she’s changing into something nice, Aaron makes a call to a friend who would be able to get them a table at the nicest place in town with only an hour to spare. Luckily, he has good friends in all sorts of places, so before she can even really second guess the date, they’re sat in the back corner of a dark restaurant sharing a candle-lit dinner.

“So… how is this going to work?” She finally asks, she can’t keep it in any longer.

“What do you mean?” Aaron asks.

“Like, are we going to file fraternization paperwork? Are we going to tell the team? Should I transfer to another unit?”

“Oh… I think we could file the paperwork if you want to and you don’t have to leave, you’d just have to report to Morgan or Cruz, it wouldn’t be that hard.”

“And are you going to tell Jack?”

He nods, “Eventually.”

“Does he even want to be a big brother?”

Aarons a bit taken aback by that question, “I… I really don’t know?”

“Cause I don’t want him to hate me, I’ve seen so many cases where kids grow up to hate their dad's girlfriends and new stepmoms and feel like they lost their dad when a new baby shows up,” she just lets all the worry out then and there, there’s no point keeping it from him. He’d figure it out eventually.

“Well… the best thing we could do is go slowly, I can talk to him about it and see where he stands with it all. I know for a fact he really liked Beth and he was very little when Haley left me so I don’t think he holds any resentment for the divorce, I think it’ll be okay.”

“Okay,” she repeats while letting out a deep breath. “Cause… I know you like me but I never got to tell you how I feel about you. I think you’re a wonderful man and you’re so astoundingly handsome it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and—”

“Really?” He cuts her off with a smirk.

“Yeah,” she manages to laugh, snapping out of the panic because it’s just so easy with him. “This is how I was supposed to feel with my husband… thank you for making me realize I deserve better and thank you for being what I deserve.”

“I feel the same way… I mean, I loved Haley even after the divorce, hell, a part of me still does love her and I don’t think it will ever fade. However, it’s so nice to feel like this again,” Aaron agrees. “I’m just a little anxious that it’ll all come crumbling down around me again.”

“Why?” She asks, not thinking she could ever leave him heartbroken.

“Our job isn’t the safest environment. If you get hurt on the job I don’t know what I’ll do… my little crush on you was hard enough to deal with out there, and that was when you were married and I thought there was no chance of us being together because I’m not a home wrecker, but now… now I have to watch you go out there into the unknown every day with half of my heart in your pocket,” he explains, almost tearing up.

She shakes her head softly and reaches out for his hand, “Aaron, I’m always going to come home with you. Even if I get a little hurt, I know I’ll always fight to get back to you… and I have the same worries, I never want to lose you and physically see it happen or know I could’ve been there to stop it. It’s going to make the job harder, sure, but we could also just get better at what we do because we love each other.”

She watches all the worry fade from his face as his jaw drops for a moment. “You love me, too?”

She can’t help but laugh, “Yeah, Aaron, I love you.”

Just as they lean in to kiss over the table, Aaron's phone starts to ring in his pocket. With a disgruntled sigh, Aaron sits back down in his chair and takes his phone out, answering it with his last name, she watches him go devoid of feelings. “Yes sir, we’ll be right there.”

She sighs, “I’ll get the car, you get the check.”

They stand up at the same time and before she can get too far, he pulls her in close. Hand on her lower back, faces inches apart, “I’m going to show you just how much I love you when we get home, okay?”

“Okay,” she smiles, leaning into their first kiss.

Still smiling as their lips touch, she could swear sparks fly around them as the restaurant fills with the screaming sound of a million colourful fireworks.

General Taglist

@ncsls0515 @stevesmunsons @reidsbookclub @sweetyyhippyy @manuosorioh @mrs-dr-reid @k-k0129 @squishyturtle @katsukis1wife @babybisexual @marsmunson86 @x-a-delama-x @kylakins88 @harrypotteranna23-blog @moonlightspencie

Bigger than the whole sky taglist:

@ssamorganhotchner @mrs-ssa-hotch

#aaron hotchner #aaron hotch hotchner #aaron hotch x reader #aaron hotch x you #hotch smut #hotch x reader #criminal minds smut #criminal minds imagine

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the-scandalorian · 1 year

Text

two

Pairing: Joel Miller x Female Reader Rating: E, 18+ Word Count: 5.1k Warnings: sort of dubcon due to intoxication; alcohol and drug use (by both reader and Joel); mention of reader’s hair being long enough to tangle his fingers in (no details otherwise); smut (fingering, oral, spitting on her pussy, p-in-v); grief and angst Note: There's no part one out yet; this is the second of a potential series of loosely tied oneshots that are coming to me out of order.

The living room is blue. All the surfaces, the shelves and the antique piano, are coated in a thick layer of dust. It feels wrong to disturb anything in this house—in this perfectly preserved resting place—so you tuck yourself into the corner of Bill and Frank’s old couch, out of the way, toe off your boots, and pull your knees up to your chest.

Ellie thunders up the stairs and shuts herself in one of the rooms, gone at the first opportunity for privacy.

Joel doesn’t disappear. You expect him to take the other bedroom and close the door. Instead, he watches you settle onto the couch and drops heavily into the seat beside you. He leans over the armrest and opens a cabinet, retrieving a bottle of dark liquid.

His casual knowledge of the space speaks to how much time he’s spent here, to the depth of his friendship with Bill and Frank. It makes you sad; it makes the room dark. It makes jealousy sour your stomach. Joel has people: a place to fit in this fractured world.

Had. He had people.

There are paintings on the walls: landscapes, still lifes, portraits. Mostly of Bill, you think. With that glower? Definitely Bill. Joel did say Frank was the nice one.

The likenesses vary in style. There’s a gradient from careful, detailed studies to less refined renderings with loose, painterly brushwork. All of them, in their own unique way, capture the same steely gaze—the spiteful tenacity that must have fueled their survival for decades.

You ignore the many versions of stern eyes watching you.

The worn fabric under your fingers is scratchy, the upholstery splashed with roses, the hard back of the couch draped in crocheted blankets. It’s dated, the whole place frozen in time while the world fell—falls—apart around it, chaos kept out by a chain link fence and Bill’s gritted teeth. A bell jar in a hurricane.

You wonder if Joel and Tess ever considered leaving the QZ permanently for this place. If that was ever offered. You imagine it would have been almost…idyllic.

You look up at Joel. He’s holding the unopened bottle in his lap. His sharp profile is limned by the soft moonlight filtering through the window behind him. It catches on the silver flecked in his hair and beard.

He knows you’re watching him. He says nothing. He’s thinking about the letter.

About Tess.

You’re trying to think about anything else.

You study his face. Even like this, anguished and lined, filthy from the road, with a half-healed slash across his cheek, he’s handsome. He has rugged good looks, with those brown eyes and that granite-cut jaw. The natural pout of his bottom lip. In a different time, a different universe, he could have been an actor, a model—the face of an ad campaign for a devastatingly masculine cologne. Those big, veined hands modeling watches on the pages of a fashion magazine.

He wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t suit. But he could have.

It’s strange to think about what he could have been.

Instead, he’s here. The peaks of his knuckles are split and scabbed, the valleys a mottled black and blue, their edges fading to a sickly yellow. His skin is rough and dry—it snags when he runs his hands absentmindedly over the denim of his jeans. His palms are calloused. You know because when shit gets serious, he grabs your wrist or your forearm or your bicep—never your hand—and shoves you behind the wall of his body or pulls you along as he takes off at a run. His middle is thick and soft, his shoulders broad and strong. He’s going gray, and fuck, it looks good on him.

You study him because it feels inconsequential. Your presence feels inconsequential. To him, you think, you’re just another ghost in this house.

Or maybe he is.

A small part of you is braced for him to break, to buckle under the weight of Bill’s last words—the words that are hanging over this house like a storm cloud. Anyone else would.

Joel won’t, though. You watched him stalk away from the burning capitol building with white-knuckled stoicism, and you felt sure that he was already too utterly broken to break again.

Like molten metal, bent and hammered and folded over on itself, again and again and again. Until it’s shatterproof.

He’s leaning forward, his elbows braced on his spread knees. Even on a soft couch, he doesn’t fully relax. He drops his head into his hands and scrubs one over his face. Then he reaches into the pack by his feet and rummages for something. A little plastic baggie. He just holds it for a minute. You watch him decide.

It’s safe here. As safe as anywhere can be. And Joel hasn’t slept in days.

He shakes two white pills out of the bag and chases them with a swig of whiskey, knocking the liquor back with a quick tip of his head, squinting against the slight after-burn. You extend your open palm. He shakes out a couple pills for you without question, without even looking up.

He passes you the bottle, and you down them. One harsh gulp.

It’s real whiskey, with a label and everything, not something homemade. Not top-shelf quality by any means, but it’s better than anything you’ve had in a long time. It should be sipped and savored. Back in the QZ, you could have gotten a hefty stack of ration cards for this one bottle—even half empty. It doesn’t matter now.

You take another drink and hand it back.

You watch as a glazed calm gradually slips over Joel’s troubled expression and he finally sinks into the give of the couch cushions, letting his head drop back. You watch as the pills soften his edges. Just barely. They erode a little of the hard, calcified layer he must have started building the day of the outbreak. It grants you a fuzzy peek into the Joel before. His shoulders lose their tension; his fists unclench. If you squint, you might be able to see the Joel who drank with his buddies and winked at women at the bar. The one who drove a pickup truck with the windows rolled down in the summertime.

You sit in silence as the haze takes you too, creeping up the back of your neck like a warm tide until you feel just numb enough. Any and all troubling thoughts are caught and trapped, restrained like moths in amber, so all that’s left in this blue room is pleasant quiet.

You’re just starting to feel drowsy and loose when he turns to you, wanting. Joel shifts in his seat and fixes you with a look—the first time he’s looked directly at you in an hour or more. The usual bite of his penetrating gaze is muted, the crease between his brows deep with feeling; his brown eyes are big with a question. A need.

It’s the tiniest chink in his armor, a momentary blip of him without a mask. A second of vulnerability, so foreign on his stoic face that the urge to soothe him is visceral. It jumps up the back of your throat.

This is Joel breaking.

He’s asking you for something—for distraction, for comfort. To be put back together.

You unfold your limbs and climb directly into his lap.

He makes a low, approving sound when you straddle his spread thighs and drops his head to your chest to inhale deeply against your shirt. If you weren’t buzzed, you might flinch away. You’re filthy, sweaty and dirty from days on the road. Neither of you have taken advantage of the shower yet. You can’t smell nice.

Joel does it again, though, chasing the comfort by burying his face between your tits, his hands tightening on your hips, his long fingers slipping inside the back pockets of your jeans to grip your ass. He pulls you down against his lap. Hard.

He’s hungry for it this time, watching the place where your body meets his, denim against rough denim. Like he’s imagining the way your naked body will fit against his.

He remembers himself for a moment, looking up at your face. “This okay?”

“Yeah, Joel,” you say. “I want it.”

“Good.”

His forehead drops lightly against your sternum as he moves you against him. He guides your hips into a slow grind. Your knees sink into the plush of the old sofa cushions, your hands braced on his shoulders.

If he were anyone else, you’d have kissed him already. You settle for pressing your face against the side of his neck, dragging your nose up the column of his bared throat. He smells like sun and sweat and pine, like the dry, dusty road and something else...something distinctly him. It's subtle. It makes your mouth water.

He holds you tight, a strong arm wrapped around your back. You run your hands over his biceps, over the hard lines of his muscles, his shoulders—feeling what often distracts you when he crosses his arms over his chest and the fabric of his shirt pulls taut.

Joel is content, for now, to lift his hips, just barely, into the steady roll of your hips. You think about last time—his clinical, efficient approach. It was all deliberate movements and quick work. He'd made a growled promise that it would only ever happen once.

And yet.

This time, he seems to be letting himself enjoy something, reveling in the pleasure. That alone feels like an unaffordable indulgence, like if you drew attention to it, you’d scare it away.

His big hand slides heavily up the curve of your spine, a needy drag, and back down again, settling on your lower back, urging you harder. Faster.

More.

It feels good. You rock your hips, grinding yourself into his lap, where he’s full and hard now, thick and straining against his fly, and you groan together when he adjusts his legs wider and pushes his hips up to meet you, letting you get at his clothed erection a little easier. The metal button on your jeans clicks against his belt buckle as you move.

He turns his head to set his teeth against your shoulder, biting with no pressure, and breathes hot against the fabric as you ride him, his chest expanding on a sharp inhale as you drag your core over the stiff arch of his cock and chase the embers of pleasure sparking low in your belly.

All at once, it’s not enough.

Joel grunts and grips your ass, fingers digging into your soft flesh, and he half-shoves, half-lifts you backwards as he straightens, setting you on your feet in front of him. You make a squeaked sound of surprise at the sudden movement, clutching his biceps for balance as you find your footing, and the corner of his mouth twitches up into the barest beginning of a smile. You smile back at him, radiant.

Smiles.

The pills are hitting. It’s all a little delirious.

The moment feels surreal, like this dated living room has been snatched from the current of time and set down on solid ground. Just for a moment. Just to let you both breathe.

It evaporates quickly. His stern expression returns.

“Bedroom,” Joel says with a bossy little jerk of his chin.

You snatch the half-empty whiskey bottle from the coffee table and head down the hall.

There are two spare bedrooms in this big, white house—the one upstairs that Ellie disappeared into and a second down here on the first floor. It’s situated down the hall from the locked door. You try not to think about that room. Try not to wonder if Joel and Tess shared this same spare room when they used to visit.

There are too many ghosts here tonight.

You pop open the bottle and drink deep, and Joel shuts the door behind him with a quiet click. He stoops to switch on the lamp on the bedside table.

You drop the corked whiskey onto an armchair and reach for the top button of your shirt, eager to avoid an awkward interlude, eager to please him.

There’s something about Joel that makes you desperate to be wanted by him—something more than just his gruff appeal or the situation you’re in together or the fact that his care promises some measure of safety in this world of scarcity. It has everything to do with how he acts around the people that are his. More than just protective. Possessive.

This want is practical. And it’s not.

It’s animal too.

He rounds the bed and stands close, stopping your hand with his. You look up, and he inclines his head toward the bed.

“Lie down.”

You move to listen, but he stops you.

“Wait.”

He bends to grip the bottom edge of the bed frame, and Joel grunts as he slides the whole thing a few inches away from the wall. The feet squeak along the hardwood floor.

He straightens and nods. “Alright, go on.”

The image of him arched over your body, fucking you so hard and deep that the headboard knocks against the wall—thump, thump, thump—sets your heart racing. You scramble up the bed, and he takes his time unlacing his boots then follows with a slow crawl, watching you with dark eyes. With intent so potent it makes you want to look away.

You don’t.

He’s here this time.

As present as either of you can be when you’re a little high. Just the barest edge of sedated. You imagine your own eyes are glassy, lacquered in the low light of the shaded lamp. Joel’s don’t seem to be, though. He’s alert.

He crowds you further up the bed, and you scoot back until your head hits the pillow. He makes space for himself between your legs and reaches for your collar. You watch his deft fingers work quickly down the line of buttons on your shirt.

His eyes flick from his hands to your face and back. There’s naked want there—desire etched into his hard features. You’ve never seen him like this. You’ve only seen him two ways: serious or furious.

This is something else. This is intoxicating.

Your head is starting to spin.

He gets your shirt open, helps you shuck it off, and pulls your bra off with a practiced ease. His large, warm hands palm your breasts as soon as they’re free. He’s immediately fixated, and the attention sends a flush of heat over your bare skin. He tests the weight of each, kneading lightly, his mouth parted in muted awe as his fingertips sink into the give. He tweaks your nipple between two fingers, one and then the other, and watches, satisfied, as they pebble for him. He studies your reactions to his touch, eyes lingering on your face as he plays with you, as if your response is as important to him as the feel of you.

He takes his time. Unhurried. Like you have all the time in the world.

Joel leans down suddenly and licks a warm stripe up the line of your sternum, through the valley of your breasts, and your body reacts to him: you arch your back into the heat, your hand automatically burying itself in his thick hair, your lips parting around a moan.

His tongue.

You must taste like salt and sweat, and yet, he looks a little smug when he pulls back, his lips quirked in a half smile.

“You like that?”

He looks young when he smiles. You can see thirty-year-old Joel in that look. Unburdened Joel. Fifty-year-old Joel without the trauma.

The margins of your vision start to smudge as you look at him; colors bleed freely in the dim light, his features running like wet ink. His smile melts away. You feel off-kilter, like you’ll slip off the solid plane of this mattress and drop into nothingness if you don’t hold on. You fist your hands in the comforter.

A hand frames your cheek. You can’t focus your eyes. Your lashes flutter.

Joel says your name, concern woven between each syllable.

Once. Again.

He drops his weight onto you. The spinning stops, and your hands release. You meet his eyes.

“Joel—”

You remember last time—the first time you fucked, the smothering weight of his hand on your mouth when you said his name—and you bite your lip before you can say anything else. But he doesn’t react to it this time. He’s too lost in it.

It feels good to be lost together.

“You alright?” he asks, his brow pinched not in anger or distress, for once, but in naked concern. “Too much?”

You're not sure if he's asking about the pills and the booze or the pace or just...him.

“No, no.” You shake your head. “I’m good now.”

There’s so much care in his eyes that it feels like he’d give you anything you want in this moment. Like he’d lie down and hold you if you asked him to. You’re seeing him without his hardened front, and it makes you shiver. You slip your fingers around the back of his neck and pull his face down to yours, taking the thing you want most. He bends for you willingly.

His lips are a little chapped, his facial hair scratchy. You’re expecting a light kiss and a retreat, a concession. You’re not expecting his whole body to respond—the press of his chest against yours and an arm slipping under your shoulders to force you closer. You’re not expecting to be enveloped by his wide frame, for your back to be lifted a couple inches off the mattress in his urgency to hold you tight. You’re not expecting his tongue to slip between your lips first—to lick across the roof of your mouth in an utterly invasive, possessive way that makes you gasp.

He coaxes your shocked body into a response with careful waves of his tongue, consuming you with hungry lips and searching, grasping hands. Gentle teeth worry your bottom lip, soothed by the pass of his tongue. His nose nudges tenderly against yours as he kiss kiss kisses his way across your cheek.

He pulls back, fixing you with a serious look.

“You sure you’re okay?”

You can see him so perfectly in the before for a second. How he might have asked you the same question in some mundane situation, helping you to your feet after a stumble with a steadying hand on your shoulder. The dip of his accent and the color of his eyes would have spelled the end for you. You would have been a goner.

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m good.”

“You wanna stop?”

You tighten your fingers in his shirt and shake your head. “No.”

He nods, sweeping light fingers across your cheek, and leans back in.

You fumble blindly with the buttons of his shirt as he kisses you, working as quickly as you can in the tight, shifting space between your bodies. When you have it almost all the way open, he sits back on his heels and yanks it off the rest of the way, tossing it off the bed. You tug impatiently at the hem of the white t-shirt he has on underneath, but he goes right for the button on your jeans, popping it open and ignoring the zipper completely. It comes down on its own when he hooks his fingers in your belt loops and jerks the denim off your body. Your underwear goes with it.

You reach for his belt buckle, but he stops you.

“No,” he says, stern, not unkind, “I’m gonna make you come first.”

He waits for your nod, then slides down the mattress and situates himself between your legs, spreading them open with a decisive push.

You’re naked under his gaze.

You watch, tense with anticipation, as he leans down to part you with the v of his fingers, one forearm hooked over the top of your thigh. He takes his time admiring the natural gloss of your arousal, his face situated so close that you can feel the warmth of each individual exhale on your skin, and then he looks up at you from his position between your thighs.

Without breaking eye contact, he adds to your slick by pouting his lips and letting a line of his spit drip slowly onto your pussy.

When he did that the first time you fucked, you chalked it up to efficiency, necessity—a way to bypass intimacy by cutting down on foreplay. Now, watching him track the slow seep of his saliva over your glistening cunt with hungry eyes, you realize he just likes it. He’s just nasty.

Joel dips his head and licks through the mess.

Your knees start to close reflexively around his ears at the first direct stimulation against your clit, but he forces your legs open with one hand and the width of his shoulders.

He looks up at your face.

“You gonna keep these open for me or do I need to do it for you?”

He says it in his usual deadpan, but there’s a challenge there, a hint of provocation behind his expression, the buried hope that you might want to fight him in the way he’d like. You tuck that away for later.

For now, he takes your look of surprise as an affirmative and dips his head again, satisfied.

He works his tongue over the aching pearl of your clit with a gentle, targeted flick—up and back, the bridge of his nose pressed hard against your mound—and your mind goes blank. You arch into him, fucking yourself against his face in a languid rhythm, as the tension begins to build in your body.

He likes it. His throat vibrates with an approving hum.

You grip the comforter as your muscles pull taut, as your thighs tense in his tight hold. You can hear the flick of his tongue and the suck of his lips. The low, wet sounds.

He exhales sharply through his nose and readjusts, his hands forcing your thighs open and up, so he can taste you how he wants—where he wants. Where you’re dripping for him.

The rough pad of one finger rocks steadily over your clit while he fucks you with his tongue, moaning into the heat of your body as he pushes in as deep as he can. His other hand is gripped around the back of your thigh. Bruises will blossom there by morning, a shadow of his hold on you.

You crook an elbow and drop your arm over your face, turning into it to muffle the noises he’s dragging out of you. A whine. A choked moan.

His mouth moves back up, and a finger takes its place, eased inside you with little resistance. He slides it out, and a second joins the first when he presses them back in. They’re thick, and he pushes them deep.

Joel builds your pleasure to a peak—with his hand, with his tongue, with the low sounds grunted in his throat—and it climbs steadily until it breaks. He climbs with you, the cadence of his breath picking up as yours does, his body rocking gently into yours in time with his fingers' movements inside you, his shoulders pressed against the backs of your thighs. The bed is shifting, the mattress springs whining quietly as you writhe.

You clench tight around his thrusting fingers, their tips curled repeatedly against the spot that makes your heels slip down the bed, and he closes his eyes as he works you through it with the hot lick of his tongue on your clit.

Through the shock, the tremors, and the slow fade. Until you’re limp.

His voice is a husky drawl, his breath humid on your hip. “Fuck, baby, you feel good.”

It’s barely anything. From him, it feels like a revelation, like a fucking love poem. You reach for him.

“Please, Joel—”

He sits up, kneeling between your legs, and rips his shirt over his head. His heaving chest is flushed. He opens his belt buckle with one hand, the clink of metal and slip of leather loud in the quiet room as it slithers out of his belt loops, and he drops it to the floor. He moves from the bed to kick off his jeans, and when he settles his body over yours again, the only thing left between you is the thin fabric of his boxer briefs.

You can feel the heft of him through them. The strain and the heat. The body-warm fabric pressed against your wet cunt.

He’s heavy on top of you, his hips caught between your thighs, his chest warm against yours, knuckles ghosting over your cheek. You shove the elastic waistband over his ass, impatiently searching for skin.

“Need you to fuck me,” you breathe.

He helps you push the fabric down, gets them off, and holds himself over you with a hand braced by your ear, gripping the base of his cock to tease the head through your folds. He meets your eyes as he catches the tip on the notch of your entrance and starts to sink inside you, dropping his hips forward in a slow, purposeful movement as he drinks in your reaction. You’re wet and aching to be filled, but he’s still a stretch, so he thrusts shallowly against the resistance until the crease in your brow smoothes and your body welcomes him deep.

He drops to his forearms and lets you feel each other. He’s thick inside you, sharp and vital in a way that feels incredible, hugged tight in your heat. Joel dips his head, your foreheads brushing, and he presses his mouth to yours in a light kiss. Sweet and quick. Almost chaste.

He tastes like you.

Then he circles his hips, a slow grind that ends in a controlled thrust—powerful and targeted.

You get to collect little pieces of him while he moves inside you, as his cock kisses the deepest parts of you, as you cling to him. Gray hairs are threaded among the dark brown ones on his chest. His neck is dusted with faint freckles, only visible this close. There’s a shiny pink scar on his left shoulder—a deep cut, old and healed. A much newer one puckers the skin of his bicep. A bullet graze.

He likes to kiss your neck and suck on the supple skin of your breasts while he fucks you.

He gives you a second orgasm before searching for his own, reaching between your bodies to take you over the edge with the practiced ease of his fingers.

He was right to move the bed away from the wall.

He works his way up from a slow, deep rhythm to a pace that has each punch of his hips threatening to drive you up the silky fabric of the comforter. He slips a hand under your back and curls his fingers over the top of your shoulder, keeping you in place as he impales you on his cock, pulling you back down to meet him each time. The pleasure has you pressing your head back into the pillow, your eyes closed tight.

He doesn’t like that tonight.

“Look at me.”

Joel shoves a hand under your skull, tangles his fingers in your hair, and holds you fast. He’s panting as his eyes flick between yours. Searching. Almost…frantic as he starts to fuck you harder, with less control. The mattress complains under your shifting bodies.

You watch him unravel.

One hand still caught in your hair, he pulls out and jerks himself over you, chasing his orgasm as he watches your face. He bares his teeth when he comes across your stomach in warm pulses, pearly lines dripped over your skin. The pleasure punches a grunt and a hiss from him, his hand squeezing tight around the base of his cock as his whole body tenses and releases, the tug of his fist slowing to a stop as he milks the last drop.

He’s breathing hard as his gaze traces over the spots where you’re painted with him, and something flickers behind his veiled eyes. Before you can really catch it, he scrubs a hand down his tired face and reaches for his discarded shirt. He uses it to wipe the sticky mess off your skin and tosses the crumpled thing back onto the floor.

He settles on the edge of the bed, sitting with his back to you, and you slip underneath the blankets. Now that you’re sated, sleep is starting to weigh at the edges of your consciousness. Insistent.

Joel pulls on his jeans and leaves the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. You hear water running.

You lie there—torn between feeling sure he’s coming back, especially seeing as the rest of his clothes are here, and the creeping thought that he’d probably rather sleep on the too-short couch then blur an already murky line by sharing this bed for something other than sex.

It would be so nice, for once, not to sleep alone.

But you’re used to sleeping alone.

His steps creak on the hardwood outside the door. Too much relief blooms in your gut.

Joel shuts the door behind him and stands at the end of the bed, scratching a hand through his tousled hair. Something about his rumpled appearance, his uncertainty, his half-dressed state is endearing. It’s so rare to see him…undone. He’s studying you, like he doesn’t quite know how to bridge the gap between your bodies now that the lust has dulled. Now that it’s just you and him and a bed.

“You want me to find another room?” you ask, knowing full well that the Texas gentleman buried somewhere inside him would never allow that. He’d leave if he wanted to be alone.

“No,” he says, making a decision and reaching for the light. He shuts it off with a click. There’s a shuffling of clothes, off and on, and he slips under the blankets.

In the dark, it’s easier for him. He gets close. He doesn’t reach for you, but in the quiet black, you can hear him angle his body toward you, settling on his side. He doesn’t resist when you slide closer; his hand rests on your waist when you press your nose into the soft, worn cotton of his t-shirt.

In the morning, he’ll be gone again.

#joel miller x you #joel miller x female reader #joel miller x f!reader #tlou fanfiction #joel miller fanfiction #the last of us fanfiction #the last of us #tlou #tlou spoilers #the last of us spoilers

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sweetracha · 7 months

Note

VAMPIRE STRAY KIDS THOUGHTS MAKE BRAIN GO BRRRRRRRRRRE!!!!!!!!!!

Anyways *clears throat*

So Chan as a vampire: sweet, loving, romantic, non toxically obsessed and protective of you

That’s all I’ve got but like vampire aus…..heckin love them

Okay I've been saving this ask for spooky month!!!

But vampire skz in general is so hot but then you have Chan?!?!?! UGH

Vampire Chan BF Headcannons

He tried to hide it, he really did

Chan swore he wouldn't fall in love

Sure, he had needs

And he would get those needs settled

Usually by individuals of the night

But never would he fall in love

Knowing his mortal lover would have to leave him in years to come broke his heart

It had happened too many times before

He had his boys now

Poor "young" souls sadly given the same fate as him

He would stay strong for them

But then he met you

It was almost ironic how you wore blood red that night

Chan sat at another table at the steakhouse

But his attention was all on you

Unlike the man who say across from you

He seemed like an asshole

Scum

Discusting

Someone Chan wouldn't mind offing

Then the man said words to you that Chan would never repeat

Mean, vial, ruthless, abusive

Chan enjoyed human blood for the first time in a long time that night

Recently single and free you began to date again

And just happened to fall for a man you now knew as Chris

Your relation grew fast and wild

Within months you met his "boys" and whole confused, you loved him even more for his caring nature

Chan swore he would never fall in love, but it seemed like fate wouldn't let him live in peace

He was getting sick

Something he wasn't sure could even happen to a vampire of his status

He hadn't drank blood in so long, not with you around

You made him feel almost human again, he almost forgot he wasn't.

You cared for him and the boys as Chan got weaker and weaker.

The boys fought with Chan to tell you, to tell you the truth.

He didn't have too

You were standing in the doorway with another bowl of soup

It crashed to the floor

And you ran

Chan thought that was the end

Until you showed up the next morning, first aid kit in hand

Hours went by of you pleading for him to feed from you

And him telling you it would never happen

Then you kissed him

You shut him up and kissed him with so much passion

He could feel warmth again for a brief moment

Pulling back he looked into you eyes

He could see the future

He could see how torn up he would be in the end

How he would lean over your grave and sob for decades

How you would be the end to him

But he could see you smile

Your laugh

You in a white wedding down and flowers in you hand

He saw the future for both of you

Chan knew if he was to love you

He would love you for the rest of your life

Chan sunk his teeth into your neck and fed

That night, after bandaging your neck up, he held his lifeline in his arms.

And he was never letting go

(Unedited)

#stray kids #skz #stray kids smut #skz smut #stray kids fluff #skz fluff #🍑 answers

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jpeg-dot-jpeg · 6 months

Note

24 & jaytim for the prompt list? <3

!!! this idea has been living rent free in my head since i got this prompt and i've been trying to figure out how to do it justice. hope you enjoy!

24. “You’re the only one I trust to do this.”

Jason opens the front door and the first thing he says is, "Okay, you have to be nice to me right now."

Tim blinks. "I...wasn't planning to do otherwise?"

He grunts and takes a step back, motioning for Tim to come inside.

When the door is shut, Tim looks at him and asks, "Shirt on or off?"

Jason hedges for a second, plays with the idea of pretending he isn't so far gone over the edge that just the thought of bare skin makes him want to howl. But he's been waiting long enough just for Tim to arrive. He doesn't have it in him to make things harder for himself.

"Off."

The shirt hits the ground, left in a crumpled heap next to the sneakers Tim kicked off upon entering.

Jason likes that about Tim. He knows when not to ask questions, when not to push, when to just saddle up and get shit done. There's not an ounce of expectation or judgement when he looks around and asks, "Couch? Or bed?"

"Couch." The bed might be a tad too much for Jason's frail heart.

They shuffle into the living room. "How do you want me?"

Jason's brain stutters. He hadn't thought that far ahead. "Umm. Lie down. On your back."

Tim obeys without question, cushions bouncing under his weight, and settles in by arranging a pillow under his head before opening his arms in invitation.

And Jason-

Jason blacks out for a teeny tiny second with force of how desperately he wants to be held. In a breath, he finds himself suddenly plastered onto Tim's front, clutching to him like a life raft.

He's shaking. When did he start shaking?

A cold fingered hand rests on his back and another buries itself in Jason's hair and he could sob with the immense relief of it. He has his own hands hooked under Tim's shoulders, cheek pressed to his chest, and its not close enough. Jason wants to crush them together so hard they just blend into one fleshy amalgamation.

"How are you feeling?" Tim's voice is laced with an obvious concern that he doesn't have the bandwidth to ease. He gives an unintelligible grumble into the skin over Tim's heart. "Jay, you're shaking." The hand in his hair slides down to press against his carotid. Tim makes an unhappy noise. "When's the last time you got a booster for your pollen vaccine?"

The question irritates Jason more than it should, but its just so hard to think when the hand on his back is rubbing up and down like that. He catches one of Tim's legs between both of his own and squeezes hard enough to bruise himself on Tim's bony knee; it settles his nerves a bit.

"Fuckin'.... when I was fourteen?" he guesses.

The hand on his back doesn't still, but he can fucking feel Tim thinking. "Jason, if you haven't had a booster in years, that's almost as bad as metabolizing the pollen without being vaccinated at all."

"Been busy," he mumbles into Tim's chest. Its a bullshit excuse and they both know it. Jason wasn't too busy to get his flu shot every winter for the past half-a-decade. But deliberately going to the cave, making his medical history available to the whole fuckin' family, and having to ask Bruce to synthasize a booster for him? Yeah, too busy.

"If I'd known how bad it was for you, I would've-" Tim cuts himself off. Would've what? Would've nothing. Tim was in the middle of a very important, very time sensitive op when Jason called him. Something Tim couldn't in good faith have dropped cold. Something Jason couldn't in good faith have asked him to.

He knows what Tim is going to say next before he says it.

"Why did you wait for me to finish? Why not call someone else? There are a bunch of people who'd be willing to help you right now."

And the thing is that Tim is right. Jason didn't have to wait on him. Just about anyone he'd be willing to call would be willing to help him. The problem is that the list of people he's willing to call shrinks to zilch when he gets emotional.

Sure, he could have called Roy or Kori or Artemis, or Dick or Cass or Alfred, even fucking Bruce. They'd do it for him. But just doing it isn't enough. Not when he's unstable and vulnerable and oversensitive like this. Not when the slightest hint of awkwardness or most minor teasing comment could send him bursting into tears, and it drives him nuts because he knows its the pollen sending his hormones out of whack, but that doesn't make him any less prone to a humiliating emotional outburst.

God, it feels like something's crawling on him.

"I need-"

Jason digs his fingers into Tim's shoulders, fighting to vocalize the pure animalistic urges warring in his stomach. Tim stays blessedly silent so he can figure it out.

"I need-" he starts again. He doesn't know what he needs. Instead of trying to explain, Jason tugs on Tim until they shift around 90 degrees, his back against the couch, boxed in by Tim's body. He needs to be crushed, and he shuffles backwards and pulls Tim in closer until he barely has enough room to breathe.

When he's feeling a bit less manic, Jason counts his breaths and releases his death grip on Tim's shoulder. "...you're the only one I trust to do this."

And Tim just says, "Okay. I'm glad you trust me with this."

The tension leaks from his body. The worst of it is past with Tim pressed against him.

"If you send me a fully updated medical portfolio," Tim says after a while, "I can whip you up a fresh booster. And any other shots you might be behind on."

And Jason just says, "Okay. I will."

#JayTim #ficlet #Tim Drake #Jason Todd #ladytauria my beloved #ask #ask answered

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avaritia-apotheosis · 5 months

Text

Monsters at Your Doorstep

DPxDC Week Day 3: Tim Drake / Eldritch Danny / Teeth

Read on AO3 [here]

Summary: Bruce falls into a cave of bats and meets the darkness-- or whatever it is that lives inside it.

///////

WHEN BRUCE IS SEVEN THE GROUND SWALLOWS HIM WHOLE. The earth beneath the sacred grounds of Wayne Manor crumbled with one hasty misstep, taking him far away from the sunlight’s reach.

The bats swarmed at him immediately. A thousand eyes, a thousand screeching mouths, a thousand beating wings, engulfing him in their fury. His screams are drowned out by their cries. His skin cut and scraped by their claws. His ears bursting with the sound of their unholy cry. And for the first time in his life, Bruce learns what it means to fear.

And then the bats just stop.

He did not know what scared him more: the bats, or the silence.

Bruce craned his head up from beneath his arms. Darkness met his gaze. A deep and impenetrable dark, deceptive in its shadows. He stumbles back and slowly, ever so slowly like a deer caught in the crosshairs, shuffles himself towards that slim shaft of light in the cavern. He bites his tongue when the soft flesh of his palm cuts itself on a rock.

The cut weeps a deep carmine red down his wrist as he holds his hand up into the light.

Suddenly, the darkness spoke.

“Are you hurt?”

The darkness sounds oddly young to Bruce’s ears. Older than Bruce, but nowhere near as deep as his father’s, nor as rich as his mother’s. (But there is a sound there that isn’t registering in Bruce’s young mind. A sound that dances just beneath the facade of a boyish voice.)

Bruce calls out— “Hello?” —flinching at the cacophony of echoes repeating his words back at him.

A beat of stillness. Something shifts in the darkness— no, that isn’t…that isn’t right. It’s more like the darkness itself shifted. The edges of the shadows moved as if it were fabric, all too tangible.

“Hello,” the darkness said again.

Bruce steeled his nerves with a shaky inhale. “Can you help me?” He points up to the crack of blue sky. “I— I fell. I need to get back up.”

There is a sounds that feels almost like the cross between a slither and a thousand whispers. Unintelligible words building in a rising crescendo, echoing all around him and overwhelming his senses and he cannot think he cannot think he cannot think he cannot hear himself at all—

The darkness spoke, and all at once silence reigned supreme once more. “You…want my help?”

Bruce swallows the lump in his throat. “Yes?” He tacks on the ‘please’ as an afterthought.

“You want my help,” the voice echoes (and echoes and echoes and echoes—).

“Will you?”

“Yes.” the darkness answered less than a second after Bruce spoke. Eager. Giddy. Almost desperate. “It’s been a while since someone needed me. Close your eyes.”

“What—?”

Something pries its way from the darkness. It’s—

It’s—

(Even decades down the line, Bruce is never able to describe what he saw that day. There are simply no words, no method in all of living time and history to describe the incomprehensible. What parts he can explain hold no candle to the truth. They are but ghosts— imagos of the creature that he laid eyes upon that day. A shock of what might have been bone white hair. A glimpse of eyes—two, four, eight, twelve—that could have been green. A gaping maw that stretched itself into a grin. Nothingness, the void, where the legs might have been. The parts of a boy that came together all right and all wrong.)

Bruce shuts his eyes. Tight.

When he opens them again, he is back on the surface. In the sunlight. Bright and warm and safe. He turns to run back to the arms of his mother, when a whisper—whispers—invade the depths of his mind.

Call me if you need me.

***

Bruce never has to call. The creature—whatever it is—always lingered nearby ever since that day. There was a loneliness to it that tugged at his heart strings, and despite all the warnings that the little Alfred inside his head says, he invites the creature to play.

Initial fears aside, Bruce delights in this new friend that he’s made. It’s a secret that’s his and his alone, and he relishes in that fact.

The creature is like no one else. It summons ice and fire and makes the elements take shape into something beautiful. With a touch of its shadowy hands, he can make trees and walls disappear at will. Once, it made the ceiling of Bruce’s room invisible and mapped out each constellation with depth and passion unmatched. And now, when Bruce looked at the night sky, it was no longer just a cluster of stars that he saw, but an infinite mural of rich pictures, stories of myths and legends come alive and preserved in starlight.

It’s a shame that a creature that loved the sky so much would spend most of its time underground.

“It would scare you if I was out in the daylight,” the creature said.

“But you’re already scary right now!”

“It’s not like I want to be.”

Bruce bounced the ball into the little void in the corner of his room. The darkness shifted, moved, and tossed the ball back. “But at least you won’t have to leave every time the sun comes up.”

The shadow laughs (at least Bruce thinks it’s a laugh, it’s more like static, a harsh buzzing sounds that jumps in frequencies like the tuning of an old radio). “Maybe one day. It’s not pretty, but if that’s something you want then I will.”

“That’s a promise.”

***

There’s shouting and arguing, and his father has his hands up and that nervous smile on his face but the stranger is mad, is madmadmad. Bruce’s mother hides him behind her back and tells him to cover his ears. Don’t look. Everything will be alright. Close your eyes. Don’t look. Your father will handle this, everything is alright.

The man keeps telling them to shut up shut up and hand them over— hand what over? He shouldn’t be listening, he knows, his mother said not to, but Bruce is a curious child and he’s scared and he wants to know what is going on—

BANG—

His eyes shot open.

BANG—

There was—

The man—

His father—

Mother—

***

Bruce screams without uttering a sound. He screams and he wails, the sound locked inside his mind because he can’t— he can’t remember how to open his mouth. How to work his throat. How to, how to breathe—

His parents need help. There’s a hole in his father’s shirt. A bright red stain on his other’s dress. Her pearls are— she loves those pearls, she’ll be so sad if they’re lost and—

Mother’s glass eyes stare back. Unblinking.

Father’s chest doesn’t rise or fall. Silent.

Bruce’s fingertips are stained red, his cupped hands overflowing with pearls.

***

Bruce calls for the darkness. Calls for the creature that existed inside it. He doesn’t know its name. Doubts if it even has one. But he calls, prays, wishes with all his might that it would come.

And it did.

There is a shift in the darkness of the alley. The shadows seem deeper, fuller almost; alive in the way the darkness was alive in that cave. It moved, gathering like a blanket over Bruce’s shaking frame, shrouding his vision in a haze.

Its mournful crooning echoed in his ears, a thousand voices crying aloud as one when he could not muster the strength to. “You shouldn’t see this,” the voice quivered as he spoke, as if familiar with the pain. “No child should see this.”

You’re here.

“Of course I am. You needed me.”

Please.

“Yes?”

Please don’t leave me alone.

The shadows envelop him tighter and Bruce clings to them like a lifeline.

“I won’t. You know I won’t. I’ll keep you safe.”

***

The darkness stays with Bruce that night, keeping silent vigil over Bruce in his room as he mourns. When the first rays of daylight began to bleed between the cracks of the curtains, Bruce panics. He feels the creature’s form try to recede back into the cracks and crevices of his room. Feels the room suddenly become bigger and emptier and alone-alone-alone.

His hand shoots out to grab at those tangible threads of darkness. “You can’t— you can’t go.”

The creature croons sadly. “You know I have to.”

“But you promised me. You promised.”

“You know I’ll be back.”

“No. Even during the day. You said— you said you could do it. You would do it, if I asked.”

The shadows ripple and sway, slowly as if in contemplation. Uncertainty hung thick in the air like the heavy pendulum of the great grandfather clock in the library. Bruce held onto his breath, watching and waiting to see where the creature’s choices would swing.

Finally, the shadows stilled. “You’ll see me tomorrow then.”

His heart sank. “You’re leaving?”

“Not for long,” it said. “I need…I need to get something. It’ll take some time, but once I get it then tomorrow, tomorrow morning even, I’ll see you.”

“And you’ll stay.”

“And I’ll stay. For as long as you need me.”

Reluctantly, Bruce lets go. The darkness disappears and light engulfs the room.

The sunlight has never felt so cold.

***

At dawn the next day, a boy appears on the steps of Wayne Manor.

He’s young, though not as young as Bruce, but his hair is just as black and his eyes and even paler shade of blue. He’s tall and gaunt with skin as thin as paper and as white as bone, lips tinged a deathly blue. There are holes in his ratty shirt and mud staining his shoes. When he moves, it isn’t in any way that is natural. Like a puppet loose from its strings, or a person that’s forgotten how to walk, learning how legs work again.

He smells of wet earth, the bitter cold, and the moment when autumn leaves begin to rot.

The boy was unnatural, unexplainable, and terrifying.

But the warmth in his voice—and the twisting shadows beneath his feet—were all too familiar to Bruce.

“You’re here,” Bruce gasped, running to embrace the creature even as Alfred yelled at him to stop.

The creature caught him, stick-thin arms deceptively strong. “To stay, if you want.”

“Of course!” It would be difficult to explain to Alfred, or the police, or the hundreds of people that came knocking to his home. Bruce will find a way, though. As long as he can keep his friend and keep Alfred by his side, as long as he isn’t alone, then he’ll do anything.

Alfred clears his throat, yanking Bruce away from the creature. “It appears, sir, that I was not informed that we were to have any visitors today.” There’s a hard edge to Alfred’ voice that Bruce has never heard before. Something dangerous. Something scared. “May I inquire as to your name and purpose here?”

The creature tilts his head so quickly Bruce hears something crack. And when he holds out his hand, Bruce could see the heavy layers of dirt beneath his chipped fingernails. Coupled in his appearance, it almost seemed like the creatures spent the entire night out digging.

“I’m here because Bruce said he needs me.” Its smile was too wide and too sharp; unnerving despite its attempts to look friendly. “You can just call me Danny.”

#dpxdc #dpxdc week #dpxdc week 2023 #i wish i knew how to explain this au in a way that makes sense but my mind is just going BRRRR

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abiiors · 1 year

Text

Birthday

Day 4 of (write) anything that you want to! week. I won't give away the main trope of this but the side trope is friends to lovers. Series Masterlist.

Thursday: trope night

‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he smiles sweetly, extends the flowers in his hands. ‘The big 30!’

‘The big 30,’ you echo.

Behind you, the party is in full swing. It’s just friends and family, really; not a very big group but they chat about and joke around with each other. You stand transfixed at the sight of Matty dressed in a simple black button-down. Remnants of a stubble decorate his face and hints of his tattoo peek through the open collar. His hair is messy, his hair is always messy like he’s been running his hands through them and his eyes shine with joy.

‘Come in,’ you say, voice hoarse, and step aside.

He doesn’t need an introduction to the people already gathered there. They all know him, your friend of over a decade. They all say hello, include him in their conversation while you find a vase for the flowers.

Stepping into your bedroom feels like stepping into another dimension. It’s quiet, still faint notes of a song float in. Every once in a while, raucous laughter echoes around but in this moment it’s just you in your bedroom, sitting on your slightly messy bed, Matty’s flowers on your lap.

Thirty whole years gone, thirty years worth of a life lived…

‘You alright?’ his voice brings you out of your reverie.

Matty leans against the doorframe, one hand holding a glass of champagne, the other in his pocket. He looks like he belongs; in your bedroom, in your space. In your life.

‘Just feeling a bit nostalgic is all,’ you smile and pat the space next to you.

‘Do you remember when we pre-gamed so hard before your birthday party that we ended up passing out in my bedroom?’

He laughs and winces in embarrassment at the memory. ‘God, how old were we? 23?’

‘Babies, really!’ you shake your head. ‘I don’t think I would survive that hangover now.’

He chuckles a bit at that. You are suddenly and intensely aware of how close he sits, how his thigh is pressed up against yours, your bodies leaning into each as if by some invisible gravitational pull.

Comfortable silence wraps around you like an old, familiar blanket and you let the moment carry you away. He doesn’t stiffen, doesn’t hesitate when he feels you rest your head on his shoulder. He simply tilts his own to rest onto yours.

‘I thought you wouldn’t make it today,’ you confess softly, ‘what with the tour and all.’

‘And miss your birthday? Not a chance.’ A beat. ‘Besides, I’m here with ulterior motives.’

That gets your attention.

He shifts around a bit, grabs something from his pocket. His wallet. It takes a second for him to open it and dig around but finally out comes a perfectly preserved square of paper.

You sit up with a jolt, gasp in shock. He’s loving every bit of disbelief on your face as he hands you the paper.

‘Shut up, it’s not!’

‘It very much is,’ he counters.

You don’t need to open the paper to know what it says. You already know the words by heart. Still, as if possessed, you unfold it gingerly.

If I’m still single by the time I’m 30, I will marry you immediately.

Both yours and Matty’s names underneath it, signed in hot pink glitter just to drive home the point.

‘You didn’t think I forgot about this, did you?’ he teases softly.

The paper is yellowed, almost as old as your friendship and just as cherished. Each groove, each wrinkle filled with love and memories.

‘I– you still have this?’ It’s right in front of you, this “contract” that you both signed after you went through a bad breakup at 19. Still, it feels unreal that you’re holding it after all these years.

‘It comes with me everywhere,’ he states proudly. ‘I almost got it laminated at one point.’

He gives you a moment to examine the relic, to just hold it and let the memories wash over you. Memories of a bedroom not too different from this one. Memories of two 19 year olds sat side-by-side exactly like this. Matty wiping the tears from your cheeks—then full of heartbreak and now full of utter, blissful happiness.

‘Fucking Trevor,’ you both say simultaneously and then burst into a fit of giggles.

His eyes shine brightly, his smile brighter still. Outside the song fades out with soft piano notes.

‘I was going to get you a ring as a birthday gift.’ His tone is joking, light but his eyes hold so much longing.

‘I would have said yes,’ you whisper back, unsure if you mean it as a joke or not.

Matty lifts up his hand, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear.

‘So what is it?’ you clear your throat in hopes that he won’t hear your racing heart, ‘my birthday gift, that is.’

‘This,’ he whispers and presses his lips onto yours.

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the-elusive-soleil · 3 months

Text

State of the Union: Maglor

I did one of these for Curufin a while back, and I haven't really been subtle about who I think Caranthir's married to, so it's clearly high time I complete the trio of Women Who Married Into This Family For Some Reason.

The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel like the Fëanorian wives should be...a little not normal. A little nuts, even. There are plenty of takes where they are the Nice Ones who stayed behind in Aman to provide guilt trips, but I want to see ones who didn't. Ones who came along, who were part of the war - who maybe even were part of the kinslayings if they lived long enough.

And I've mostly seen Maglor's Wives who are Teleri or Noldorin, so on a whim, the one in my head has become Vanyarin.

Her name is Ainalámë (one of her parents must've thought very highly of her), and she grows up not unlike those overachieving piano kids for whom imperfection is Not An Option.

She's very very gifted musically, specifically with voice and zither, and because she's Vanyarin, this means that from about adolescence onward, her life centers around playing music for the Valar on Taniquetil.

Her technical perfection is second to none, but there's always room for improvement, so periodically she'll go elsewhere to study with this or that music master.

Which is how she runs into Makalaurë Fëanárion. Who has spent pretty much his whole life being the greatest musician around, but is open to some friendly competitiveness when Ainalámë shows up.

She is not impressed with this Noldo prince and his virtuosity. Almost at once, it becomes her mission in life to take him down a peg.

Well, fine, if she's going to be like that about it. He'll show her. Her and her boring perfectionism and total inability to improvise and her pretentious name and snooty attitude and no he doesn't fancy her Nelyo, shut up.

What ends up happening is that the ensuing fervent one-upmanship actually makes both of them improve in ways they didn't know were possible. They've both spent ages with everyone around them telling them they were already the best, but now they're having to prove it, work for it.

Makalaurë's technique gets honed razor-sharp. Ainalámë practices until her fingers bleed and it's still not enough, and in desperation she resorts to adding flourishes to match his.

She calls him out on every mistake. He starts calling her Sinyacarë, new-maker, as a dig at her reluctance to deviate from written music.

And, well, she doesn't want to improvise. Improvising means that there's room for error. You can't have error when you're performing for the King and Queen of Arda.

But he's making her eat her words about his precision, so she has to make him eat his about her creativity.

And she does. Once she finally lets go, it's even surprisingly fun. She...doesn't quite remember the last time music was just fun.

Slowly, she and Makalaurë reach a kind of accord. They keep pushing each other, but they collaborate sometimes now, too. He still calls her Sinyacarë, but it's affectionate now.

At some point, she realizes that she doesn't want to head back to Taniquetil. She wants to stay in Tirion and keep on experimenting and trying new things (and seeing Makalaurë - which, when did that become something she wanted?), wants to keep writing music that's about things other than birds and stars and the mighty wisdom of the Valar.

(Not that those are bad things. But they've been her subject matter for decades; she's ready for a change.)

She falls in love with the creative freedom and the lack of pressure before she falls in love with Makalaurë, but that eventually comes along, too.

He's been in love with her since the first time she really, truly lost her cool during a song duel with him and let out a string of wildfire arpeggios that almost got away from her; he knew he was a goner then.

Their courtship is slow, to give her parents time to come around to the idea of her lifestyle changes and to give Fëanáro time to come around to the idea of a Vanyarin daughter-in-law. Insofar as there's any kind of timeline for this, I think they'd start courting not long before Curufin and Kestë meet, but would get married sometime after Curufin does.

Fëanáro's issues with the Vanyar aside, Sinyacarë actually finds she likes Makalaurë's family quite a lot. They're very chaotic, but that means that no one will really notice if she messes something up while she's still finding her feet. And there's music in their chaos; she writes a nocturne that's Ambarussa trying to sneak in late after a hunt, or a fugue that's everyone talking over each other at dinner.

She and Makalaurë mean to have kids. They talk about it. But there's always something going on, always other music to work on, and after all, they have forever.

Until, of course, the Trees go out, and they don't.

Sinyacarë joins in the host going over the Sea without a second thought. What exactly she'll do in Middle-earth, she isn't sure, since she's average at best with a sword, but her husband and his family are going, so she's going too.

The Oath...bothers her a little. There's something about the way it warps the song of the world, and it sounds disturbingly like a twisted version of a marriage vow, and she doesn't like what she can feel it doing to Makalaurë's soul. But it's not like there's anything they can do now.

Alqualondë is a mess. Everything happens very fast, and before Sinyacarë can quite decide what to do, there's a Teler coming at her husband and Moryo from behind with a fishing spear. And then there's not, and she's standing over a body.

Well. No turning back now.

She kills three people that day. She doesn't know their names, but she can never forget the number.

Fëanáro promised freedom when they came to Middle-earth. Fëanáro dies not very long after they arrive. And then Nelyo is gone and Makalaurë is left as a frayed, guilt-wrecked regent.

Sinyacarë might have married a prince, but she never thought that would matter, politically. But she picked up a few things in passing on Taniquetil, and Makalaurë picked up a few things in Tirion, and his (remaining) brothers pitch in and help, and everyone holds things together until Findekáno brings Nelyo back.

When the language shift kicks in, she Sindarizes her name to Saintân. She goes with Maglor to the Gap, and in some ways it's as ideal as Beleriand can get. The pressure of the regency is gone, their family is safe, and they roam free and hold back the darkness with song. Saintân becomes better, much better, with a sword because that's what's needed, and above all else she has always striven for excellence in anything she is called upon to do.

It's not perfect. Nothing in Beleriand is perfect. Morgoth's presence, his dominion, twists the song of it, and while the Sindar and Avari who were connected to the land before Morgoth's return do somewhat better, the Noldor get just a little more twisted in themselves over time. It's worse for those who are Oathbound.

The constant war and threat of destruction don't help either.

Saintân came to Beleriand for her husband and for freedom - the two have always been intertwined, to her - but it's becoming rapidly clear that there's no freedom for the Feanorians without the Silmarils. The gems themselves, she could take or leave, but she wants her family free of the Oath, to be happy again.

So she fights in the Nirnaeth, to try and get the Silmarils back from Morgoth.

When that doesn't work out and they turn to Doriath, she insists on going with them then, too. Maglor tries to talk her out of it, but time has only increased her stubbornness, and she insists that she's going to be at his side just as she was at Alqualonde.

Maglor can never quite forgive himself for capitulating, when she falls in battle with the Doriathrim.

He's incapacitated from the broken marriage bond and can't help Maedhros search for the missing twins, and perhaps it's partially that that leads him to take in another pair of twins a couple of decades later.

Saintân watches the tapestries and adores the peredhil and prays that Maglor will find a way out. She weeps when he ends up alone and burned. Despite her best efforts (she's no Luthien, but she's very good at coming up with irritating songs to sing at Namo), she does not manage to get reembodied anytime soon to go and get him.

But she does make it out of the Halls in time to meet Maglor when he sails with Elrond, and also to meet the son Maglor adopted in her absence.

#silmarillion #maglor #maglor's wife #oc of sorts #loooong headcanons #i need to write something with her and keste showing up on haleth's doorstep for a sisters-in-law chat

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faffreux · 7 months

Note

can you tell us about when you fell in love with fawful? :)

Yep. In fact, I'll write a whole mini essay for you so I can add it to the FAQ section of my website coming up shortly LMAO (SINCE I NEED TO FULLY ANSWER THIS QUESTION FOR THERE ANYWAY, RIGHT???) CLICK UNDER THE READ MORE TO SEE IT BECAUSE THIS IS GOING TO BE THE LONGEST THING I'VE EVER POSTED HERE, LMAO.

To preface, I have been a fan of the M&L games going back to the early-mid 2000s when I was a kid. I had no involvement with fandom or anything of the sort back then but I used to hop on my mom's bulky computer and look up fanart and other related content as early as 2004/5 and as a result, ended up captivated by the characters long before I knew who they actually were. (As a result of this, I have the names and art styles of various old M&L fandom creators permanently ingrained in my head and often wonder where they are today since a good deal of them vanished..!) It wasn't until 2006 that I got my first handheld console (DS Lite) and of course, what did I do? Immediately begged my mom to order me a used GBA copy of Superstar Saga.

When I finally had the game in my hands it was like coming home to a colorful world that I'd been captivated by for so long but never gotten the chance to actually explore until now. The characters felt like old friends and the Beanbean Kingdom as a location felt familiar and comforting to me. (As a side note, Popple quickly became my favorite. Shocker, right?)

I used to sketch various beans in my notebooks as well as on printer paper we had lying around the house. Long story short, I finished Superstar Saga and then a few years later in 2010 I picked up Bowser’s Inside Story and THAT’S WHEN THINGS SHIFTED–

BIS brought Fawful and his personality to life in a way that captivated my imagination like nothing else had prior. He quickly overtook Popple as my favorite character from then on forward… and that’s where it ends! Or.. is it?

Nah, that’s where it gets funky. Life got a little chaotic after that and not only did I stop playing video games altogether for many years, but I also almost completely gave up on art - the one thing I was most passionate about above all and thought I would make a career out of someday. A series of depressing events caused me to lose all hope and motivation for anything I created and the spark I’d kept inside of me for so long all but died out as a result.

We’re going to timeskip again, this time to late 2019. I’d just moved away from home permanently for the first time and had been getting settled in and no matter what I did to make my new apartment a cozy place it always felt like something was missing. My mind would keep wandering to the fact that I never made art anymore despite it having been such a key part of my life when I was younger. I so desperately wanted to change this and over the next few months the frustration only kept growing until on January 1st, 2020, I sat down in the living room with a pencil and paper in my hand and shut my eyes tightly before saying under my breath:

“I do not care what it is, I don’t care how it comes. Just please… PLEASE send me something to bring my art back. Anything… anything at all. I don’t care what I draw, I just want to be drawing again.” And with that, I placed the lead onto the paper and began to sketch…

And from there… a familiar face appeared!

(Now I could ramble to you about how much I do NOT like this drawing and how off model it is from how Fawful actually looks… but I’ll forgive myself since I hadn’t touched the M&L games in over a decade at this point and had forgotten most of Fawful’s character. And yet?? Here he was.)

How else can I explain it except that in that moment it felt like the pencil in my hand had suddenly become one of these:

A joy that I hadn’t felt in SO long suddenly filled my entire being and without wasting another second, I immediately went online and ordered both Superstar Saga and Bowser’s Inside Story to replay again. In the time waiting for the games to arrive I had started drawing daily again - sketching out various old characters of mine with dozens of doodles of the bean man stacked in between them all.

There he was… always smiling, always happy to see me, and oftentimes with his arms outstretched as if to give an encouraging hug. When the games arrived I worked through them quicker than I ever had prior - finishing up Superstar Saga in less than a week and subsequently moving onto Bowser’s Inside Story with a LOT of excitement built up for it.

It was my first day playing and I was having the time of my life! The way Fawful looked in his little grey cloak with that enormous, charming grin of his as he bamboozled Bowser into eating the Vaccuum Shroom had me giggling with joy while words repeated in my brain over and over of: “I need to draw this later, I NEED to draw this later!!!” I WAS EXCITED ABOUT ART AGAIN… AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. I was practically hopping in my seat from the happiness I felt in my heart and chest every time Fawful appeared at this point!

This was how it felt until the moment I arrived at the Fawful Theatre and watched as he began dancing on the stage floor. THIS time.. something different came over me. If you’ve felt it before, then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it was like my entire body turned warm all at once, like some sort of flame had been lit inside. I’d never felt it for anything or anyone prior to then, and that's partly why it hit me as hard as it did. I was practically sweating.

Heck, I was so absorbed in my feelings that I had forgotten there was anyone else in the room with me! That is.. Until my roommate at the time spoke up:

Her: Are you alright? Me: Uhhh… yeah, why? Her: You’re red as a beet. Are you sure you’re okay?

By this time I had realized what was really going on so I reassured her I was fine, grabbed my 3DS, and ran to my room to finish the playthrough on my own so I wouldn’t embarrass myself any further, hahaha.

In the days, weeks, and months following that moment I became dedicated to drawing the best art of Fawful I could possibly create! What started as a challenge to myself to ‘give back’ to the person who’d given me back the ability to create again turned into someone I genuinely could not stop drawing for how much fun I was having doing it. The desire to make better and better art in order to honor him drove me to improve at a speed I never had prior, and soon thereafter I created Jolligig as a way for me to be in this colorful world with him and to express the deepening affection I was feeling for him with every day that passed by.

By some miracle, my prayer had been answered and here it was in the form of a grinning lima bean.

[End of Part 1. Interested in the rest? Yes… there’s more, I’m sorry. Please let me know in the comments. This took a while to write so I thought splitting it up would be best if folks are interested, LOL.]

#ASKS #MY GOD I AM SORRY (no i'm not)#fawfultalk #important

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beastlycheese · 11 months

Text

Does Robert Carlyle, now 62, get his kit off in the new TV series of The Full Monty? ‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he says with a grin.

Photograph: Alana Paterson/The Observer

Interview

By Rebecca Nicholson, printed in Guardian/Observer

Robert Carlyle’s life has been defined by two remarkable characters: the explosively violent Begbie, and Gaz in The Full Monty. Here, he talks about his Glasgow childhood, Britpop hedonism – and playing the PM…

It was 1997, and Robert Carlyle was in his mid-30s, when he first played the stripping Sheffield steelworker Gaz in The Full Monty. Last year, to get ready to play him again – this time for an eight-part TV series – he sat himself down to watch the film. He seems slightly embarrassed to admit it – he’s not the kind of actor who likes to watch himself. “And I’m not about trawling back through something from 20-odd years ago,” he says. But The Full Monty was calling him to South Yorkshire, so trawl back he did. He decided that he would watch a few minutes, then he would move on. “And I sat there and watched the whole thing.” He was surprised to find that it still worked, even after 25 years. “I don’t know if I can say this, but I really enjoyed it. It really stands up.”

The original Full Monty told the story of six unemployed men from Sheffield who put on a DIY strip show at the working men’s club. It was an indie film, shot on a very small budget, and it almost went straight to video; a last-minute re-edit saved it from obscurity and it went on to be a staggering global success, making £200m at the box office. Carlyle’s Gaz is the ringleader, a schemer and a dreamer trying to keep enough money in his pocket to put the heating on when his son comes to stay.

I had misremembered it as a film about men getting their kit off, a bawdy hen night of British comedy. But rewatching it I was struck by how political it seems now. Three decades later, in the new series, people are still broke and Gaz is still scheming, but the working men’s club has shut down, the school is crumbling and children are going hungry.

‘I love it when I dive into a job. You’ve got a little family unit, you love each other to bits and you think you’re going to be friends forever’

“It’s easy to forget that the film is quite heavily political,” says Carlyle. “It makes a point. And I think the same applies to the TV show. These people have lived through what seems like 25 years of austerity.” He credits the writers, Simon Beaufoy and Alice Nutter, with its gallows humour. “But you see that the older people’s lives have been pretty tough for the past 25 years, and then there’s 20 years of what Simon calls the Young Montys, the younger characters, heading for the same shit. So it’s good that this has been made. It shows what people go through to survive the day to day.” Not just men getting their kit off, then. Does he strip this time? “Nobody wants to see that,” he says, with a grin.

Carlyle is a great talker, open and funny and relaxed. He admits he was not always this way, particularly when it came to the press, though he did have his reasons. He’s calmed down a lot since his wilder days, in part because he is, as he says, “125 years old” (he’s just turned 62, though he looks younger) and also because he now lives in Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada. “There’s a laid-back attitude and quality here I enjoy,” he says. He moved there to film a TV series, Once Upon a Time, in 2011, with his wife, Anastasia Shirley, and three children, and found that he liked the city, though he has kept a home in Glasgow, where he grew up, and the family splits its time between the two. His kids are 21, 19 and 17.

Do they have Canadian accents? “Aye, they do,” he laughs. “My eldest son’s got this strange – hang on, let me see if I can do it – this half-American thing with a bit of Scottish thrown in, you know?”

Carlyle is at his happiest when he’s at home. “I’m a homebody, there’s no doubt about that,” he says. “I’ve got loads of friends, particularly in London, and I enjoy it when I get to meet up with them. It’s brilliant. But I’ve always been a bit of a loner to be honest.” Carlyle was brought up by his father; his mother walked out when he was a child. He has spoken before about moving around a lot, living in communes. “I always think about it as darkness and light, my life, because the first part of it was pretty dark. My mother had left when I was a wee boy. I was brought up by my dad alone in Glasgow in the 60s, and the single- parent family, there was not a lot of that around, especially a single-parent family with a father. That made me instantly different from the rest of the people who were around me.” He seems surprised by his own candour. “Genuinely, I’ve never really spoken about this before. But I guess that’s probably where it started.”

I still love Begbie. It was such an explosion. An absolute avalanche

Did he feel like an outsider at school? “When I was very young, yeah, definitely. It’s the little things.” He has a teacher friend and he says he is pleased to hear that things are very different now. “But back in the day, if you had to get permission for something, the teachers would say, bring a note in from your mum. Stuff like that. Of course, when you don’t have that, that really hits home, even when you’re a wee boy.”

Carlyle left school at 16, became a painter and decorator, and worked with his dad. At 21, he came across a copy of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and it lit something up inside him. He went on to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and set up his own theatre company. For a loner, he has picked a very sociable job.

“Yeah, but I’ve been doing it for so long that I’ve become very good at separating those things. I love it when I dive into a job, whether theatre, film, TV, whatever. You’ve got a little family unit, you love each other to bits and you think you’re going to be friends for ever. Then two months later you never see them again,” he laughs. Family means a lot to him. “I’d always wanted to have a good family unit, to be able to connect with each other and be pals with each other,” he says, talking about his three children. “Thankfully, we’re great friends.”

In 1991, he was cast as the lead in Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff, and worked steadily through the 90s, playing a serial killer in Cracker, which set the tone for more villainous roles to come. But nothing prepared him for the double whammy of playing the sadistic maniac Begbie in Trainspotting at the end of 1995 and Gaz in The Full Monty, 18 months later. “From that point on, they were massive shadows that then followed me around for the rest of my life, the rest of my career,” he says. “So it was something that I had to get used to, the whole fame thing. Because I am, as I’ve been saying, quite a homely guy, a family man, it took me a long time to get used to that.”

To say the films were hits is an understatement. Both were phenomena that travelled around the world. One of the strangest things about watching The Full Monty again, he says, is that it took him right back to that time. “It’s looking at yourself in another life, and all the things that were happening in my life back then. I mean, we can all look back in photographs, but I’ve got this living, breathing thing in front of me.”

What was happening in his life back then?

“Ha!” It was the height of the Britpop era, and because of those films, Carlyle was right at the heart of it. Back in the day, as he puts it, he was invited to everything and went to most of it. “I met all the personalities of the day, the Oasis lads, Damon Albarn, who’s still a great friend. I was right in the middle of that whole thing, enjoying that life.”

Was it as hedonistic as it seemed? He doesn’t pause for breath. “One thousand per cent,” he grins. “It was incredibly hedonistic, but it was exciting. If you think about it politically, we’d just come out of Tory rule. Blair was there, everything seemed to be on the up. And I can remember that feeling.” He appeared in an Oasis video, for the song Little By Little.

Was it easy to be friends with Blur and Oasis, given their famous rivalry? “Hahaha. To be honest with you, I was really good at not getting involved. But I remember when I did Little By Little, Damon was like, ‘Why the fuck did you do that? Come and do one for me!’ I said, ‘But you never asked,’ which was true! And that was the end of the conversation.”

“It doesn’t sound like you were a homebody in those days,” I say. He laughs again. “No,” he says. “There wasn’t so much homebody then. I certainly wasn’t shy in getting out the door.”

But there was a darker side to that era. His fame made him a person of interest to the tabloids. He says it’s nothing compared to what some people experienced, but still it sounds unpleasant.

“At the time, going through that was horrible, to be honest with you, because I didn’t understand it. I was suddenly in this world and I was very open. Probably too open, at times.” The papers responded by reporting on his private life and his family. “They got in touch with my mother and pulled her out the dark, and that was really upsetting. So I slammed the door shut for a long time, because I just hated it.” He was tight-lipped in interviews and wouldn’t do chatshows, though he will say he still regrets saying no to Michael Parkinson. “I think that was probably quite clever, because then you do keep a little bit of yourself. I mean, you see people on these chatshows and everything comes out and you go, ‘My God, I don’t know how you can live your life like that.’”

He does them these days, however. “Because I’m 125, I’m more used to it,” he jokes. “I can do it better now. Time and age is a great thing.”

Is it just time? Has he mellowed with age?

“It’s family, children. My children came in the 2000s, so all the stuff in the 90s, there were no kids then, but once children arrive in your life, everything changes overnight. So that becomes more important. That becomes your focus. And you begin to think, ‘Oh, the other stuff’s not actually worth bothering about.’”

Carlyle has had the chance to go back to two of his most iconic characters. He revisited Begbie for T2, the Trainspotting sequel, in 2017. A sequel was always planned, and Carlyle says he and Jonny Lee Miller, who plays Sickboy, wanted it to be sooner. “But Danny Boyle [the director] always said, we’ll do it, but when you’re older. He was obviously right, because it’s in the face. You can see that life has been lived.”

Even more so than Gaz, the terrifying Begbie is the character who has followed him around the longest. “The terrifying Begbie!” he laughs. “I love Begbie. I mean, who knew? Who knew what was going to happen with that character? It was such an explosion, Trainspotting. An absolute avalanche.” At the time, he knew that the film was going to be something special. “I thought this character is gonna be around for a while. But I thought, maybe a few years.” Yesterday, he says, he went to the butcher’s near his house, and the man in the shop, in his 20s, from Bilbao, recognised him and said he loved him in Trainspotting. “He said, ‘I’ve got a T-shirt of you, of Begbie with the glass.’ This thing I thought was going to last a few years, is still there, in people’s minds, 27 years later.” Wherever he goes now, people still recognise him as Begbie. “That mad character!” He’s not exactly a teddy bear, is he? “I mean, this is a line from the film – he’s a psycho, but he’s a mate, so what can you do? I do love him. And Gaz. Both these characters have given me a tremendous career and a tremendous life, and you’ve got to love him for that.”

Besides, Begbie’s not dead yet. There is a six-part TV series, The Blade Artist, in the planning, about Begbie’s post-prison life as an acclaimed artist in California. Carlyle is working on it with Irvine Welsh and Hex author Jenni Fagan.

“It’s been brilliant, this one. I mean, let’s face it, Begbie is me. So to be right in at the beginning of that and be able to go, well, actually, maybe change this, change that… that’s where we are at the moment.” He thinks they’ll start shooting in the next year or two.

For now, he’s off work, relaxing in Vancouver, travelling with his wife, spending time with his family. “Back in the day, it was all about the next job, next job, next job and I don’t think so much like that any more.”

Recently, he’s been playing the British prime minster, Robert Sutherland, in the political thriller Cobra. “Who would have thought? Begbie, Gaz, the prime minister…” he says. In the original Full Monty, Gaz explains that he can’t go shoplifting because “I’ve got serial killer written on my forehead.” Carlyle nods. “That’s right. That’s probably my issue with parts. Certainly with Sutherland, when he gets angry, I’ve got to really pull it down. Don’t get Begbie-angry,” he says. “Begbie as the prime minister!” I wouldn’t put it past him.

The Full Monty will be streaming on Disney+ from 14 June

#robert carlyle #full monty

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jawritter · 1 year

Text

Something About Fate...

Chapter 4

Summary: Y/N has been homeless and living on the streets of Dallas, Texas since the start of Covid. Until one day, a handsome, green eyes strange notices her and turns her whole world upside down.

Warning: Change, even good change, can be scary, and even a little hard...

Pairing: Jensen Ackles x Reader (eventually).

Word Count: 2k

A/N: This series is completely unbeta’d, so all mistakes are mine! This series will contain mature content eventually, and therefore is unsuitable for persons under 18 years of age! Anyone under the age of 18 will be blocked for my blog! Thanks so much for reading! I hope you all enjoy this series!

Main Masterlist Series Masterlist

Y/N and Jensen had been trapped in the hotel room in Dallas for three days and three nights. In that time period, Y/N had learned a few things about the mysterious actor. First, he didn’t act like any rich guy she’d EVER encountered, whether that be while she was still living on the street, or while she was a working-class citizen.

He was mostly a quiet person, but somehow, it seemed easy to just BE with the man, and not feel the need to be pressured into a conversation. He was perfectly content to sit next to her on the bed or couch, and just watch whatever was on TV.

TV. That was a whole new topic all together. Having been living on the streets for so long, and only seeing any form of news or goings on in the world around her from the passing magazine stand, or outdoor advertisement, she didn’t realize just HOW behind on things as she was, but more on that later.

When they were talking, he was the tentative, focused, and open person she’d ever met. Which shocked the hell out of her.

She didn’t realize this about herself either, but she had forgotten how to converse with people. She forgot how to hold a casual conversation with someone. She had no idea how that had happened, but it had. It took a lot of silent, long stretches of Jensen probing her a little to attempt to get to know her, but finally, she figured it out, and when she did, it took an immense effort on her part to actively not shut down every time Jensen asked her a question. She had to almost convince herself it was okay to talk to him, and that he wasn’t out to hurt her, like so many other had been in the past before she could get herself to open up to him, but she was glad she, because she like the person she found herself with, even if she still didn’t really recognize herself yet. She really had lost herself along the way…

Jensen was also very patient with her; something she’d ever experienced with ANY man, rich and famous or not. Never once did he get irritated with her. Even when he had to press her a little to figure out if she was hungry, or to convince her to allow him to pay for food. He didn’t get irritated when he ordered her a cell phone, and handed it to her, only to quickly learn she knew nothing about phones anymore, and he had to basically teach her how to use one. He never complained when she had to learn how to work the keycard for the room, or maybe spent too much time in the bath. He never even raised his voice at her, not once.

She’d only spent three years on the street, but trying to take a step back into society, she felt like she’d been out for decades. So much had changed in just three years it wasn’t even funny. She felt like she’d never catch up, and never be normal again. If there was really such a thing as ‘normal’ anyway. Jensen said there wasn’t. He was probably the most understanding person she’d ever met in her life.

She couldn’t for the life of her understand how the man was still single, though, he did tell her that he was married at one point, and had three kids with the woman, but they had just grown apart in the latter part of their marriage, and they were better as co parents than an actual married couple. It made her wonder if there were some things Jensen was hiding, some issues or flaws she was too blindsided by the things going on around her to see, but so far, he’d given no hint to anything being gravely wrong.

“Have you ever flown before?” Jensen questioned, bringing her out of her head with a slight jump when he spoke as he zipped the bag of clothing up in front of him, and placed it onto the floor next to the bed.

They were getting ready to fly out to California in a few hours, which would give her a little glimpse of his life outside of this room, and that made her incredibly nervous.

“I have, but it’s been years,” she admitted. “Somewhere around the age of ten I think, and I don’t really remember it.”

Jensen nodded as he looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was barely four in the morning, and they were already about to head down to the Uber that was going to take them to the airport. She was no idiot. She’d heard him talking to his friends, and they were flying out so early to spare her the gawking fans asking questions as to who she was, and why she was flying with Jensen, when he usually flew alone.

She wanted to confront him, ask him why, if he was ashamed of her or something, but she didn't. She kept her peace. For one, she was lucky he didn’t just fuck her like she thought he was going to, slit her throat, and throw her in a dumpster to rot somewhere. So she wasn’t going to question his methods right now.

“It will be fine,” Jensen continued as he tossed not only his bag over his shoulder, but also the small bag of things that Felicia had collected for her and brought to the room. Literally, all she owned right now to her name, fit in a gym bag. The sad part about this was it was already more than she’d had in years. “It’s a super early flight, and it’s first class. I wouldn’t be surprised if we are the only ones in first class this morning, we can probably catch some sleep before we land.”

Y/N nodded, knowing damn good and well sleep wasn’t something that was going to happen for her. Maybe him, but not her. She wasn’t even nervous about flying until he brought it up… damn him.

“Will your friends be flying with us?” she questioned as she followed him down the completely vacant hallway, and to the elevator that would take them downstairs.

“Na, Jared’s just going back to Austin, so he and Clif are just gonna drive, and Felicia has a later flight out to New York. Something about a project she has to get ready for, but honestly I was so tired when she was talking to me about it I wasn’t really listening,” he revealed with a chuckle as they stepped inside the elevator, and the large metal doors close behind them, leaving behind the kinda, sorta HOME she’d known for the last three day, in well, three years…

“Once we get to LA and get to the Air B&B, we can go shopping for a few things you're gonna need to actually do the job I’ve got you hired for; a laptop, pick up your iPad, things like that. I’m not filming or anything, but I wanted to spend some time In LA before we have to gear up for the next con.”

Jensen continued to ramble about LA as they made their way through the mostly empty lobby towards the black SUV that awaited the pair outside that would take them to the airport, and Y/N’s heart seemed to pick up speed as a heavy weight settled in her chest.

This was real… This was happening…

She’d never not left Dallas since she was a child. She never imagined herself living anywhere else. Now, he’s about to literally take her away from the only place she’d ever known, drag her all the way to LA, then once they were done there to Rome, then Toronto, then finally, when all that was done, possible New Mexico if they get renewed for a fourth season, before they could finally go back to Texas. Only God knew what would come up between them. It was surreal…

“Hey,” Jensen said, taking her hand in his own and pulling her out of the sudden fog she’d fallen into, and back to reality where he stood in front of her with the car door open, waiting for her to slide inside. “You okay?”

Y/N nodded as her eyes suddenly started to sting, but she shoved it down, WAY down, and when he fell asleep on the plane, she’d cry then. She’d mourn the future she thought she’d have, that clearly she never was meant to have here in Dallas. She’d mourn the life she should have had, but now had to leave behind. She’d mourn it, and she’d leave it right there in the air, miles and miles above the past she was leaving behind.

Not all of her memories from Dallas were bad ones, there were some good mixed in there too, but not enough to hold her here, not enough to make her stay. There had been plenty of warning from the Universe that it was time to move on. Some sort of higher power had sent Jensen her way that fateful day, or she was certain she would have frozen to death. This is the path she was meant to take, but that didn’t make things any less hard, or scary for that matter.

Jensen watched her closely as she slid herself into the backseat, and took a deep breath as she watched him close the door with a tightlipped smile on his face. It was almost as if he knew how hard this was for her, but wouldn’t say anything out loud, not that she even wanted him too. Some things, even though you have someone sitting right next to you, you just have to walk through all by yourself.

“Hey, if you need some time, if this feels like we’re moving around way too fast, just tell me. I can move some things around and give us more downtime. I don’t mind. I want you to be okay, that’s my main concern,” Jensen offered as the Uber driver took off towards the airport, and Y/N watched out of the frosty window at the dim light of the morning as it stretched it’s arms just over the top of tall buildings, still casting their own light over the streets of Dallas, the streets that she’d once called home.

“No, it’s okay,” she assured him, not even taking her eyes off of the window as the familiar sights rolled by. Like the park she’d slept on the benches of so many nights, or the little sandwich shop she’d met Jensen at. All these familiar things, and yet, they all seemed so far away now. To which she was grateful, even if she was a little dumb struck in the moment. “I’ll be okay.”

Jensen reached over the small space between the pair of them, grabbing her hand in his to catch her attention away from the past that was now zooming by her so fast she could only see a cold blur, to focus on the more important future that was sitting right next to her.

She’d be a liar if she said her heart didn’t skip a beat every time he touched her in any way, and that was dangerous. Very, very dangerous. She couldn’t go catching feelings and fucking this up, she just couldn’t let herself do it.

“It’s gonna get easier, I promise,” Jensen said, and she could only nod at him, and look down at the floorboard, a lump the size of Texas suddenly invading her throat and cutting off her ability to speak.

“I got something for you while you were asleep this morning,” Jensen offered, letting go of her hand to reach into his pocket and she stared back at him in confusion.

“While I was asleep? We’ve been up since 4AM! Did you sleep at all?!” she questioned, and he chuckled as he pulled a small, silver set of keys from his pocket. One looked like a house key, and the other was very clearly a car key.

“Na, not really, I guess I don’t sleep much anymore. But that’s not important,” he blew her off, as she examined the small set of keys in her hand. “One of those is the key to our house in Austin, where you will be staying with me, and the other is to one of the cars in the garage that you can use. No sense in being stuck at home while we’re there if you want to get out because you have to wait for me to get home to go somewhere.”

“Jensen!” She breathed, looking back up at him in utter shock as the car pulled up to the airport.

“Hey, I don’t want an argument about it,” he teased, clearly amused at the shocked look on her face. “If you’re gonna be my assistant, then you’re gonna have to be able to get around for me sometimes, and besides, I want you to have some independence.”

“But… Jensen… I don’t even have a driver’s license anymore! It’s been three years since I’ve driven! What if I can’t even drive anymore?”

“Hey, it’s okay,” he assured her for what seemed like a thousand times that morning. “It’s just like riding a bike. Not something you tend to forget how to do, and I can fix the license thing once we get back to Austin. You’re gonna be fine sweetheart, just trust me.”

Y/N swallowed hard and followed suit as Jensen made to step out of the car at the airport, and began to retrieve their bags from the back of the SUV.

She did trust him, she didn’t understand why, but she did. That didn’t mean she trusted herself though, that was the problem.

Forever:

@britnwinchester

@samanddeaninatrenchcoat

@wittysunflower

@demongirl1996

@as-lost-as-sams-shoe

@jensenslady79

@spnwoman

@stoneyggirl2

@unabashed-lover-of-fictional-men

@stixnstripesworld

@fullwattpadmusictree

@nancymcl

@christycreature

@whiskey-infused-dreams

@supernatural79impala

@deandreamernp

@forgetthisbull

@miraclesoflove

@slamminmine

@deanwanddamons

@rvgrsbrns

@chevyharvelle

@i-love-superhero-movies

@lyss-dw79

@magssteenkamp

@lemondropirwin

@squirrelnotsam

@hobby27

@spnbaby-67

@mrsjenniferwinchester

@defenderrosetyler

@thecreatiivecorner

@vicmc624

@busy-bee-angel-misska

@justanotherwinchester

@brilovesdeanwinchester

@idksupernatural

@lyarr24

@emoryhemsworth

@dean-winchesters-gardian-angel

@flamencodiva

@itmejado

@thoughts-and-funnies

@teresa-67

@hearteyes-j2

@peaches007

@bobbie3939

@vulgar-library

@writercole

@fairlyspnfanfic

@sexyvixen7

@spngi

@b3autyfuldisast3r

@donnaintx

@maliburenee

@the-family-business67

@agirlwithdemonblood

@captainsoldiergirl

@twinkleinadiamondsky

Jensen and Dean’s Babes

@deans-baby-momma

@impalaslytherin

@perpetualabsurdity

@msmarvelouswinchester

@akshi8278

@love-jackles

@irmcpar

@pink-sparkly-witch

@deans-spinster-witchs-favorites

@herstarburststories

@mimaria420

@deanwinchesterswitch

@charred-angelwings

@pascal-rascal424

@myloversgone

@fortheloveof-jackles

@eevvvaa

@bts-spnlvr12

@jxackles

@lassie-bird

@samsgirl93

@shawnie74

@kaz11283

@mlovesstories

@ladysparks78

@sarahgracej

SAF tag list

@itsdesiree86

@evilunicorns4minions

@jesllianaquilesrolonsworld

@thefemalestorywriter

@tapedeck-hearts

@tristanrosspada-ackles

@southerngal96

@mavisiceroo

#sometihng about fate #jensen ackles #real person fiction #rpf #jensen ackles x reader #jensen ackles x you #jensen ackles x y/n #jensen x reader #jensen x you #jensen x y/n #x reader inserts #jawritter

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pinkiepiebones · 2 months

Note

Renfield prompt: how did renfield feel/ react to having his own place for the first time in almost a decade? What was the feeling/process of nesting until it felt like home and safety and hope?

I was going to say "I've written a lot about this" but wow aside from the one where he takes a shower and has Emotions about it, I actually haven't dug in to this subject... And then I wrote something barely related to the prompt orz

"I, uh. I moved out."

Renfield doesn't tell the whole group right away. But he has to tell someone. It's exciting, and terrifying. Everything lately is exciting and terrifying, really. He opened up more about his 'boss' and everyone encouraged him to focus on himself. To 'grow to full power.'

He tells Mark after most of the group has left. Mark stays behind to tidy away the folding chairs and pack up the unborrowed books. Mark startles when he turns to see Renfield standing there, not quite as hunched over as he had been in the months past.

"You moved out?" Mark repeats, a little confused. Renfield nods, then moves his hands to help Mark with the box of books and as he takes the box he says "out of my boss's place. I'm- I mean, I was, I was a sort of live-in serv- service, aid, um, assistant, but not any more!" He grins nervously, but expectantly.

With his hands free, Mark claps. "Well alright Renfield! Look at you, out on your own!" Renfield feels suddenly shy and ducks his head, greasy hair falling in front of his pale face. Mark gives him a comforting shoulder pat, then gently motions for the door of the gym. Renfield dutifully walks alongside the group leader.

"So, how is the place you moved into?"

"It's really nice. Small, I guess, but it's better than where I had been." He smiled. "I spent the whole of yesterday cleaning it. Can't remember the last time I got to do something like that for myself."

Mark smiles softly. Renfield had started coming to the DRAAG meetings months ago, and barely spoke until just recently. It was hard to discern just what sort of relationship he had been in, but judging by the facts (Renfield always came in wearing the same hastily mended clothes, he smelled like a high school science class on pig dissection week, he looked like he had spent most of his life indoors, and he was always highly aware of his surrounding), Mark assumed it had not the sort of relationship he frequently saw in his group attendants.

Outside, Mark unlatches the trunk of his car and Renfield sets the box inside. Mark shuts the trunk and sees Renfield looking around, nervous, as though anticipating his newfound joy might come crashing down.

"Hey," Mark says, and Renfield glances at him. "You know what you should do? You should paint your new place. Check with your landlord first, of course, and if he says 'yes'- Really make it yours, y'know?"

"That- I never thought of that."

Mark spreads his hands. "So, what colour -or colours!- will you go for? What colour says 'this is Renfield'?"

Renfield picks at his cuticles and looks at his shoes. Despite being so tall, he looks small, now.

"I really never have had a chance to think about these things, Mark."

Mark hmms in thought and leans against his car. "Okay, well, what would be the polar opposite of your boss?"

"Bright," Renfield says immediately. "Cheery. Hopeful. Warm. Friendly." He makes a little choking laugh sound. "Modern."

Mark nods. "So go with that! Surround yourself in the opposite of what you've been dealing with."

Mark helps Renfield navigate his new phone (a refurbished old model, but to Renfield it is the pinnacle of technology) to find a local home goods store. Then, realising the time, Mark and Renfield say their goodbyes. But-

Mark says, "you'll tell us all about it at next week's meeting, right?"

Renfield smiles.

"Of course."

#renfield

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scotianostra · 1 year

Text

On 15th March 1814 the large scale Sutherland Clearances began.

There are still those out there who push the narrative that the Clearances were natural occurrence, that thousands of families willingly gave up the crofts en masse, leaving crofting settlements that their families had worked and lived in for generations. Ask yourself this, is it likely that the numbers naturally dwindled from a third of Scotland’s population who lived north of the Highland Line; would just fall to the numbers it is today of just five percent? This was a systematic attempt to rid the country of troublesome Highlanders after the Jacobite Uprisings that continued for decades.

In 1811 there were 250,000 sheep there; by the 1840s there were almost a million. Within that period sheep replaced people driven from their homes by direct eviction or through hunger and destitution. After the sheep and over-grazing came deer and the creation of hunting grounds for the elite. By 1884 a tenth of Scotland’s land was given over to deer forests, greater than the size of Wales, and taking up the great majority of the land in the crofting counties (crofts were the small plots of land available to the remaining population)

The eviction of whole communities from Sutherland was done a scale not seen before, or again, during the Highland Clearances.

Families were moved off land to make way for large-scale sheep farming.

Starting in the late 18th Century and running into the 19th Century, the Highland Clearances saw townships occupied by generations of families cleared to make way for large-scale sheep farming and the rearing of deer.

Landowners were seeking to "improve" their estates in line with the industrial revolution.

In some cases people who had lived on the land for generations left voluntarily, while others were forcibly evicted and their homes burned and demolished.

Highlanders did try and fight the movement that saw their ancestral lands given over to sheep farming, 26 years previously and sheep were targeted in 1792 - which became known asBiadna nan Caorach (The Year of the Sheep) - following clearances in Sutherland and Easter Ross.

Four hundred men from families that had been evicted, or were facing eviction, drove thousands of the animals from the hills.

By early August, they had rounded up 6,000 sheep and had reached Beauly, near Inverness, where they were intercepted by soldiers.

Some of the men were tried in court and one man received an order banishing him from Scotland for life.

In the final decades of the 18th century some 200,000 were cleared to make way for sheep.

It wasn't only English landlords that were against the Highlanders, Scots in the Lowlands, perhaps spoon-fed on propaganda about the Uprisings were as much part of the rhetoric that something had to be done about this quarrelsome people.

A young journalist sent by the “Scotsman” to the Highlands exhibited the this while, writing in 1847 he said, that the Highlanders were “an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon.” Robert Knox, the Edinburgh surgeon who bought the bodies from the West Port murderers Burke and Hare believed in the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and wrote that the Highlanders “must be forced from the soil.”

Then there were the landlords factors, the most hated of whom was another Lowlander called Patrick Sellar , he regarded the Highlanders as racial degenerates. In his racist view they were, “the aborigines of Britain shut out from any general stream of knowledge… ”

Sellar was charged with murder for burning down an old woman’s house, a hand-picked jury of landowners found him not-guilty, but he had brought bad publicity to the Sutherland Estate and lost his job.

James Loch was an Edinburgh lawyer who for 40 years, from 1812, was commissioner for the Marquis of Stafford. He would write an apology for his employers but his racism towards their tenants was never far from the surface, with him complaining:

“… [their] habits and ideas, quite incompatible with the customs of regular society, and civilised life, adding greatly to those defects which characterise persons living in a loose and unformed state of society.” His concern was to provide wool for the “staple manufactory of England” and to convert the people to “the habits of regular and continued industry.

In 1846 matters became desperate as the potato blight brought the likelihood of famine to the Highlands. In response Charles Trevelyan, Under Secretary at the Treasury, wrote: “The people cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.” Two years later he did the opposite in Ireland, letting hundreds of thousands die. Arguing the famine there was “a mechanism for reducing surplus population.

Yet, as starvation became apparent the British government did intervene to feed the population: just two deaths from starvation are recorded, both on the hard hit population of the Isle of Barra (whose people were largely cleared in 1853 and sent to Quebec). This contrasts with Ireland, where the Great Famine killed thousands. While Ireland was nominally part of the UK it was in reality a colony and seen as separate. The Highlands were regarded by the British government as part of the UK, and starvation could not be permitted there (although emigration was encouraged)

The clearances speak volumes about how capitalism came into being, dripping with blood and at the expense of common people.

There were about 7 million sheep in Scotland nowadays, thats over one for each and every one of us,and estimated to be worth £165m to the economy, according to Scottish Government figures.

Brian McNeil wrote, in his song No Gods and precious few Heroes;

So farewell to the heather and the glen They cleared us off once and they'd do it all again For they still prefer sheep to thinking men Ah, but men who think like sheep are even better There's nothing much to choose between the old vain and the new They still don't give a damn for the likes of me and you Just mind you pay your rent to the factor when it's due And mind your bloody manners when you pay.....

#scotland #scottish highlands #the highland clearances #sutherland.#history

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kaylapocalypse · 9 days

Note

Also I saw your other ask about adam mine and the corruption of hollis brown, and is there anything you can tell us about them? (if you want to of course) I tried finding a synopsis of the corruption of hollis brown but couldn't find it

-indian anon

Yes!

The Corruption of Hollis Brown is about a kid who lives in a severely impoverished American Industry town (a town built around one industry like steel or beef or something, where if the company that owns the industry leaves everyone who lives there is fucked) whose factory shut down decades ago.

He and most people he knows travel really far for work and most kids can't afford college. Its an extremely hopeless situation and he deals with his angst about this by getting into fights with other kids at school (not bullying, he goads them until they beat him up. Very Self Harm)

One day he meets a guy who it turns out is actually just a ghost possessing a dead body and he stupidly makes a deal with the ghost, who immediately possesses him.

But the situation here is kind of complex because:

The deal he made with the ghost is about how he can share his body if the ghost makes his life better.

The ghost is ACTIVELY trying to make his life better (and succeeding!!)

Hollis Brown is an absolute freak who starts getting sexually attracted to the ghost and begins a campaign to seduce him (much to the ghost's horror)

Eventually they work things out and are in * love *, but Hollis's friends are starting to notice that there's something off about him.

-----

Adam Mine is a retelling-ish of Frankenstein in which a teenage Victor can't actually figure out how to reanimate a corpse and instead kidnaps a local townsperson, desecrates his body and passes it off to his friends as a reanimation.

Eventually the guy wakes up mid-surgery and freaks out. Then, furious about what Victor did to him (he's cut all over and also burned bc Victor set him on fire trying to escape) he decides to make it his life mission to hunt victor down and kill him.

There's a lot more to it with Alchemists and magic, but the gist of it is a pretty standard dual POV road trip where Victor is running away from this guy at top speed and the guy is Right Behind Him so insanely angry like "So help me god, When I catch you I will taste your blood."

Anyway, the whole thing is about how Victor learns about Consent and Not Being Terrible and the guy learns about Please Calm Down, Victor is a Teenager and also It Was Bad To Murder His Family, just in time for them to almost kind of sort of fall in love in the end.

#anon ask

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esta-elavaris · 5 months

Text

Nobody Knows

Okay, starting things off with something I wrote back in 2015 for my first creative writing class at uni. It's a short horror story, the assignment was literally just "write a short story with roughly 1.5k words" bc they were great with giving us serious freedom to write what we wanted to write, and this was what I came up with. I think it was the first 'serious' original short story I wrote, I was 18/19 at the time (so, disclaimer on that score if you're going to compare it to the stuff I'm posting now at almost-27 lolol), so the quality will probably reflect that, but it has sentimental value and a bit of other meaning to me, so I'm posting it as is. Definitely a "look at what I dredged up from the archives" kinda thing rather than a "wow isn't this great?" kinda thing.

I remember I went into that first semester, looked at the people in the class around me and just thought "oh god, I am so fucking out of my league here" -- but then, three months later, my course leader (who ended up being my personal tutor in the years that followed, and my favourite teacher across my whole degree) really enjoyed it and his very kind feedback resulted in the moment where I stopped and thought "man, maybe I actually have something going with my writing". It also ended up in my uni's Eng Lit magazine, which I still have a copy of for archival purposes ✨

Plus, if I reread it too closely to edit it to the quality I like to think I can produce now, I will end up convincing myself not to post it 💀 so here! Have some baby!writer stuff.

By the time I reached nineteen, I was scared of Nobody. That was what I called him - Nobody. My own private little joke.

“Who are you talking to?”

“Nobody.”

“Who are you staring at?”

“Nobody.”

Not a lie, but not a response that would get me thrown into the nearest mental hospital. I considered that a win/win. It also described him accurately – for he didn’t seem to have a body. All I ever saw of him was shadow. Sometimes it would be clearer, forming a silhouette, and other times he’d just be an ever-shifting mass of darkness. I’d been too young to be frightened by his appearance when I first found him in my grandmother’s attic. I’d thought my cousin’s tales of hauntings in the house had always just been made up to scare me, but regardless, Nobody didn’t scare me – not at first.

By the time he did, I’d known him for a decade, and had only resented him for two of those years. The resentment began at my seventeenth birthday party. Before then, having a negative thought about Nobody was utter blasphemy in my book. I would never allow a bad word to be said about my guardian, protector, teacher and presumed imaginary friend. Not one. My mother would suggest that I was too old for this behaviour, and that it was time for Nobody to go away, only for me to go ballistic. I learned to keep him to myself after that, but my good opinion only strengthened, if anything. What could be bad about somebody, living or not, who was so willing to protect me? Who toppled over the chairs my bullies sat in? Who snuck me the answers I needed in tests? It was absurd, but I kept my mouth shut, and as far as everybody else was concerned, my imaginary friend vanished. It meant little to me – it wasn’t like any of them could see him in the first place.

Then things changed. What was meant to be the best night of my life turned out to be the worst. No parents, no neighbours, no rules. Just lots of booze, music and fun. Or so I thought. The first hint that something was awry was when all of the alcohol became mysteriously unavailable to us. Packs of beer would end up in locked cabinets, with the keys nowhere to be found. Bottles of vodka would fling themselves towards the sink and smash there, any potential source of amusement quite literally down the drain.

Then came the issue of the music. My best friend spent the entire evening wrestling with the CD player, wondering why it would refuse to play certain songs (the ones I knew Nobody hated), or why the volume refused to go any higher than, a pretty pathetic, “six”. The final straw was when every guy at the party suddenly became dramatically ill. Every single one. Headaches, vomiting fits, fevers, or even just a sense of pure unease. They needed little motivation to leave such a pathetic party in the first place. Within an hour, the only guests left were my two best friends. My seventeenth birthday bash had been demoted to a sleepover worthy of a ten year old.

After that, Nobody became less of a trusted ally and more of a domineering parent. Where I used to look at my hungover friends with a smug smirk, happy that Nobody had prevented me from drinking enough to end up in that state, I now looked at them with envy. They were normal. They drank too much and endured the consequences. When they were too lazy to study for tests, they failed. Life was difficult and it was unfair and they complained about it relentlessly. But that was what made it fun. They had to think about their next move, take responsibility for themselves. If they forgot their keys, they’d be locked out – they didn’t have any ghost to open the door for them. Without the dark you find yourself unable to appreciate the light, and so life became unbearably boring. I knew that whatever was approaching me in life, it would be fine. Nobody would handle it, whether I wanted him to or not. I hated it, and I hated him for it. My life was no longer mine to control, but instead belonged to somebody who was dead. How twisted was that? Each day was monotonous, and I found myself learning little - if that - from the limited life experience I had. I made no attempt to have an eighteenth birthday party.

Spurred on by thoughts of my failed seventeenth birthday party, and non-existent eighteenth, I made my decision. On the night of my nineteenth I took a lighter to the living room curtains, setting the place on fire. In the grand scheme of things it seemed like a perfectly safe and reasonable thing to do in the name of distraction. By time the blaze was out and smoke stopped billowing out of the window, I was already down the street, peering out at my home from behind a wheelie bin to make sure that I wouldn’t be returning to the charred skeleton of the house at the end of the night. What I did return to, however, was a foreboding mass of shadow that I was too scared to tear my eyes away from. His presence had gone from endearing to terrifying in seconds flat.

My bedroom was trashed. Books were scattered on the floor, my clothes were strewn around any and every surface available. Even the door had a long, jagged splinter running up through the middle. Nobody made no move, no attempt at communication. Instead he stood stock-still in the corner, shadows bristling.

I didn’t sleep at all that night, instead sitting up in bed, staring at the void that was once my dearest companion with a sense of dread filling my chest. Hours later, when my drunkenness gave way to a fierce headache, all of the painkillers in the house had mysteriously vanished. I’d hoped it would end there, the same way arguments with my parents went. I’d lie, they’d be angry, eventually we’d all forget about it and move on. Nobody wasn’t the type to move on.

That’s where the decision to get rid of him came from. I couldn’t handle it. The constant hounding of my steps, the uncomfortable atmosphere, the lack of sleep. Sure, without him my life would be mundane and ordinary, but what was I with him? An adult with no decisive powers and an enforced bedtime.

When the day came, I kept up the façade marvellously. Nothing was out of the ordinary, and as far as he knew I was simply visiting a new friend at her apartment. Nobody didn’t show any sign of realising something was up until it was too late.

“That’s it?” I asked the ‘mystic’ dubiously as she finished burning incense and tracing odd symbols on my arms with the ash.

“That’s it,” she waved a hand “You may leave. He cannot follow.”

Nobody’s head shot up in clear alarm. His silhouette jerked towards me, but didn’t move. Couldn’t move. His head snapped between the old woman and I, almost like he was watching a tennis match, before it settled on me again and he unsuccessfully tried to move. The shadows around him spiked outwards.

“Oh, hush! You have no power here!” the old woman snapped impatiently.

I paid her as promised, but kept my gaze on Nobody. It was a weird feeling. Like seeing a caged tiger at a zoo. So much power, but no ability to use it. He’d gone from running my life, to being unable to take even a single step in my direction, all thanks to a bit of ash and some fancy words. For half a second, I faltered. I wanted to apologise to him. Pleasant memories surfaced – my toys putting on shows for me as a child, dancing on invisible strings, or even not having to pay to use the tube, as the ticket gates opened on their own upon my approach. But then the shadows spiked angrily again, and the regret was replaced by the more familiar fear.

When I walked out of that apartment, for the first time in ten years I was truly alone. I was truly free. Free to make my own decisions and live outside of Nobody’s grasp. It was then that life decided to catch up on all the years’ worth of lessons it had been unable to teach me until then. My freedom lasted four minutes. If I’d had Nobody with me, he’d have noticed the car that I failed to until it was too late, so used to not even having to look before I crossed the road. The last thing I saw was his dark silhouette, standing motionless in the window overlooking the street.

#esta's OG!fiction

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