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hanalwayssolo · 1 year

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i’ve allowed these random hfw headcanon things to gnaw and nibble away at my hyperfixating brain like a bunch of starving squirrels and god (by the forge! by the sun! by the ten!) i might as well write it down before i go insane during this long holiday weekend:

erend, in his thorough research of the ancient ones’ history with music, begins to use phrases like, “this beat is sick,” “this bop slaps!” or “this is a banger!” to describe the songs he thought are good. which are mostly heavy metal. in his defense, the only reason why the genre appealed to him was because it’s “the oseram blood” in him. (“it’s metal??? get it??? by the forge my people would love this!!”)

varl, to keep erend from blasting his questionable music taste in the base, often hijacks his focus with classical music he discovered along with zo and alva. mostly, varl plays vivaldi’s winter. erend was pissed at first but after being forced to listen to it on repeat, it’s actually… not that bad. in fact, his words were: “the beat drop in the middle? a solid 10/10.”

kotallo asking aloy about seashells has been a thing, but honestly, this was not at all a random question, nor did it come from nowhere. truth is, when he was a kid, he often traveled with his parents to the long coast, where he would watch the sea’s ebbs and flows, would listen as the water foams and makes a rustling sound as it meets the shore. he found it so mesmerising, somewhat resenting that he was not born in tide’s reach. now, after watching all the data that aloy has gathered in her travels and having learned that this strange object called a seashell carried the sound of the ocean in its body, he remembers a time when he told his mother how he wanted to “keep the music of the crashing waves in his pocket” so he can continue listening to it even from the bulwark. she only smiled at him and gave him a hug so warm his mother could have been the sun itself. anyway. this seashell seems like lovely thing to have, not just to have the ocean at his fingertips, but perhaps something to remember his mother by.

alva learns this thing called scrabble from the archives, a game played by the old ones to enhance their knowledge of the glyphs. (their word for it was vocabulary. or something to that effect.) she explains the mechanics to the rest of the gang, says that it’s similar to machine strike given how it’s played on a wooden board, but instead of machine pieces, it’s glyphs on a wooden tile. this discussion with the gang happens to coax beta out of the basement.

beta, of course, knows a thing or two about scrabble through the apollo training interface. she’s been so keen to try it out except she didn’t have anyone to play it with when she was still with the zeniths. here in the base, she offers to help in making the board, which more or less astounds everybody considering how… well… she’s been keeping mostly to herself, an isolation / kind of introversion worse than kotallo’s. this makes erend and varl immediately volunteer in carving the board. even kotallo promises he would find the best pigment to paint the glyphs on the tiles. zo and alva exchange a look that’s like, “did we just witness a nora, an oseram, and a tenakth agree on… collaborating?? for a board game??”

zo discovers the recipe for this thing called coffee and chocolate frosting, which she has heard kotallo mentioned during one of his machine strike sessions with erend. (“an oseram forging an unlikely friendship with a tenakth marshal? can you believe??” erend exclaims proudly one night, sharing his piss-poor ale with kotallo.) she lets erend, varl, and of course, kotallo, taste-test for her. the results yielded positive, if not close to catastrophic results. positive because they all seemed to thoroughly enjoy the coffee and the chocolate, but by catastrophic results, she supposes that maybe she added too much sugar and cacao beans? because somehow, the guys kind of… went berserk. they were so awake and alive and burning with a rush of energy that the trio decided to go out to train and hunt that by the time they came back, varl left a trail of dead burrowers outside the base. erend managed to collect a dozen of apex bristleback hearts. and kotallo… returned with a carcass of a stormbird and a massive boulder from the bulwark. zo will have a lot to explain to aloy about this.

aside from varl, the other person who enjoys talking to beta is actually alva. alva is very much fascinated with how beta knows a lot of things!! they spend evenings reading through the archives and talking to gaia, with beta often correcting alva’s quen version of things. of course, alva understands how beta might somehow come off as blunt and rude; after finding out how beta has been treated by the zeniths, alva would raise hell over these immortal jackasses if she could.

zo religiously tends to her garden outside the base by the cliffside facing plainsong, but every now and then, she’d notice how the plants are freshly watered just before she can get to the task herself, or how there’s often an unfamiliar addition to her pot of flowers. she doesn’t mind this at all; frankly, she appreciates it. she assumes varl might be behind this as he’s the only one who lends her a hand to keep their little lush space alive and to bring in more plants for the base—until gaia points out a fun fact in their passing conversation that the new flowers blooming in her garden are only native to tenakth soil. specifically, it only grows in the sheerside mountains. well. with that in mind, it doesn’t take long for zo to put two and two together. besides, it really doesn’t take a genius to figure out the identity of this secret gardener.

so yeah, sure. sure. kotallo takes care of the cliffside garden in secret. i mean, why wouldn’t he? it’s on the way to the sunwing site where he often trains, and erend usually forgets to water the plants, anyway. and about the flowers... he wanted to bring something that reminds him of home and to honour the friends he lost. truth is, this was all gaia’s idea. ever since he told gaia about how he lost his arm and what happened in the embassy, she mentioned that one of the many things the old ones did to cope with the kind of thing he’s been through is to make a garden. (and by ‘that kind of thing’, the words that gaia used specifically were trauma and grief. he knows she means well but this didn’t make sense to him—he’s pretty sure he’s neither traumatised nor grieving. of course not. he’s fine. he’s absolutely, totally fine.)

(of course he’s NOT fine but by the fucking ten why would he dare to admit that out loud? and what is he if not in denial? yes, he felt this when he lost his parents—but how come this is different? how come this feels a lot heavier than when he was a kid? does grief change its form the older you get? what if he’s struggling to process these big and complex feelings because he grew up being taught how to fight and not to sit with grief? to only bury the dead and to keep moving forward? besides, who has time to grieve and to wallow on losses when his tribe is at the brink of another civil war? this has always been the tenakth way: to keep a stiff upper lip, to never let sentiment get in the way of duty. to mourn is as unnatural as a dreadwing being docile. so how, pray tell, could he ever let himself have a say when he’s hasn’t been taught to do so?)

so instead, kotallo learns how to plant flowers to make room for grief. he makes space for another when they lose varl in gemini. he realises later on that he might have been unkind to erend, how easily he let go of the words “we can’t sit around wallowing in our losses” as if varl was a thing and not a friend, because truthfully, he was coming from a place of fear for his tribe, which, in turn, diminished the way erend was dealing with this loss, who’s taking this harder than the rest of them. of course varl and erend go a long way back. this time, kotallo is the outsider to their friendship. and kotallo of all people should know what that kind of pain feels like. he lost an arm, yes, but to lose your friends, to be the only one to survive… isn’t the grief from all of that a kind of maiming, too?

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pepprs · 2 years

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the absolutely UNBEARABLE ordeals of a) having nothing new to contribute to this intersection bc ppl already found it and all the scholars have already said everything im saying and b) knowing that on top of this my contributions are lackluster because i am stupid and profoundly mentally ill 🥰

#purrs #prof ******: this is just an undergraduate project and it’s only the beginning so don’t stress yourself out. me being besties with ***** and #**** and constantly feeling like i have to amount to their caliber and also them being my faculty mentors on this project meaning they have #to grade it and also me drawing from like 5 things they wrote to use in my own thing and also having *****’s voice in my head abt the advice #he got writing his dissertation and knowing that i am NOT writing a dissertation but also im doing something that is that big for me at this #stage of my life: 🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠 and they would be HORRIFIED if they knew i have this imposter syndrome about them specifically and this is #what prof brown warned me about in nov 2020 and i had like 5 breakdowns over it but still went on ahead and now every time i do anything i f #feel like im chaining all my limbs to the wall and splaying out my stomach and saying hi nice sharp talons you got there i sure do look very #much like prey right now jsut a thought. bc they’re supposed to be helping me fly and they are it’s just i am so deeply mentally ill about #needing to be on their level even though im an undergrad LMFAOOOO but also i am on their level but also im not. everyone who knows me irl an #is reading this post: 🤨🙄 but like yeahhhjjj naur i uhjmmmm. like it’s all gonna get better once i graduate and have at least one degree in t #this and finally get to start contributing to the literature alongside these fucking pioneers and titans of this field but right now it’s li #like how dare i even bother and i have felt that way for years and it’s kinda terrible that i still feel it. but also my entire existential #situation rn explains it so 💖 but yeah. anyway i feel like i am sticking a fork in a socket rn with this project and it makes me want to not #exist but it will be fine and it will be over soon but im losing my mind w overwhelm and distress rn LOL but also i am normal and it’s nothi #nothing to worry about bc this too shall pass and im on the verge of getting better 🙏🏻💕#DELETE LATER #very cringe of me to post abt this stuff to all my mutuals and not like talk to the ppl directly involved in the situation to try to make it #better but i don’t have the capacity for that rn and frankly neither do they LMFSOOOOOOO

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tasteracha · 1 year

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professor bang

word count: 2.3k

warnings: unprotected sex, power imbalance (grad student x professor), multiple orgasms, chan calling the reader pet/good girl

synopsis: you laid out a perfectly crafted trap to seduce the hot professor - too bad he’s one step ahead of you.

the midday air is unsuspecting as you walk down the creaky hallway, floorboards of the psychology building groaning under your feet. the nerves are close to eating you up whole but you continue walking, too far into your plan to turn back now - you know what you want, and you’re going to get it. no one turns an eye as you walk past open doors, the hem of your dress swishing around your knees. they’re accustomed to seeing you here, being a graduate student in the department means you spend more time here than you do in your own apartment.

you stop at one door in a series of identical ones, only told apart by a worn out plaque listing a room number and a shinier, newer one reading “christopher bang, ph.d.” underneath it.

the door is cracked just a bit, enough for you to peer inside and there he is, standing in front of his desk, wearing a crisp white shirt under a grayish-blue blazer. his pants are too tight to be suitable for a professor, and they cling to his thighs and stretch across his ass perfectly, making you pause in the doorway with a hungry stare that lasts for too many seconds.

when you look up you meet his eyes and it makes you jump; you didn’t know that he knew you were there. this doesn’t fit in the plan.

the plan you cooked up when he got a little too cozy with you during the department holiday party last semester. the plan you’ve been making and scrapping and working yourself up to execute, avoiding him at every corner so that he wouldn’t know. you were supposed to surprise him, walk in pretending like you needed help with some assignment, getting closer and closer to him until your breaths were intermingling and then you’d look into his eyes and he would glance at your lips and-

and now he’s caught you checking him out like some kind of creep.

“oh, hi y/n,” he says, eyes turning crinkly as he looks at you with a shit-eating grin. fuck.

now that you’ve been found out, you slide inside the gap in the door, shutting it closed behind you and letting the lock click behind your back. if he notices, he doesn’t react, steady eyes trained on you as your feet take you closer and closer to his desk.

“hi professor bang,” you say, surprised by how clear your voice comes out. that’s good, you wouldn’t want him to know how nervous you are just yet, it would add to his smugness and you didn’t know if you could handle his ego being even bigger than it is right now.

“what can i do for you?” he says, crossing his arms and leaning against the desk. the blazer stretches over his shoulders and the material does nothing to hide his biceps and your mouth waters. he quirks an eyebrow at you when you don’t speak for a moment, and you have to clear your throat before any sound comes out.

“i needed some help with a research project,” you say, moving close enough to him that if anyone were to walk in they would absolutely report the both of you for some kind of ethical violation. good thing you locked the door, then. “i was hoping you could be of service.”

“oh?” he leans further back into the desk, fully relaxed in a way you wish you were. “what kind of project?”

“well, it has to do with human connection,” you trail a finger across the collar of his blazer, further down until it catches on a button, in a show of false confidence. “i was looking to maybe get some hands-on experience? for research, of course.”

you feel a swell of victory when his breath catches in his throat and his arms loosen from where they were crossed to drop at his side.

“well i certainly am the expert in that domain,” he drawls, eyes flickering down to your lips and back up. “i did write my dissertation on it, after all.”

it’s a lie - you’ve read his dissertation, full of information about cognitive theory and eye movements and other things that honestly went way over your head. not a single mention of human connection was in that document, but the fact that he’s so readily playing along with you means that you didn’t misread anything. either he wants you, or he enjoys toying with you; either way, you were on board.

even more so when he takes his blazer off, throwing it off to the side like it didn’t cost him an aggressive amount of money to buy. you’ve seen the designer labels on him plenty of times enough to know he likes to treat himself to nice things.

you’re hoping you can be his next nice thing, the next possession that he flaunts and parades around.

you lean in for a kiss, but he surprises you and flips the both of you around until you’re backed up into the desk. he’s leaning over you, dark eyes looking down at you like you’re his prey.

“let’s even the playing field a bit, shall we?” his voice has gone down, low and sultry, and you feel your head loll back from how it makes you feel. he makes quick work of removing your dress, letting the material pool to the floor so he could focus on your bra. it’s your favorite one, lacey and red and sexy, the material leaving nothing to the imagination. he takes a second to admire it, fingering at the strap around your shoulder and sliding his thumb into the cup before he reaches behind you and unhooks it in one try. it joins his blazer and your dress on the floor a moment later, and you’re left feeling exposed in front of him.

“how is this even?” you ask, resisting the urge to cover yourself with your hands. “you’re still wearing all of your clothes.”

“well, sweetheart,” he starts, moving impossibly closer to you. “we’re in my office. that means i get to decide the rules, no?”

he swipes an arm across the table behind you before you can answer. papers flutter in the air, and he’s hiking you up onto the desk before they reach the ground. his hands are under your thighs, spreading them apart so he can fit between them. one of his hands snakes into the band of your underwear, your sensitive skin erupting in goosebumps from his touch.

“so wet,” he says, a smirk painting his face as his fingers part your folds to make slow circles around your clit. it shouldn’t be enough to send shivers up your spine, but it’s him, so it does.

“for you,” you say, looking up at him through your lashes. the amused glint in his eyes turns sharp, dark and possessive. just what you wanted.

“this is mine?” he asks, cupping you in his hand while his other reaches around the small of your back to hold you close to him.

“yours,” you hum, nodding even though his attention certainly wasn’t on your head.

he dips his fingers inside of you, gliding easily inside from how his fingers are coated with your juices. when he crooks his fingers and thumbs at your clit your head tips back, and you might have lost your balance if he wasn’t holding you so close that you could feel his breath on your skin.

it’s on your third time stumbling over the word professor that he leans into your ear and tells you to call him chris, his lips kissing your ear as he works you to your high. you’re shaking apart on his desk and yet he doesn’t relent, he continues to move his fingers with fervor until you can’t help but push at his chest to get him to stop.

“chris,” you stutter out when he latches his lips to your neck, open mouthed and hot as his fingers move to grab at your thighs. his hands are so big, veins bulging as he digs his fingers in. you hope there are bruises there, tomorrow. and the next day.

“gonna fuck you now, okay?” he says, voice husky. “for research.”

“yeah, research,” you breath out, using both your hands to cradle his face so that you could kiss him, finally. his lips are as soft as you imagined, plushy pillows that you could find yourself lost in for hours. he keeps his lips on yours as he moves your underwear down and off, helping you balance so he could slide it under your thighs until you’re bare in front of him. you’re unbuttoning his shirt with shaky fingers, and he chuckles against you when you can’t get one of them open.

“funny?” you break away from him, eyes trained on the way his lips are red and slick with spit.

“you’re cute,” condescension lines his voice and a spark of anger runs through you at how he knows he has the upper hand. he gently takes your hands away from his clothes and makes quick work of them himself. in what feels like a split second, he’s stripped of his shirt and pants and he’s pulling down his boxers, revealing smooth planes of muscle and strong thighs and bulging arms that you’ve fantasized about for months. you don’t know if you want to cover them in bites or let him crush you with them more - there will be time for that, the next time.

you know there’s going to be a next time if it’s already this good and he’s barely even done anything to you yet.

he spreads your thighs apart further, and you don’t miss how he licks his lips at the view of your dripping cunt in front of him before he lines himself up at your entrance. you barely got a glimpse of his cock, but your mouth waters at the idea of it being inside of you. he glides his cock through your folds a few time, slicking himself up before pressing his head inside of you.

when he bottoms out you can’t help but tighten your walls around him, helpless to the desires of your own body, and the groan he lets out makes you clench down even harder.

“relax, pet,” he says, panting a bit. his thumb strokes at the sensitive flesh of your inner thigh. “i’m going to take good care of you okay? but you need to relax for me.”

he leans down to kiss you again, and it must be a good enough distraction because he begins moving in time with the swipes of his tongue on your teeth. every time he rocks into you the air punches out of your lungs, you’re so full. he moves his face to the crook of your neck to hide his own labored breaths when he increases his pace, thrusting into you faster than you can keep up with.

he’s pressing you into the desk with each movement of his hips, the sharp corner against your legs sending pricks of pain up to your head. the game is over, the research bit is done, now it’s just chris taking what he wants from you. you love it. his arms wrap around you, keeping you upright, and you latch onto him like a lifeline. you’re completely at his mercy, entirely submissive to the way he’s keeping you still so he can use you.

you can tell he’s close when he pushes his head even further into your skin, fingers gripping your back and his movements becoming sharp and purposeful. he spills into you a second later with a bite to your neck, and you can’t help yourself from following him as your head tips back in pleasure.

when he pulls out you wince, the emptiness that he’s left you with feeling worse than you’ve ever felt with anyone else. he lowers you onto the desk slowly, letting your head rest on his mousepad as he runs his hands up and down your sides in comforting sweeps. you’re utterly spent, two orgasms hitting your limit, even more intense coming from him.

“one more,” he drawls out, not showing compassion at all for the way you’re panting and drooling onto his desk. “you can do one more for me, can’t you?”

“no, no, no,” your voice comes out thready and light, barely a sound. his hand returns to your core either way, slow circles of his fingers around your clit making your body twitch with each pass. the oversensitivity is too much, but you’re too weak to pull away from him. you don’t even know if you want to, anymore.

“there’s my good girl,” he grins when you whine and rut down onto his hand. you didn’t know it was possible, but the coils in your lower belly start to tighten faster than before. you’re coming before you even realize it’s happening, pleasure seeping from your core to your fingertips, an all encompassing sensation that you can’t put words to. it lasts for what feels like forever, waves and waves of ecstasy rocking through your body until your vision blacks out for a moment.

“you did so good,” he finally stops and you press your legs together to stop him from returning. he’s pressing kisses to your body, your thighs and your stomach up to your neck and cheeks as he mumbles praises into your skin. his hand runs through your hair, pushing the sweaty locks that were stuck to your forehead out of the way so he could press a final, sweet kiss to your forehead. “so good for me. so pretty, my precious pet.”

and even as he takes care of you, cleans you up and helps you back into your clothes and feeds you water, you’re holding back a smirk. because he thinks he has the upper hand, he thinks he won, but you can guarantee that he’ll be knocking at your door before the week is over.

#stray kids smut #skz smut #stray kids imagines #stray kids drabbles #bang chan smut #bang chan imagines #bang chan x female reader #chan x reader

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sweatervest-obsessed · 5 months

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Spencer Blurb!

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader

WC: 500

A/N: I am in the trenches with finals rn so I needed something positive to think about as well as a distraction from what I should be doing.

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“I’m starting to realize why people commit murder.” You grumbled to yourself.

Honestly, you were a sight to see. You had claimed the living room of your apartment with Spencer and books were everywhere. Your laptop was front and center and papers were scattered about as if a storm had come through.

Spencer peeked his head out of your bedroom, eyebrows furrowed. “I’m sorry, what.”

The frustrated sigh that left your lips almost knocked the curiosity right out of him.

“It’s just…”

Spencer had met you in the Boston Public Library, where you had been writing a paper for one of your classes, and you couldn’t find the statistics you needed. Enter Lover Boy with all your answers. He was only nineteen, completing his third Bachelors over at MIT and you were a sophomore over at Harvard, studying psychology. You were slated to graduate a whole year early, but it wasn’t your intellect that drew Spencer to you, it was your charm, the way you spoke your mind.

You said anything and everything to him, and he wanted to listen to every single thing you said. You started dating six months later. You ended up following him down to DC a little while after that, and supported him while he completed his first Doctorate. You loved living with him, even when his life got hectic, even when he decided he wanted to go fight crime for a living.

So when six years later, you’re working on your Ph.D at Georgetown, and you said you understood why people murdered others, Spencer wasn’t sure he wanted to keep listening.

“Just what.” He walked over and sat down next to you, taking into account the four cups of coffee, three mugs of tea, a banana, two empty Panera bags, and a myriad of gum wrappers. “When’s the last time you left the apartment?”

“Like a week ago, when I wasn’t trying to finish my fucking draft of my dissertation. I don’t know how the fuck you did this Spence.”

Spencer kissed your head and took your hand. “Why don’t you go to the library or something. Get out of here for a bit. Go on a walk.”

“I’d go to the library if you came with me.” You smirked a little bit as you fixed his tie, causing his cheeks to blush at the memories you were reminding him off.

“Thats–that’s not what I meant.”

“That’s why I suggested it.” You kissed his cheek, and looked back at your laptop, the moment of joy on your face disappearing. “Can’t you take the day off Spence?”

He started to shake his head, but then saw just how exhausted and overworked you were. “I—give me a minute.”

Spencer kissed your head and went into the bedroom, where you heard him make a call to Hotch, claiming he needed the sick day.

You smiled and started to clean up your space, excited to spend the day away from your work, and with your favorite person.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #x reader #spencer reid x fem!reader #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid x you #spencer reid angst #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x reader fluff #spencer reid fluff #dr spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x self insert #Spencer reid x y/n angst #Dr Spencer reid x dr!reader #spencer reid x gn!reader #Spencer reid x fem!reader

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green-sky-smoke · 3 months

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Reader asks Husk about his ideal date. (~1300 words)

"My ideal date, huh? The one where i win all your money in poker." He laughs, and smiles at you firmly, his eyes pierce at you warmly, like he was looking at nostalgic show, on old, thick tv screen, in worst quality possible. "Bring me cards, hun, i shall do a little," he waves palms happily, "magic! Watch future, how good your chances are." He laughs purringly. Then his smile and cheerful look dissolves. He's never like this for long. "But if you don't plan it... Honestly, i'm not really used to dates. I'm not interested in flowers and fancy dinners, i saw enough of them. I am a man of simple pleasures. I have booze here, why don't just stay where we are?" he tilts his head a little, with catlike grace and elegance, expecting you to nod. And then you both hear something heavy, loudly falling on the floor, and a lot of swears and arguing. His ears press on his head from the sudden noise.

"Well. That's why. We may go somewhere." He sights, annoyed. Husk is frowning, looking in almost empty bottle, like lines of light and reflections on emerald glass will say something his drunk brain stubbornly refuses. He tries very hard to think it out, but he got solid brain fog.

"How about... Well..." he is really lost in his own thoughts. You can almost see how his neurons try to reach one another, but fail miserably, and pain gently swipes them away. "How about... About..."

No. Date isn't a game, it's when you entertained enough being with someone. Not a game. You did games everyday, Husk, what make date unique if it just another playful robbery? Date is not another gambling game, loss of big money and property. Especially not of someone who you like. Maybe you can both play and share loss, or win, playing together and not against each other... But against anyone else? Hm. Would be nice to offer it later, if he won't forget.

He hasn't had any sugarcoated romantic fantasies in a long time, and his brain rejected him creating some now, when he got someone interesting enough. The most interesting thing was just looking at your confused, annoyed face, and just any negative emotion. He felt better sometimes, seeing unhappy faces, when he is himself aren't happy at all about where it all ended for him. Husk hunched over the table, puzzled. Looks like he completely zoned out.

Most of all, he enjoys spending time together, calmly, not in a fight. Table games where he can bluff and laugh at someone's bad strategies and skill, or hand motorics. Magic tricks and spectacular shows. Gently massages and some cuddling. Sleeping and resting, doing nothing. He doesn't like very pricy places, or sports. He isn't most complex person, so it's quite a mystery for him why you would have interest in alcoholic with ludomania who likes to mock you lovingly, or insult. It's kinda easy when he presented with people insecurities every day, every year, when they can't shut up about it, and any anecdotes happening. He could write dissertation about it.

"Cheap, and funny." He chuckled, as your face becomes a little disappointed. "What? Not the answer you wanted?" He smiled, a bit smug. He enjoys your confusion, and how you try to think of questions to to clarify exactly what he wants, when you know that he won't reply long, he mostly gives you very vague answers that tells nothing at most.

"Let me tell you a thing, boo... Planning perfect dates is the most useless thing to do. Life is always unpredictable, chaotic, troubled and hard in hell. Situations always change, your mood, your tastes, you never the same person as day, or hour ago. You never know. If you hunt perfection, perfect place, perfect person, perfect reaction, day and time, you will end up miserable. And... You can try small things and be happy with surprises from this chaotic universe we live in, being constantly amazed how bad you are at fortune-telling!" He spreads his arms with enthusiasm, and then puts them down, waving one. He takes an indifferent sip of alcohol. "Or whatever. I don't care." He for a moment forgets what he wanted to add. Seems like he forgets that you're here too, too entertained with looking at same bottles, as if he was in an elite art gallery. His head migraine felt as if brain is expanding like the universe, right in his skull, and it is about to crack, while he won't be able to say anything intelligible or catch a coherent thought. He needs time to frown. You just look at him, wanting to stroke him. He looks so soft and fluffy, but you can't tell a moment you can do it.

"There isn't such a thing i would call a 'perfect date'. But there is 'it wasn't so bad as i expected'." he says before another long pause. He is clearly thinking hard, trying to scratch words off the walls of the skull, that hit him with an electric shock for any touch. His body was sometimes a real prison, making him worse person, who can really, really never leave for long.

"There may be all things i can enjoy to a point of addiction, but i would just act as grumpy ass until you take me there, waving booze, fists, threats, and i would know how enjoyable this is only after." He smiles and cackles, a bit annoyed and a bit self-ironic. He knows his brain and mood tricks pretty well, but believes he don't really need or can change a thing. He hates it, but he wouldn't wish to be anyone else. "It all seem too boring, overrated, overpriced and annoying to me when i think about it. I can find all reasons to not go anywhere and not move at all. Im in the point of life where it's really hard to find joy and eagerly seek things. You know?" He shrugs. "Go on, i don't mind, if you can bear with me constantly rejecting anything im not used to, and being grumpy old growler. It may at some point end as perfect date i would be sad to forget." He looks at you, like he doesn't really believe it, but willing to let you try. It doesn't matter to him, he will suffer each way in same amount, you wouldn't make it much worse than Alastor. " ...Or not. Who the hell knows. Maybe you will have patience to make some use of such boring, forever grudging and mean demon. Im not the best choice, and it will only make you pathetic to try make impossible work." You smile, finally out of confusion. He just invited you to annoy him, how sweet. You bend over to him and hold out your hand. He doesn't understand your gesture, so he just hand you some heavy bottle of some sweet, sparkling tonic for cocktails. You move the bottle to the table, and you put your hand on his. It suprised him, but he smiled at this micro-miscommunication, and places other hand over your. Old cats are playful too. And no cat will reject some good, pricy food and quiet place to see all things, not just hear behind the bar table. "Well, you are the strongest creative source of new things in my life for now." He smiles faintly. Maybe he was completely sarcastic. "So, take care of yourself. I can't appreciate you most times, but it would be loss for all hell. And i think you didn't drink in a while, so you need some liquid more than hold my hand, dumdum." He gets his hand out of your warm touch, and moves the bottle almost in your face. "Or shall I shake it for you?" He laughs. Husk believes you totally can use some foam of wrath in your face too.

#Hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin hotel #reader insert #x reader #hazbin hotel husk #husk x reader

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milkywaydrabbles · 8 months

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Meeting the Haitani brothers in their clubs

A/N: literally no one asked for this but I am a firm believer the Haitani brothers are raveheads. Rindou is for sure a wook, while Ran stays in his progressive house lane. I could literally talk about them and their music taste for hours, writing a dissertation as we speak.

Haitani Rindou Artists inspo: ATLiens, Svdden Death, Rezz

⁍When you first met Rindou you were at one of his smaller clubs. Definitely an edm club, one that he owned for fun and not to push drugs or be a cover for any other illegal activity. He knew it was a silly club but it's one he often visited for the fun of it if he wasn't doing business. That's when he was his most casual. ⁍He was by the bar area, leaning by the rails of the elevated section and looking out to the sea of ravers. That's when he saw you. Across the masses, you were on one of the pillars that has some footing (not its intended purpose but you know what it worked). It let you be above the crowd for some air, really taking in the lights and visuals of the artist performing. ⁍He’s seen it done before, not a new concept, so he let it be. Though his eyes lingered for a beat longer than normal of any other girls that frequented his club. For one, he hadn’t seen you before, a newcomer he assumed. But you were so comfortable in the scene it must have not been your first rave. Second, your attire might have matched his aesthetic in terms of rave gear than anyone else. All black, showing skin in a tasteful way, but paired with spikes and chains. Hot. ⁍He watched you every now and again throughout the night, but not acting on anything. And then he saw you next weekend. And the weekend after that. And each time, no matter the artist, your aesthetic regularly stayed the same save for a jersey or pashmina that matched the artist. Each time you were heavily involved. Either fanning the crowd to give some air, trading kandi, hell even turning up in the pit. ⁍The third time he saw you Rindou decided to say something. He got there early enough before the crowd started to form. You turned to him with a bright smile, and he thought just for a second you were too pure to be here. ⁍You got to talking before it got too loud, and he learned you were new to the city, and you just found this club. He asked you your opinion, almost anxious on what you thought of his club. When you gushed over how amazing it was, he almost preened. ⁍Rindou wasn’t much of a smooth talker, didn’t really continue much conversation from there but he lingered, dancing and headbanging with you to each of the performers. You gave him a piece of kandi for the great night and wished him a safe trip home. ⁍He spoke to you again the weekend after that, and ultimately decided to just man up and ask for your number. You gladly gave it to him. Your hangouts eventually made it out of the club, now turning into breakfast dates, lunch dates, park dates. ⁍Rindou over time confided in you, telling you that the club you frequented was his, and your eyes almost popped out of their sockets. He laughed in your face, immediately apologizing but it was too funny not to. ⁍The two of you continued to see each other in and out of the rave scene, promise of this new found relationship blooming into something more.

Haitani Ran Artist inspo: Slushii, Dabin, Elephante

⊛Like his brother, Ran owns an edm club too, though a much different vibe. You were a bottle service girl at his club, and a diligent one at that. You’ve jumped in to help on nights you weren’t supposed to work, and even took on cleaning shifts if the rest of the bar was understaffed. ⊛All the bottle girls knew Ran, he liked to hire them personally to make sure they all fit the bill he was looking over (aka running background checks on them and making sure they were clean.) ⊛Every night he’d show up you greeted him with a cheery ‘good evening, Mr. Haitani!’ to which he responded with ‘you can always call me Ran, pretty girl.’ It ended with a giggle and a roll of the eyes, before heading off to your duties. ⊛You weren’t any different than the rest of them, not really, but he did notice you tended to get more tips than the rest and he was interested to know what you did. Maybe it was heavy flirting? Or maybe you ended up taking shots with the poor bastards and you milked them dry of their money that way? ⊛When he started watching you more, he noticed he was completely wrong. While the other girls tried to dance sexy with their tables you actively ended up singing all the words to the songs the performers would play and headbanged with them. That’s what got you more tips, you genuinely enjoyed the music. Huh. ⊛At the end of the night while you cleaned up Ran came to find you and ask you about it. Oh boy, your face heated up so much you swore you could fry an egg on your forehead. You apologized for your behavior, stating that you ‘just really like the music, so working is really fun’. ⊛Ran threw his head back and laughed, and asked you out on the spot. You paused, confused at the random offer and started to decline. That was your boss and you were pretty sure it was definitely against policy. ⊛But Ran was so pleasant and asked so pretty it was hard to say no. ⊛So you went on a date with him, thinking it would be one and done, and that it’d be short. Turns out, you had the best night of your life with him. ⊛Every shift after that started the same, with your eager ‘good evening, Mr. Haitani’ his rebuttal ‘Call me Ran, pretty girl’, a giggle and smile. ⊛And ended the same, Ran driving you home with a kiss and finally getting to hear you say ‘good night, Ran’.

#haitani rindou #haitani ran #rindou haitani #ran haitani #haitani brothers #haitani ran x reader #haitani rindou x reader #haitani brothers x reader #tokyo revengers #tokyo revengers x reader #tokyorev #milk writes

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lorcandidlucienwill · 2 months

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“Bitch” wow! I don’t see the reason for getting so heated over these characters. They don’t actually exist you know? You’re not defending anyone’s honour or being some saint here. I didn’t mean anything in a bad way, I was trying to have a rational conversation because I’ve never come across an IC hater and wanted to know why you didn’t like them. But obviously having a rational conversation is out of your zone of abilities since it didn’t take a lot for you to get down to name calling. My only suggestion to you because I truly wish the best for you is control that anger and learn to listen to other people before someone shows you your place. It won’t be nice. Good luck bbg 💜💜

You're the one coming in anon and shitting on characters that I like. What did you expect??? I'm going to defend my characters, obviously. You want my dissertation on why I hate each member of the Inner Circle? Let's start with captain asshole Rhysand: Rhysand: Sexually assaulted Feyre, did not apologize, licked Amarantha's boots for fifty years to "protect" no one since he only rules 1/3 of his court. He claims to be uber powerful yet he can't control misogyny within 2/3 of his court. But it's totally fine to go into Tarquin's house, steal an important possession, then act superior later when his wife's antics in Spring caused Summer to be invaded. Pretends to give his wife a "choice" while not giving her crucial information, i.e. that he wouldn't be helping her out with the Weaver at all. Locked Lucien in a house, made rape jokes about his mother, altogether treated him like shit for no reason. Then the Inner Circle acts all shocked and furious that their "masks" as "bad guys" fooled everyone and act violent towards literally everyone not Inner Circle there. Rhysand forcibly shut Tamlin's mouth, Feyre burned Lucien and Eris's innocent mother, Azriel nearly choked Eris to death. Ironically, Cassian acted the most sane here. After Tamlin saved Feyre and Rhysand's lives multiple times, Rhysand has the gall to tell Tamlin to kill himself despite knowing they'll need him as an ally, which is a terrible thing to do and also made Lucien's life harder. ACOSF he locks Nesta in a house and hides the malignant nature of his wife's pregnancy from her. That's just the gist of it. Cassian: Rhysand's dog. He need to grow a fucking spine. He never defends Nesta in front of Rhysand, and constantly abuses her physically and mentally. Won't let her eat sugar, forces her to train, tells her everyone hates her, makes her hike a fucking mountain for having the nerve to disobey rhysand and tell feyre the truth she deserved to hear. Then again in HOFAS not defending Nesta in front of Rhysand when he was screaming at her for giving away the trove and telling her she should've killed Bryce instead. THAT. IS. YOUR. MATE. He treats all the women in his life better than her, like mor and feyre. Azriel: A fucking weirdo violent creep. He needs to man tf up and admit Lucien is the superior man. His creeping on Mor for 500 years when she's clearly not interested is not cute. Nor is choking Eris to death in an important political meeting. Nor is treating Elain like a helpless object and masturbating to a gag gift he gave her. I'lL dEfEaT hIm WiTh LiTtLe EfFoRt boi stfu no you can't and Lucien has done NOTHING to you. I have absolutely ZERO respect for a character who treats the nicest guy in the series like that. Elain is not a child to be fought over. He's so pathetically jealous that Lucien is a good dude and has a mate and is better than him at everything. He needs to admit his homoerotic desire for Lucien and get it over with. Or let Eris humble him. Either way. Mor: the biggest hypocrite of all time. I aM a DrEaMeR aNd I gOt OuT so did it ever occur to you that maybe you're not the only dreamer? You're not even going to try to save good people stuck under the Court of Nightmares or ask your High Lord to? You just write them off because you're the only good one? And you want to throw Nesta into the court of nightmares? You don't do shit when Cassian is harassing Nesta? You're a bitch and not a girl's girl at all. If there's ANYTHING women should be united on, it's creepy dudes. ESPECIALLY if one of them is your best friend. Amren: this bitch should've stayed dead after ACOWAR. How dare she talk to Nesta the way she did in ACOSF? She KNEW how much Nesta was hurting and she did it anyway. She's over 15 thousand years old. What a bitch. They're all part of an elitist establishment and the epitome of modern politics that needs to be destroyed. Oh, I'm sorry? Should I apologize for saying "bitch" when you're the one coming in hot on my anons? How about you get a life besides harassing people who disagree with you first?

#anti rhysand #anti cassian #anti azriel #anti mor #anti amren #anti inner circle #asks

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oysters-aint-for-me · 1 year

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my first time watching succession: oh my god kendall roy is such tragic figure. logan is such an asshole. shiv’s got so much anger and tom’s so sad. this show is so heartbreaking. what the hell. roman is funny, though. greg too. also they say “fuck” way too much.

second time watching succession: wait this is a goddamn comedy isn’t it? lmao kendall roy is just a little clown baby. connor is my favorite character because i hate him so much. willa is my second favorite character because i hate connor so much. kendall is fucking insufferable. wait kendall almost DIED?!* i think they still use “fuck” too much.

third time watching succession: oh wow. ok. this show is funny, but also it’s about the tragedy of sexual violence and the way it has subtly and unnoticeably crept into and then metastasized throughout every branch of this media conglomerate, which in turn influences the minds of at least half of the country. yikes ok. roman is a strange little creature. kendall is actually insufferable from the beginning of the show—his issues are exacerbated with drugs but there’s something deeper going on. i no longer think they overuse the word “fuck.” in fact, i think i could write an essay on the way they use the word “fuck.”

fourth time watching succession: oh okay this show isn’t just about the slow and subtle creep of sexual violence throughout the business and the way it waits to blow up suddenly like a time bomb—it’s also about the blatant sexual violence that is thrown in your face from the very first episode but which you overlook or don’t notice because we’re so desensitized to the use of sexual language to describe business activities. it probably means something that even though logan claims to have never actually committed any sexual assault, his medical issues are still often related to his dick, but in a not-sexual way—compare how he went piss mad from a UTI to how sandy furness had dementia because of a sexually transmitted infection (even though that’s probably a rumor, logan did start it). and the show is also about childhood trauma and neglect, and roman roy is the most fascinating character to walk across my screen since i don’t even know. i can’t even articulate what it is i find so interesting about him, but it has to do with how he is so flexible with his words so that everyone thinks he’s on their side and he kind of really IS on everyone’s side, because he wants to be liked sooo bad and the details don’t matter as much as that. and it’s also about bodily autonomy and sex as power vs sex as love vs sex as whatever the hell is going on between greg & tom. i am obsessed with the way the roys will say “(x) fucked me” and so rarely add the usual “over” to the phrase, turning every description of revenge or betrayal into an act of sexual violence. i could write a fucking dissertation on the way the show uses the word “fuck.”

*i was drunk when i watched the last two episodes and completely missed a healthy chunk of them. the irony of this is not lost on me.

#succession #i just really needed to collect my progression of thoughts somewhere sorry!

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loversj0y · 11 months

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this is me trying

coming back to london and being away from wilbur was hard. fighting your own coping methods and trying is harder.

pairing: wilbur soot x gn! reader

angst, hurt/comfort

TRIGGER WARNINGS: fighting, yelling, broken bottles, lots of tears, and alcoholism, plus the briefest (one line) insinuation of suicidal thoughts.

note: this is part of the 'tis the damn season universe, but doesn't particularly have to be read alongside it (though you'd probably be very confused if you didnt read it). this part is pretty heavy. not even going to lie, i had to stop writing a few times to keep myself from getting too stressed, really heed the warnings. at least im getting better at writing fights? ao3 version

word count: 5.7k

You and Wilbur hadn’t seen each other in months. It was May, and the warm air was making the days feel a bit more pleasant if it weren’t for the glaring guilt in your chest.

The last time you and Wilbur had seen each other was Valentine’s Day, when he’d taken a train up to London to visit you and surprise you with some takeout and roof access to your apartment — you didn’t actually know you could get up there. He wasn’t able to spend too much time with you, mostly due to your own time constraints, but it was a nice trip nonetheless. When he left, you’d promised you’d come down to Brighton to visit him soon.

That didn’t quite work out. You were going to visit for a full week at the end of the second term, however, once you’d met with your advisor, you learned just how behind you were on your final dissertation. It was incredulous because you had thought you were on track with it, but regardless you had to spend break trapped in the library, trying desperately to catch up on writing your paper on Lord Byron’s work. Then, you were supposed to visit during the Easter weekend, but you were given a paper, due in a week, that blocked any opportunities for travel.

But you were determined this time. You had to do this. You devised a plan, and you found a perfect weekend where you would be completely free of assignments if you hustled. You even got Tommy in on it.

“Hey, Tommy, sorry to call you like this, do you have a moment to chat?”

You heard a laugh through the phone, “Yeah, hold on,” he mumbled something off the phone, and you could make out the sounds of him walking to another room.

“What’s up?”

“I want to surprise Wilbur, and I need your help.” You smiled as you started launching into the details of your plan, each piece meticulously planned out for a wonderful weekend.

He grinned, “Aw, he would love that. Why d’ya need my help though?”

“Well,” you faltered a bit, “there’s a flaw in my plan, and it’s that I don’t know where Wilbur’s apartment is, and I especially don’t know how to get there from the station. So, I was wondering if you’d be able to pick me up and take me to Will’s?”

“Oh, yeah, no problem, plus it’ll allow me to annoy him a bit as well, so yeah, sounds good.”

You cheered a bit, “Thank you so much, Tommy, you’re the best. I’ll text you all the other details, yeah?”

“Aw, I am the best, thank you. And yeah, that works.”

“Perfect, bye, Tommy!”

He responded with a quick bye in return, and you felt yourself grin. You had been trying so hard to find time to be able to go see him, and this was it!

You got a call a few minutes later from Wilbur himself, and you worried immediately that Tommy may have spilled something accidentally. You didn’t even have a chance to speak before he questioned you.

“Why did you call Tommy with something he will only describe as being ‘important’ and ‘for cool people only’?”

You snorted out a laugh, rolling your eyes a bit, “Well, hello, to you, too, Wilbur.”

“Hi, darling, I hope your classes went well today,” he rushed out, “Now answer my question.”

“I just had a question for him, Will.”

“One that you couldn’t ask me?” You could hear the pout in his voice.

“Nope. As he mentioned, it's for cool people only.”

He let out a gasp, indignation clear in his voice, “Darling, how could you? I am much cooler than Tommyinnit.”

You could faintly make out the sound of Tommy yelling at Wilbur in the background.

“Don’t worry, alright?” You laughed, “It was just something only he could really answer.”

“Are there questions that exist that only that gremlin child can answer?”

“Believe it or not, yes.”

Wilbur whined on the other side of the phone, “Love, you know he’s going to hold this over me for months, right?”

“Oh, I’m aware.”

“So, why?”

“Well, if I’m going to ask a Minecraft-related question,” you lied cooly, “it’s better to ask a professional, isn’t it?”

He was silent for a long moment. “...I am a professional.”

“Will, we’ve played Minecraft together for years. You’re good, but even I could beat you at PVP.”

He groaned, “Is this some ploy? Are you messing with me?”

“Is it wrong for me to try and get closer to your best friend by asking him questions about his interests?” Okay, truthfully, that was a low blow. But the surprise would make it worth it.

“I guess not.” He chuckled, “Sorry, I’m just annoyed about how smug he’s going to be about this.”

“Don’t apologize. You know I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to chat with you, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t either, love,” you could hear the smile in his voice, and the vague sound of Tommy speaking to someone. From over the phone, the room sounded louder than before.

“Is… something going on over there?” You chuckled, trying to hide the nervousness in your tone. You didn’t even know why you were nervous. Something was just gnawing at the back of your brain, and for some reason, you just felt… tense now.

“Oh, uh,” he paused, and you could hear more people talking now, “sort of. It’s nothing big or anything just, uh, Tommy’s having some friends over is all. He and I have been hanging out for a bit today, but we’re just at his now, so he invited a few people over and stuff.”

You nodded quietly. You couldn’t help the sadness you felt fill your chest. You were trying to be there, but it was still hard to hear about all the things you were missing out on, all the times you missed him, and stories and inside jokes you would never truly understand.

“Right, okay. Well, I-I’ve got to get back to studying, anyway, so.”

“Darling, it’s nothing, really-” “No, it’s not an excuse or anything,” It was, “I-I just… ‘m busy, is all, so I’ll let you hang out.”

You were both silent. He knew you were lying, and you could tell. But he wouldn’t call you on it. Not now. Not when you hadn’t seen each other in months and every slight felt like a balancing act, trying to keep the other from pulling away. You were so excited a moment ago, and you didn’t mean for the sadness to overtake your entire conversation. You just couldn’t help sometimes how every conversation, every time you heard him talk about the things he was doing, cut you open more and more. He didn’t mean to, and you would never hold it against it but almost every conversation opened the wound a bit further.

He spoke up after a minute, “Okay, well… good luck studying, and text me when you’re done,” he paused, voice softer, “I love you.”

You bit your lip, unable to hide the guilt bubbling in your chest at his solemn tone, “I will. I love you too.”

You hung up quickly, setting your phone down on your desk. You placed your head in your hands, taking a shaky breath and fighting off the tears in your eyes. It would be easier, soon. You’d see him in a week. You tried to console yourself.

You wouldn’t admit it out loud to Wilbur, no matter how much he asked, but you weren’t entirely adjusting well to being back here, without him. The first week, you could only fall asleep if he was on the phone with you. Then, there was one night where he fell asleep before you could call. You ended up turning to an older sleep method, knowing that you needed to get to bed in order to be able to make it to classes. Before you knew it, your room became littered with empty bottles you barely had the energy to clean up. It was an interesting dichotomy, the clear vodka bottles piling on your nightstand and the white Panadol bottles piling on your sink and in your backpack. You were mostly lucky the weekend he came for Valentine’s Day, because you had forced yourself to clean up your room a few days before, meaning there was only one half-empty bottle of vodka on your shelf, and a single bottle of Panadol left on your sink (though there were numerous more inside your school bag).

You weren’t completely lucky, though. Your weekend with Wilbur was almost entirely perfect. Until the end. Every time you thought back to the end, you watched the memory as if it wasn’t you, as if you were a watcher, not the one actually there.

You’d walked back in with Wilbur, around midnight. The apartment was mostly quiet, except for one of your roommates who was standing in the kitchen, fixing themselves a drink. When they heard you enter, they turned, perking up a bit.

“Y/N, hey, could I borrow some vodka? I ran out.”

You’d nodded, “Yeah, I’ll grab it, hold on.”

While you’d gone to grab the bottle, Wilbur took his coat off, your roommate lightly chatting with Wilbur while you walked to your room and back. You’d only caught the ending of their brief conversation, listening in as you walked slowly from the hallway back to the kitchen, trying to not wake up your other roommates.

“-mean, seriously, Wilbur, they can even drink me under the table. Every week, they come in with a new bottle.”

“Wait, every week?”

“Yeah!” Your roommate was laughing, and it hadn’t even crossed your mind yet that they were talking about you, “I mean, seriously, once a week, they walk in and one hand has a bag with vodka from Tesco, and the other hand has a bag from the chemist’s.”

You walked back over by the time your roommate finished speaking, placing the bottle in front of them. Wilbur gave you a strange look as you did, going uncharacteristically quiet as you said a quick goodnight to your roommate, bringing Wilbur, and the bottle, back to your room.

You placed the bottle back on the shelf while Wilbur closed the door. With your back turned, he spoke up finally.

“Darling…” he seemed to struggle to find the words, “Are you… okay?”

You’d chuckled, “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“You tell me,” he spoke, and you turned to face him. He had a sad look on his face, almost pitiful, and in the moment, it made you feel sick. “You’ve apparently been going through a bottle a week.”

Your entire body had gone rigid, eyes had gone fearful for a moment before you’d defaulted to being defensive. “That doesn’t mean anything is wrong, Wilbur. It just helps me relax, and you know that I can handle my alcohol.”

“Love, you can’t seriously expect me to just accept that answer,” he scoffed, and he almost looked mad. Looking back, you knew he wasn’t mad at you, more just concerned that you were trying to hide this from him. Even so, in the moment, you thought he was mad. While you couldn’t really place why he would’ve been mad, you knew that it made your own blood heat up.

“Well, it’s- the fucking truth, okay? So just- leave it.”

“How many bottles?”

“Wilbur, what-”

“How. Many.” He looked tense, walking to your bathroom and grabbing the bottle of Panadol, “How many weeks has this been going on? How many bottles have you gotten? If you’re struggling, you should–”

“I’m not fucking struggling, you’re reading into this!”

“Oh, am I? Really?”

“Yes, Wilbur! I am fine, better than fine, in fact, and don’t act like you haven’t been drinking too. You always text me when you do!”

“I’m not against you drinking, but you know how insane going through a fifth a week is. I know that’s not normal for you.”

“How the fuck do you know that? Hm?” You’d practically yelled out before you spoke out again, each word spitting venom at him, “You haven’t been here, Wilbur, you don’t know anything about the way I am when I’m here! Please stop fucking acting like you know everything about me.” You’d gestured with your hands while you spoke, eyebrows raising as you looked at him incredulously, “Yes, okay, fine, you win! I have been drinking more! Basically every night, but that doesn’t mean that something is wrong with me, Wilbur. I am trying my hardest just to fucking exist enough to finish the school year, I am allowed to have vices without it being some big, stupid conversion. Now, let’s just drop it, we’re both exhausted. It’s not going to help to just stand here and argue, okay?”

You’d panted softly as you’d finished. You watched as waves of hurt appeared on Wilbur’s face, and now that the moment had passed, you’d felt just complete, immediate regret as you watched his face fall, staring down at the floorboards.

“Yeah. Fine.” He spoke out flatly.

You two went to bed that night next to each other, still sharing a kiss and exchanging “I love you”s, but feeling tenser than ever before.

In the morning, you two had been able to patch things up, but not before Wilbur made you agree to just call him anytime you needed to relax instead of immediately turning to alcohol. You agreed, and you’d been doing a pretty good job of it, even if you still drink sometimes. But ever since the fight, there’d been this tense air in your relationship, lingering in each conversation, both too scared to overstep and lose the other all over again.

You stared at the bottle on your desk as if it was taunting you. You couldn’t call him, so it was that or sleeplessness. You sat up, shaking your head slightly and wiping the tears from your face, taking a deep breath. You couldn’t. Wilbur would call before bed, he always did now. Instead, you distracted yourself, pulling up your laptop and writing out your list of due dates for this week and the next two weeks, albeit the tears in your eyes made it a bit harder than usual. You wrote the list on a sticky note, placing it on your laptop. Some of these things were easier to knock out than others, for sure. Three big assignments and three small ones, plus whatever reading you had to do in between. Thankfully, only two of the big assignments were due this week, the last one could be left for after you came back from visiting him.

You got started, working on a poem analysis for your Romantic Poetry class and letting your own thoughts fade in the noise of Wordsworth and Keats.

You’d started working on your second small assignment when he’d called later that night. You set your phone up against your laptop, accepting the video call with a gentle smile on your face.

“Hi, darling,” he grinned, and with a quick listen to his voice, you could tell he wasn’t entirely sober. You didn’t bring it up.

“Hi, Will. Did you have fun at Tommy’s?”

He nodded quickly, turning to get comfortable in his bed, “Kid’s a menace, for sure, but yes,” he frowned, getting a better look at you, “Babe, are you still studying?”

You sighed, “Yes, Will, I am.” “It’s been like three hours, how dare they? How could they possibly assign you so much?”

“God, I wish I knew. It’s like they all just decided that everything would be due this week. I might not be able to do our video chat dinner this Friday. I have a huge project due on the 21st.” In reality, you would be taking an hour train to his place and having real-life dinner, but he didn’t need to know that yet.

“That’s not for so long though,” he whined out, pouting.

You chuckled, rolling your eyes a bit, “Yes, but it’s Professor Brian. He makes us all come to his office hours, so he can make sure we’re on the right track, and I need to go in early before the other students can take up all the timeslots. I need to make sure I have everything prepared for that.”

He sighed, relinquishing, “Okay. I know how important all this is, anyways. Plus, graduation isn’t too far now, so you need to finish strong.” He smiled, nothing but supportive towards your academic goals.

“Graduation will be here before we know it. Still gonna host me that party?”

You both laughed, and he nodded, “Oh, absolutely. We’ll have two parties, a moving party and a graduation party all in one.”

You smiled fondly at him, nodding, “Yeah. That sounds really nice.”

He gave you a look, eyes full of love and adoration, “I miss you so much, love.”

You sighed wistfully, “I miss you too. We’ll see each other soon enough, I’m sure. We’ve waited years, we can do months.”

He grinned, repeating your words, “We can do months.”

The rest of the conversation was standard, asking “How’s your day”s and sharing loving words. He tried to convince you to sleep once more, but you told him how important your work was, and he eventually gave up the topic. You wished each other a goodnight, saying “I love you”, before he eventually headed to bed fully. After you hung up, you looked back up at the bottle. The urge to drink was gone now. And if you weren’t going to get any sleep, you may as well continue working.

The rest of the week went by smoothly. The stress and weight of assignments and your plans for Friday kept you from sleeping properly, which at least gave you more time to work on your assignments.

Friday approached quickly, and you couldn’t sit still in a single class the entire day, let alone Professor Brian’s class. He taught your Victorian Literature class, and he was a genuinely caring professor, despite being a bit intimidating. You could barely focus throughout class, far too excited. When it was time for class to be dismissed, you stood eagerly, but Professor Brian stood in the way for you to leave.

“Do you mind staying a few minutes?” He asked, a kind smile on his face.

As much as you didn’t want to, you really liked this professor, and his opinion of you meant a lot to you. So you nodded, following him to pull a chair up to the other side of his desk.

He sat down, giving you a gentle smile, “I wanted to ask how your paper is going. You haven’t come in for office hours yet.”

Wow, and you thought you were the early prepper. “Well, I was planning to come in on Wednesday since it would give me a week until the project was actually due.”

He frowned, “What day is the paper due?”

You gave him a confused look, responding simply, “The 21st.”

His head tilted back, and he nodded slowly, “Right, I’ve found the problem then. The paper is due the 12th, not the 21st.”

You felt your heart stop. You pulled out your laptop, looking at the sticky note you had taped to it. You had certainly written the 21st. Fuck, you thought, realizing quickly that it must’ve been a consequence of your own mental state since you’d been crying when you wrote the list.

“Oh. Oh, god, I’m-” You struggled to continue your sentence, too distraught. The paper was due in three days, not twelve like you’d thought.

“Hey, don’t fret,” he pulled out his calendar, humming for a moment, “It’s an honest mistake, and you’ve always been on top of your classwork. I can’t offer a major extension, but I can give you until Wednesday the 14th, but that’s only if you come to office hours first thing on Monday. I can help out with some more of the editing work for the paper, but only on that day, and you’ll need to have at least most of it worked out. I trust in your abilities to create a well-thought-out thesis, especially given your passion in previous classes when we’ve discussed Wilde. Does that work?”

You nodded quickly, fighting tears as your entire plan crumbled around you. “Yeah, yes. I-I can do that.”

“Alright.” He offered you another kind smile, though it did nothing to stop the feeling of the world-shattering around you, “And are you alright? You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t wish to, but you were much more quiet in class today than usual.”

“Yeah. It’s nothing now, anyway.” You sighed, biting your lip to keep it from quivering too much. You stood, pulling your bag on while he nodded slowly.

“Keep your head up, alright? You’re a brilliant student. I don’t like to see you falling behind.”

You knew he meant no harm with his words, but it added to the pit of self-hatred that you were slowly sinking into.

You just nodded, turning and heading towards the door, “Thank you, Professor.”

“Have a good rest of your day.”

“You too,” you spoke, trying to put more enthusiasm into your words than you actually felt.

You practically ran out of the hallway, the air feeling like it was choking you. You walked to a random bench outside, on the edge of campus, unable to stop yourself from completely breaking down. You’d been planning this for weeks, how could you have fucked up this bad? You sobbed, head in your hands.

The tears didn’t stop. The sun was starting to set, and all of a sudden it felt like there were too many eyes on you, so you stood and ran. You ran all the way to the water, panting heavily as you stared out at the river, standing on the old bridge that was always abandoned this time of night. You stared at the water as you sobbed, chest heaving as you struggled to breathe.

Fuck.

You had to call Tommy. You already felt like enough of a fuck-up, you could at least prevent him from wasting his time picking you up.

With shaky hands, you took out your phone, dialing Tommy.

It rang once before he picked up, your sobs immediately carrying over the phone.

“Y/N?” He asked, panicked, “Are you crying, did something happen?”

You heard some arguing over the phone, but you could barely hear it over the sounds of your own crying as you began to speak, “Tommy, don’t- I-” your voice quivered, biting your lip hard enough to bleed.

There was still some arguing happening on his side, but you paid it no mind.

He tried to say something, but you cut him off before he could as the words broke through your sobs.

“Don’t- don’t bother p-picking me up,” you sobbed out, “I f-fucked it. I fucked it all up.”

“Y/N, what’s going on? Talk to me.”

“It’s- it’s stupid, I- I’m sorry. I can’t- I can’t come anymore. I fucked up,” there was sarcastic laughter behind your words as you continued speaking, tears streaming down your face, “I can’t, fuck, I- I fucking ruined everything, I- I was trying, I am trying, but I-” you gasped for breath, one hand clutching your chest weakly as you sat at the edge of the bridge.

“Take a deep breath, come on. What are you talking about?” It almost sounded like he was pleading.

“I just-” you sobbed, trying to muffle your cries to get your words out, “Tell Wilbur I’m sorry.” You pulled your phone away from your ear, ending the call despite hearing his panicked voice through the phone. You shoved your phone in your bag, curling up into a tight ball as you sobbed until you could barely think.

Unfortunately for you, you could still think. Your sobbing had been reduced to slow tears and the occasional hitch in your breath. As the sunset faded into the night sky, you became so acutely aware of how you’d fucked up your relationship. The one you’d spent years pining for, that you wanted to work so hard for. You let all of it fall apart. Even when trying so hard, your trying just wasn’t enough. You stood up, walking to the railing and staring down at the water.

The rushing water felt like it stared back at you.

You gripped the railing tightly, and you suddenly felt like you couldn’t breathe all over again. You slowly backed away, letting go of the railing and trying to collect yourself.

Once you were calm enough, you turned, walking the slow trek back to your apartment. Your eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, and it’d be impossible to hide that you’d been crying even if you tried. You realized off-handedly that you had no clue how long you’d been there sobbing. The sky was your only reminder that time had even passed.

You walked to the apartment slowly, body feeling drained. When you opened the door, you were met with all three of your roommates in the living room, staring at you with concern. One of your roommates, Jayden, sighed softly, speaking into the phone and looking away.

“What’s going on?” You asked softly, voice cracking. You didn’t have the heart to be embarrassed.

“Wilbur called,” your other roommate, Quinn, spoke up softly.

You didn’t bother responding, just nodding and walking to your room. They didn’t fight it, watching you quietly.

You grabbed the bottle, laying down in your bed, and staring at it. There was barely anything left, probably about a shot’s worth. Your hands shook as you stared, mentally waging a war over whether or not you’d take that final sip. A sob wracked your body, and instead of drinking it, you threw the bottle against the opposite wall, watching it shatter and spill over the floor. You couldn’t be bothered, turning away from the door and curling up into a tight ball. You heard movement outside your door, but you didn’t move, and eventually, the footsteps departed. You closed your eyes, lying drained on your bed and letting yourself drift in and out of restless sleep.

When you came to at one point, you could make out the sound of someone picking up the pieces of glass you’d shattered. You wanted to turn, to mumble a thank you to whichever roommate had cleaned it for you, but you felt frozen in your own sadness. You listened, though, keeping your eyes closed. The sounds of each shard falling into a bag, the sound of a towel wiping at the wet spot left by the vodka. Then, there was a pause before you heard the gentle sound of footsteps moving toward your bed. You felt the bed dip, and you couldn’t fight the confusion that creased into your brow. An arm slowly wrapped around you, and you let your eyes open, taking a moment to process. You thought you must be dreaming.

Your voice sounded weaker than you’d hoped it would as you spoke.

“Wilbur?” You turned, looking up and seeing the face of your lover staring back at you. He looked as exhausted as you felt, and it looked like he’d been crying as well.

You sat up slowly, and he did the same, brushing back some of your hair.

“Hi,” He sighed softly, sitting across from you, “You scared the shit out of me.”

Tears welled in your eyes, and your hands reached for him as if to make sure he was actually, really there in front of you. He held onto your arms gently as well.

“What- what are you doing here?” “You were on speaker when you called Tommy.” He sighed softly, “We could only come for tonight, but we really need to talk. We could wait til the morning if you’d prefer.”

As much as you’d like to have one last good night in his arms, you’d rather rip the bandaid off now.

“No, let’s talk now.” You sighed.

He nodded, watching you quietly, “Can you tell me what happened, then?”

You took a shaky breath, nodding softly. “I was going to come down this weekend. I spent weeks planning it, making sure I could get everything done in perfect timing. But that night I called Tommy, after you called me, I started crying, and I wrote down one of my due dates wrong,” you sniffled, chuckling sardonically at yourself. “God, it’s so stupid. But my professor stopped me after class, and he extended the due date, but he could only extend it by two days. So, I couldn’t come to surprise you anymore, and,” you sobbed, biting your lip and trying to hold yourself together, “I called Tommy and let him know that he didn’t- he didn’t have to pick me up anymore.”

Wilbur nodded as he listened to you explain. He knew you better than you ever wanted to admit. “On the phone, you said… you ruined everything. You weren’t just talking about the plans, were you?”

You shook your head, moving your hands to hide your face behind them, “No.”

“Did you… think that I would stop talking to you because of this?”

You took a shaky breath. It felt like your last chance to be honest while you still could. So, you let the words spill from your mouth in endless streams.

“I just- I haven’t been doing well, Wilbur, ever since I got back here. I was drinking every night, really heavily, and I know it wasn’t good. And I’m sorry for how I talked to you that night, I was just scared and defensive, and,” you took a shaky breath, “every time we’ve talked after that fight, everything would feel different, and I was just getting terrified that my time was running out, that you were going to finally decide that you’ve had enough of the fucking mess that I am. Every time you would tell me about the cool things you were doing, I just couldn’t help but feel like it was cutting me open, no matter how happy I was for you, and now, I just I feel like I’m an open wound that can’t close no matter how much I try. And I am trying. You have to believe me, really, I am trying. I didn’t,” You cried softly, head still in your hands, “I didn’t drink it. The rest of the bottle, I-I didn’t drink it. I am trying.” You felt like you were pleading for him to believe you.

“Hey, hey” he spoke softly, gently holding onto your forearms, “Let me see your face. Please.”

You let your hands fall, looking up at him. You never felt smaller than in that brief moment where you could feel him seeing you in your entirety.

He gently moved a hand to your cheek, wiping at your eyes softly.

“I know you’re trying. I’m proud of you for not drinking it. Really, I’m insanely proud of you. I can see that you’re trying. I’m not going to leave you or stop talking to you because you’re struggling. That doesn’t mean what happened is okay, but darling, you need to communicate with me. Neither of us are going to be perfect about anything, and I know I’m not perfect with it either, but when you start having these thoughts and ideas that I’m going to leave you? That’s when you need to come to me and talk to me. I know it’s hard, and I’m not expecting it to be an easy or quick fix, but I need to know that you know that you can come to me. That I’m someone you truly trust. Because if not, it will just hurt us both.”

You nodded quickly, leaning into his touch, “I’m sorry. I’m going to try, I just- I get so in my head sometimes, I just-” You took a shaky breath, and he carefully moved forward, pulling you into a tight hug. You hugged him back just as tightly, burying your face into his chest.

“I do trust you,” you whispered, “I’m just scared you’re going to see me the way I see me.”

He took a shaky breath, kissing the top of your head. “And I’m just trying to get you to see yourself the way I see you.”

You sobbed softly, clinging onto him tightly. He held you just as desperately, rubbing your back.

“I love you,” you spoke softly once you’d calmed down enough, “so much.” “I love you so much too.” He pulled away, only to pull you in for a kiss. You kissed him back, your arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders. The kiss felt like breathing, a strong sense of relief in the physical confirmation that despite everything, you didn’t lose him.

When you pulled away, you rested your forehead against his, and you both sat like that quietly for a few minutes.

“I missed you,” You spoke softly, looking up at him. “You said you’re only here for tonight?”

“I missed you too. Even if it didn’t go as planned, at least we still got to see each other this weekend,” he lightly joked before nodding, “We are only here for tonight.”

“Wilbur, I can’t go to Brighton anymore, I have to write my paper,” you sighed.

“Oh, no, I know. I wasn’t talking about you.” “What?” “Tommy insisted on coming with. He was really worried too. He’s currently sleeping on your couch.”

You chuckled, your chuckle soon turning into full laughter as you imagined Tommy’s lanky limbs leaning off your cheap couch. Wilbur started laughing as well, arms still wrapped around you, slowly rubbing up and down your back.

Once you stopped laughing, you leaned into him, relaxing against his chest. He moved both of you into laying down.

“I’ll talk to him in the morning. Today’s been exhausting. Can we just sleep?” Wilbur nodded, kissing the top of your head once more. “I would love nothing more than to sleep with you right now.”

You groaned, lightly hitting his chest, but you couldn’t deny the laughter that bubbled up in your chest.

“Goodnight, love.” He grinned.

“Goodnight, Wilbur.”

taglist: @shubblelive / @superioritycomplexes / @your-shifting-gurl (send an ask/dm me if you want to be added)

#wilbur soot x reader #wilbur soot #mcyt x reader #dsmp x reader #mar writes #wilbur x reader #tis the damn season au #mcyt x you #wilbur soot x you #wilbur soot fanfiction #mcytumblr #mcyt wilbur

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musingsbycaitlin · 7 months

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HEY! Writeblr Intro!!!

Hi, my name is Caitlin, and I’m a third year Creative Writing student in rainy England. I’ve got a couple WIPs but none are set in stone so you’ll have to bear with me for a while haha.

- I’m here for a good time so my writing is solely based on my mood and vibe at the time, please do not expect consistency.

- I write short stories mainly but am trying to branch out into novels so you’ll hopefully be seeing a bit more of that in the future.

- I am a university student with anxiety and decision fatigue so things change drastically around here every so often but I promise if I go quiet I will come back.

Let’s get into the WIPs (these will be constantly edited and changing) and feel free to ask me any questions about any of them, even ones that might have been removed from this list if you’re interested.

IF I GIVE UP, SO MUST YOU - a Wild West literary fiction novel

STATUS: currently drafting (on hiatus)

GENRE: literary fiction, sapphic romance(?)

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 3,995

Okay, so a bit of info about this project. I started writing it a bit ago purely because I wanted to write a Wild West novel and then it turned sapphic and then it became literary. It follows an unnamed narrator as she navigates life outside of her small town after she is targeted by bandits in a raid. A coming of age novel that explores what it means to figure things out for yourself whilst battling with false truths engrained into your from a young age.

NIGHT SWIMMING (working title) - a short story collection

STATUS: literally haven’t even started :/

GENRE: literary, horror, surrealist

This collection is my version of NaNoWriMo this year because there is no way I can feasibly write a novel in a month where I also have to write my dissertation first draft and three other short stories like no. I’m hoping to do an update on my page whenever a story is complete, so I will also update this section to include the names of all the stories going in. Stay posted is all I’m saying ;). All I know is I want it to explore the everyday in a surrealist way (as most of my stories do).

DAMAGED GOODS - a dystopian sci-fi novel

STATUS: currently drafting (on hiatus)

GENRE: dystopian, sci-if, speculative

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 2,323

So, I haven’t done an intro post to this yet simply because I had to put it to one side once university started again. A brief summary is this: Auden, an average guy, husband, and father, has gotten into a dreadful car accident. In this society, however, surgery is replaced with metal transplantation. Due to Auden’s extensive injuries, he now must live in suburbia with a completely metal head, arm, and leg.

I’m super happy with this concept and the initial 2,000 words I’ve got I’m pretty okay with. The main issue is where to take it and if it will be a full novel or more of a novella.

EAT YOUR YOUNG - a gothic horror novella

STATUS: currently drafting

GENRE: gothic horror

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 4,950

I haven’t done an intro for this project because I honestly wasn’t sure I’d return to it but the spooky season is upon us and I really want to get back into writing this. Brief Summary: Mr Gerard is an accountant hired by the Heron Manor estate to deal with the affairs of the three sisters residing there after a mysterious death of the man of the house.

This is going to me my main personal priority other than my short stories for now and I’ll try to get an intro out soon.

Okay, so that’s all for me folks. Like I said, any questions please feel free to send me an ask or a message, don’t be a stranger. As a writer I always wanna talk about my projects, OCs, and anything else writing craft related!

I’m tagging some mutuals, if you wish to be tagged or removed :( - let me know x

@annlillyjose @dallonwrites @aesa @winterandwords @iannicellis @isherwoodj

#writeblr #my writing #writeblr intro #wip #short fiction #lit fic

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eganeyes · 1 month

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demarco/macon hcs bouncing around in my head like a pinball incredibly self indulgent and will probably not go anywhere bc i am Not a cohesive writer but this has been in my head and in my notes app for so long it has to come out

benny is literally the chillest person in the us air force hes not repressed to like buck he's just genuinely never really Fazed and even if he was hed be like "well alright" and continue on, like go with the flow is his life motto he's achieved the ultimate zen

so meeting macon and realizing he has Feelings doesnt put a single blip on this mans stability

this: demarco has an intelligence kink. enter macon. (@blood-mocha-latte posted a snippet of her demacon fic abt this exact thing and i have yet to recover)

some more on this bc i cant stop even if i wanted to:

he definitely had a passing crush on buck and kenny bc wowsies they’re so smart

completely platonic ofc ride or die w buck his bestie ground crew is untouchable etc etc

every pilot has got to be like Above Intelligence though and he’s Suffering from it

had a brief hard on for bucky when the man doled out a highly complex pyramid scheme for their imaginary postwar pilot gig whilst drunk and never recovered from the shame bc the next minute the man falls into a ditch with curt

100% enamored with macon ever since the man started elaborating from simple 3rd grade physics to college level dissertation titles.

that gif of benny humming and hawing at the mud stump while macon explains physics to him has me by the throat

bc benny is genuinely Very Put Together he pursues macon with a singular intensity that frightens macon just a smidge

im talking quality time to the maxxxx, randomly complimenting macons hands, buying him lunch, popping by his base to make friends with all of macons friends, breakfasts and morning runs, polishing forts together, etc etc

please do not ask about the logistics of him popping in and out of macons base i don’t even know how far to each other's current air base is lets consider it 3 cms apart (im like 80% certain they arent even in the same country lmao but whatever its just rot in my brain let me be)

apparently bennys dad is a designer so lets say benny gifts macon with custom flight jacket patches, sweaters, beanie hats, scarves, saying shit like take these with you to your flights and remember me or something insane like that

going with him to doctor appointments for his neck, pressing arms to arms for comfort

meeting meatball is An Ordeal

he either brings meatball with him to the tuskegee base/his flight school the very first time he gets there to rack up more points with macon and co

or he takes macon on a date (will he actually say its a date? who knows) and introduces meatball to him while walking the dog together which is alwayssss such a cute first date/getting to know each other idea oml

macon, completely and utterly flustered bc why is this white boy steadfastly giving him gifts and taking him to lunches and writing him letters and saying shit like hey you going on a test flight with that new plane tomorrow right heres our pic i got printed yesterday put it up with you so you wont miss me yeah

its his superstitious lucky charm now ofc

macon wearing the scarf hes gifted and the boys jeering and whistling every time he shows up wearing it oh

alex drawing a sketch of him and benny laughing together in the officers bar and leaving it in his footlocker

macon then slowly gifting practical little trinkets he cooked up himself for benny,,,benny keeping everything even when some of them get broken bc they're self made trinkets bc they're from his guy guys,,,they're from his guy,,,,

one day macon greets benny by running a hand down from his bare elbow to the tips of his fingers (im talking pride and prejudice, bridgerton levels of insane hand grazing) and benny went completely offline and somebody probably gale had to pinch his side to kickstart him back to life and whatever came out of his mouth next was comprehensible only to meatball

benny leaving meatball with macon and them bonding,,,,,,meatball resting his head on macons lap/feet while macon does Important Paperwork/Calculations,,,,,,,,

also its soooo funny how those two are the shortest of the boys is this actually important to the plot (there is no plot btw) or even in general? no. is it something i noted and kept close to heart? yes.

is this a modern au? a post war au? a no pow au? i literally cannot tell you because i do not know

again just incredible self indulgence sorry

#mota #motafic #but no its #mota hcs #mota headcanons #demacon #benny demarco #richard macon #weirdly enough i never refer to macon as richard will he be richie rick dick rich but rlly none of them hits me as good as macon?? idk #mace???#BUT this is just what i have and couldn't keep to myself so thank #eganeyes

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dallonwrites · 2 months

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lover boy - wip (re)intro

How do you navigate love after losing the person you loved the most?

I realised I don't like writing WIP intros where I just list everything super neatly + have a nice official summary so I am just going to infodump!! Lover Boy is an Adult Literary/Historical novel set in the late 1980s that follows a gay man's navigation of love, sexuality, community and grief after losing his best friend to AIDS. It's inspired by my own experiences of grief + caretaking and the dissertation I did on grief in queer AIDS narratives. It follows Beau, my beautiful special boy, and is like patchwork quilt of all of his avenues of love -- romantic, sexual, platonic, familial, communal, self -- that is stitched together with the grief from this one major loss. This is paralleled with chronological flashbacks telling the story of Bobby's illness, and how Beau took care of him.

Beau and Bobby are best friends who were platonically in love with each other, who had to adapt their relationship as Bobby got sicker and Beau became his caretaker, and in the midst of this adversity became closer than ever. Beau is a lover of love in all ways, who thinks the best holidays Halloween and Valentines Day, who loves sex but is bad at not falling in love afterwards, who has a soft heart, who also has a massive crush on George Michael. Bobby loved his life, his friends and going to the club with them, scenic hikes and swimming, his pet snake named Judas, leather and heavy metal and activism and also the Muppets (his fave was Gonzo btw). He was obsessed with volcanoes and wanted to be a volcanologist. And Beau misses him so much!!! He is trying to understand what his life is now after losing such a big part of it. He is trying to understand what kind of love he wants. He also is trying really hard not to fall back in love with his ex boyfriend who is back in the picture. And he is not really doing any of this well!!

Other features of this novel:

Gay + Autistic protagonist who doesn't know he is autistic but his special interest is horror movies and it shows (favourites are anything monstrous + full of bloodsoaked practical effects. Favourite of all time is The Lost Boys). Beau literally looks towards horror movies to try and understand grief and loss

Protagonist is a guy who actively wants to be haunted and is looking for any signs of ghosts

Lesbian + Gay + Bi + Trans + everything solidarity. An honouring of that history. Exploration on how the AIDS crisis shaped and reshaped community and identity because well, I did an entire dissertation on it and I am not putting that to waste!!! It is interesting and important!!

A narrative that is brutally honest about grief and death, and all the ways it is messy and complicated. A narrative that also doesn't always take itself seriously because sadness and joy are always holding hands

Narrative that plays around with form (video transcripts, letters, journal entries, descriptions of art) and POV (past + present tense blended together, third person present that often dips into second)

Exploration of caretaking on a community level and an intimate, one to one level. Look into how love is often all the little ways we help each other hold on.

Exploration of disability and sickness and how it shapes your identity, your relationship with yourself and others, especially when you're young (I also have a novella planned actually exploring this from Bobby's POV, but you didn't hear that from me!!!!)

The idea that grief never gets smaller, just your life grows around it

The idea that you can love your friends!!! You can be in love with them!! And that love is no "lesser" than romantic love, and it is just as beautiful and big and bright. Even when Beau navigates romantic relationships, these aren't put on a pedestal above any other type of love

A golden retriever named Atlas (Beau's own beautiful, special boy)

This is a personal project that I'm not publishing, but it means a lot to me so I will talk about it a lot!!! I've been playing around with it in its current form for about a year now and am finally making a dent in an actual first draft. My want is to share long, in depth pieces about how I navigate writing a story like this somewhere like Substack, and also all the fun of drafting it along the way. Expect infodumps and excerpts!!!

#i still dont know how tf to make a wip intro!!! posting this like ahhh so scary!#i will be honest i am not in a social media mood recently but it is literally beau's favourite day #so i don't know when i will post something for this but hopefully soon!!!#wip intro #what even are the writeblr tags these days #writeblr #amwriting #??#lover boy #there IS another wip intro for this in that tag but it is mildly outdated!!!

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dragondream-ing · 3 months

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It’s kinda funny to me that even team black fans get vicious with other team black fans if they disagree with their interpretation of a character or event or rumor. Now, there are some wild or dubious claims about canon, and I get shutting those down or insisting they be treated with skepticism. But there are also genuine disagreements that, imo, don’t deserve the vitriol.

I am not talking about things we *know*, like dates and events and crucial elements of the characters’ relationships and personalities. I’m talking about the things we *cannot* know because the sources and Gyldayn simply can’t and don’t have access to every inner thought or belief of the characters. Those same sources can’t and don’t have knowledge of everything the characters did and why they did it. Those sources have their own viewpoints and bias, and so they might have witnessed or heard things that they didn’t write down because they deemed those things unimportant or counter to their bias. They might have elevated information that had little factual basis because they trusted the source it came from or it confirmed their bias (*cough* Sara Snow’s entire existence). That’s the beauty of F&B. It isn’t a novel, it isn’t a dry accounting of events, it is a history book written after the events by a maester raised in a post-Dance, post-dragons world with his own belief system, and the sources he used are limited and imperfect.

Because of the nature of the book, I would never claim my interpretation of a character is the definitive truth, only that it seems most plausible to me. I know who Rhaenyra isn’t, but I don’t know all that she is. I know who Daemon isn’t, but I don’t know all that he is. I can’t, and neither can anyone else, because the sources themselves didn’t and couldn’t. F&B is written in a way to obscure and distort at least some of the truth. GRRM isn’t an idiot, he studied journalism and history in college, he knew exactly what he was doing and he well understood the pitfalls and complications of primary sources and secondary literature. It’s not his fault that many of his fans don’t lmao (and yes, I blame HBO for the increase in stupidity, but I digress).

There are many things we know for sure (which makes the shitshow’s manipulation or removal of all the *literal facts* extra infuriating; now we have people claiming those facts are unreliable even when they are among the few things that are reliable). But I’m sorry to say, there is MUCH that is unknown.

The characters do not have their own POVs. That creates fertile ground for different interpretations of them and their motivations, even if some aspects of both are clearly defined. And entertaining those interpretations isn’t bad faith. I know we all like to think we have the One True Interpretation of our fave characters, but in F&B, even the most fleshed-out characters don’t speak in their own words with their own voice. We are reading them in the voices of other people, and those people have their own perspectives, biases, and agendas. That’s why I love the book so much, it reminds me of my days writing my history dissertation and trying to identify the societal influence and personal bias of the people I studied (sorry, I’m a bit of a nerd lol)

I know we are used to fighting team green and years of wild GOT shenanigans, but come on. I’ve seen people absolutely lose their shit because other fans disagree over the degree to which Daemon wanted a Valyrian wife. Another one I love is the fury over Valyrian customs. Some people believe the Targaryens might have continued practicing some Valyrian customs, while others believe they were true followers of the Seven (other than incest). Literally who cares?? The book doesn’t include much on this topic, but why is it so offensive that some readers think the Targaryens truly converted or that they held to their beliefs more than the maesters and septons claimed? We don’t actually KNOW because the sources wouldn’t have been privy to everything, especially things the royal family did privately, and extra especially when the conversion was for political reasons (as confirmed by GRRM) and the Targaryens would’ve had ever reason to hide customs deemed heretical by the majority religion. This, to me, is a completely inoffensive difference in interpretation, and I cannot fathom why some people view it as akin to team green stans claiming book Alicent was a child bride.

There are degrees of difference in which readers believe the sources of F&B, which I think contributes to diverging interpretations, and we should acknowledge that this is a personal choice. If you give more credence to certain sources, you’re going to come away with a different view of a character than if you don’t, and that’s okay! That’s how interpreting primary sources works, and that’s part of why historians can write books using the same bank of sources and come to different conclusions. Another reason is someone coming along that looks at those sources from a different perspective, or pays attention to sources other historians had ignored. For example, most historians pre-1970 didn’t think to check the records of the wives of politicians, so when others went back through the archives, there were tons of revelations missed by earlier scholars. This just goes to show secondary sources, aka Gyldayn, also have their limitations, viewpoints and/or bias.

A lot of people don’t even stop to question the sources. Some people put a lot more stock in Mushroom’s account than I ever would (the shitshow didn’t cast him, but it sure used his dubious claims). Some people think Eustace was pretty much a straight shooter bar a few exceptions, which I completely disagree with. Gyldayn is also a problem for me, he’s a bit of a weirdo and perv. Tbh I don’t trust any of them. Could be because I was trained to interrogate sources, not trust them, but I’d rather do that than blindly believe someone like Orwyle. It’s up to every reader to decide what seems most plausible.

And no, that doesn’t mean everything is fair game. Some things are blatantly untrue, like the bizarre metas I’ve seen claiming the character ages in the shitshow are the actual true ages lmao

Trust in a source isn’t necessary to glean facts, and from these accounts we *can* learn about the Dance, so it’s all about assessing what’s a fact, what’s propaganda, what’s exaggerated but true, what’s true but unspoken, what’s a bald-faced lie or a lie of omission, etc. And with a book like F&B with biased sources and rumors and contradictions, there will be genuine differences in interpretation that are in good faith. It isn’t fair to act like these differences are headcanons pulled out of thin air.

If you want to argue what you believe is more likely, that’s fine, but what’s the point of shitting on other fans that read the book and made their own informed opinion? Some pieces of evidence and supposition are more compelling to me but may not be as compelling to someone else. These differences are fair and good faith and shouldn’t be reduced to “you didn’t read right” or “you didn’t read at all.” And if someone claims that of other book fans, they should have the humility to admit their interpretation might not be entirely right either. Only GRRM can know the full truth, and tbh, I’m not even sure he does because that man can be contradictory af 😂

And yes, I used this as an excuse to nerd out over analyzing primary sources. Even historians that leave the ivory tower retain their obnoxious urge to pour over and question primary sources, and that extends to fictional ones.

#reading primary sources: F&B edition #obligatory anti team green #stop yelling at people for no reason #you’re probably not as right as you think #obligatory HOTD was a mistake #tbh HBO getting its grubby hands on GRRM’s works was a mistake

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apomaro-mellow · 5 months

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Hey, if your fanfic requests are open, could you write baby!Dadspeed? Our fandom is dying and we are happy to find anything that could revive the fandom!

Ooooh fresh material! I've never written Final Space fic before so here we go!

At the beginning, Gary considered himself well prepped for all this. After all, Ventrexians were just cat-people (although he never said this out loud) which meant their offspring were just cat-babies. Not baby cats, those were kittens. But a cat-baby. Which basically meant sometimes it would act like a human infant, other times a kitten.

Very quickly Gary remembered he had pretty much zero experience with babies and kittens. The little ball of orange fur in his arms seemed so tiny and vulnerable. One day, Gary thought he was dying. Lil Cato had been coughing and heaving and his face was scrunched up in discomfort. It turned out to just be a hairball.

He thought that when babies, finally, finally fell asleep, they'd be down for the count for at least a few hours. But nope. Lil Cato could get fully rested in about fifteen minutes and then be wide awake to poop and cry and attempt to claw at his face.

Speaking of...

Gary was watching Lil Cato in his crib, the tiny kit reaching up with his paws while Gary wiggled his fingers above his head. His movements were uncoordinated, eyes still new and working on his control. But in a single moment of lucidity, Lil Cato's claws came out and pierced Gary's hand as he grabbed him.

To his credit, Gary only let out a tiny squeak. "You know...", he started, voice strained. "I was doing some research and they make these tiny mittens for babies so that they don't scratch themselves."

"We're not putting mittens on our baby", Avocato said, sitting nearby and drinking an ice cold something that Gary couldn't see because it was in a mug.

"So we're investing in bandaid stock? Because how else am I supposed to survive this?", Gary lifted his hand, that Lil Cato was still attached to.

"We shouldn't discourage his warrior spirit. One day, he'll be a great fighter."

"He's a baby", Gary said, looking at said baby who was trying to bite into him now. Fun fact about Ventrexians - born with claws but teeth didn't come out until they were about six months old. So right now, Lil Cato had his claws sunk into Gary while his gums attacked his skin.

"Oh you are just the most adowable, cwutest hunter in the world!", Gary cooed with Avocato got the gauze.

"Who has a taste for fwesh? You do? Who wants to mwaul me to shweds? You do!"

"Keep talking like that and you're wrapping your own hand", Avocato threatened.

"And that concludes the baby talk session. Lil Cato, return to your psychology dissertation and I expect you to solve world hunger by tomorrow." Gary placed him back in his crib, among a few of his toys with which to create his 'dissertation' and turned to get his hand wrapped up.

He may not know much about babies or about cats. But he could be a pretty good dad to this cat baby.

#apo writes #fanfiction #final space #garycato #lil cato #for as much as i love garycato and final space #i should be writing more of it #thanks for the ask!#i saw it and my eyes lit up

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forasecondtherewedwon · 14 days

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seven degrees east - chapter four

Fandom: Masters of the Air Pairings: multiple Rating: T (may change) Chapter: 4 / ? Word Count: 4645

read on tumblr: one | two | three

For most who were permitted entry, the Thorpe Abbotts grad pub was a useful spot to continue any promising discussions begun in class, bitch about grading undergraduate essays, and—thanks to the student discount offered by this campus establishment—get pre-trivia night tipsy on a higher quality of beer than they normally drank. The pub was called the Barracks because of the airfield that had stood on the spot decades before. Though the chairs were hard and the laminated page ambitiously headed “signature cocktails” likely hadn’t changed since the ’80s, the university’s graduate students considered it a nice place to hang out. The Barracks’ quirks made it all the homier. And nobody ordered the cocktails anyway.

It was larger than most of the pubs the boys would have packed themselves into on a Friday night, and continued to feel spacious even when a popular local band played the low stage situated at one end or the once-a-month karaoke event packed the place with unusual customers. (These were mostly fearless female students from departments that scared the boys shitless, like medical biophysics and actuarial science. Curt had once gleefully disappeared into the thick hedge ringing the pub’s patio with one such woman after discovering his shot-in-the-dark conversation topic of the possibility of animal cloning had legs.)

On an average, unspecial day, the Barracks had its particular draw for each of the boys. Gale liked it as a place to sit and nod, resting while others spoke. Rosie liked to do the speaking. For Bubbles, its pub fare was an oasis on Crosby’s nights to cook—for Crosby, it was the simple pleasure of an actual place where an actual bartender knew his name (after he summoned the nerve to inform the man that his name was Harry, not Henry). At the Barracks, Nash did what Nash did anywhere: trawled for a date to the movies. John—kinetic creature that he was—would throw darts with his eyes closed and dig out ancient board games whose missing pieces (“Yes, you can use that rook as a Battleship peg, Buck! Go! Your turn!”) were no impediment to his will to play anything and everything.

Curt loved the Barracks for another reason. Below the dusty TV usually tuned to show music videos, the news, or a match of whatever sport the academics got overly invested in that week as an excuse to put off writing an essay or studying for an exam, there was a PlayStation. Due to its locale, it had suffered some abuse, but it was reliable enough to get Curt through several levels of Air Combat. This left him feeling triumphant and allowed him to pat himself on the back for tearing his eyes away from the smaller screen of the Game Boy he had in his dorm.

“C’mon, Lieutenant,” he coached himself, leaning his whole body as he steered his fighter jet away from enemy fire. “Fly like an angel, don’t die like one.”

The pep talk didn’t work, and when his plane was destroyed, Curt sighed and set the controller on his knee in defeat. It slid off and clattered to the floor. He stared at it for several seconds before scooping it up and putting it back on the battered cabinet upon which the TV rested.

“Rough day to be a pilot,” he said, sagging into a different seat as he joined Jack Kidd at the bar.

“Yeah,” Kidd commiserated. Then, “Huh?”

“Aw, never mind. How’s the dissertation goin’?”

Predictably, Kidd groaned. Curt winced sympathetically.

“Next one’s on me, bud,” he promised, giving Kidd’s shoulder a quick squeeze.

“It’s actually going…” Kidd tried again as his face attempted a more hopeful expression. “…fine.”

“That good, huh?”

“I’m not behind. Well, I am, but not catastrophically. Well… You know what? You’ll see. Enjoy your innocence, Curt.”

Curt didn’t know exactly what to do with this troubling speech—or with being called innocent, which he wasn’t sure he’d ever been called. He decided he would give Kidd the gift of silent companionship. In between sips of his beer, he held the edge of the bar and twisted back and forth on his stool. This didn’t appear to bother Kidd, who seemed to be lost in his own mind for a while.

Eventually, he said, “I think I need a hobby.”

“A hobby,” Curt repeated. “Ok, that sounds like a good idea. Whaddya like?”

Very seriously, Kidd replied, “Reading.”

Curt kneaded his forehead and tried not to make the noise Kidd made when anyone brought up his dissertation.

“No. You gotta do something that’s nothing like the thing you’re working on,” he counselled with an emphatic slashing gesture. “Like, me? For instance? Last summer, I drove out to Rhode Island, right?”

“I don’t know, did you?”

Curt sighed.

“Guy, wait. I’m tellin’ you a story. I drove out to Rhode Island because I heard about this big skateboarding competition—the X Games. So, I’m watchin’ Tony Hawk, in person, doin’ all these flips and shit—”

“Yeah?”

“—and I’m like…” Curt spread his hands, a grin splitting his face. “…I could fuckin’ do that.”

Kidd’s expression went flat.

“Right. And now you’ve given up academia to pursue your dream of being a professional skateboarder,” he said sarcastically. “Mega inspirational. Thanks, Biddick.”

Curt leaned his elbows on the bar and shrugged.

“Well, no. But I bought a board, and I’m tryin’ to learn. Gets me outta my head, you know?”

“Hey, you know another way you can get what’s in your head out? Skateboarding accident. I hope you wear a helmet.”

“Hot tip. Thanks, Dad. I’m just tryin’ to help you overcome that fuckin’ fight-or-flight response you get whenever somebody says the D-word.”

“Dad?”

“Dissertation.”

Kidd’s nose scrunched in aversion. Curt was surprised he didn’t shrink back more dramatically, a vampire confronted with a cross, but maybe the fact that he’d already said the word once had desensitized Kidd a little.

“I guess I feel a bit better,” Kidd said. “Being annoyed at you is kinda cleansing.”

Curt raised his glass to toast that sentiment.

“You’re welcome.” He had a swallow. “You comin’ to trivia later? New hobby?”

“My being smarter than you isn’t a hobby, just a fact. But, yeah; I’ll come.”

“Awesome. We’ve been lookin’ for a new teammate who’s an expert on havin’ a stick up their ass.”

Kidd glared at Curt, but the remark provided him with the impetus he needed to hop off his stool and storm out of the Barracks, curtailing his afternoon of procrastination. Curt chuckled into his glass until he realized he’d been left to pay the bill.

—

Trivia night at the Barracks was a joyful confusion of noise that only clarified on the chorus of “Sweet Caroline,” the handful of patrons close enough to a speaker conducting the room with air-punches timed to each “BUP BUP BUH!” Though less busy than it was in fall and winter, the bar was still close to bursting. Windows and doors had been propped open to allow the sound to spill out into the warm summer evening. Free chairs were scarce, so all around the bar, friends crammed into booths and sat on each other’s laps.

The atmosphere was both competitive and full of low expectations; there were never enough questions in the category someone knew a lot about to enable them to perform well overall. This meant any feelings of despondency were, at least, short-lived. By nature of their discipline, the literature boys had a small chip on their collective scholastic shoulder. They were mainly let down by always going into trivia night expecting to do better than they inevitably did, trusting the novels they’d read to provide a sufficient foundation on topics like religion and politics and geology. Sometimes they lucked out, and sometimes they absorbed a stray grad student from another discipline into their team. Often, they cursed the very authors they had venerated only hours before. And they cursed Bubbles, who would give away literature answers to anyone who asked. (“That’s the one thing we know!” Crosby lamented, head in hands.)

Mostly, the night was about pooling information the way they would pool change for a cab, picking through the pocket lint and the gum wrappers to find the coins. Gale knew all the parts of a radio. Rosie could confidently name five Janet Jackson hits. Nash surprised the entire table with his knowledge of African rivers, inspiring John to take spontaneous hold of his head with both hands and plant a benedictory kiss on his forehead, not seeing the shockwave of hurt that momentarily dislodged Gale’s careful public mask. When Curt slung an arm around the back of Gale’s neck the next time they were all bent over their answer paper, Gale found it was easy to settle into the contact. He laughed when Curt told him he smelled good.

When they had lost, and they were trashed, and it was not yet 10pm, they considered how they might extend their evening. They had handed in their short essays for Professor Harding’s class that morning, which increased their sense that they should be celebrating; another paper down, only the final essay to go, and then the summer class was over and they would have some time to dick around before fall semester began. Everything seemed good and big and possible as they tumbled from the Barracks’ interior onto the patio.

It began as a whisper, and then they were all looking at and teasing Rosie as he blushed about the girl he’d met at the video store.

“You should call her,” Nash suggested, grinning. “You got her number, right?”

Rosie nodded.

“Well, go back to your room and get it!” Bubbles urged. “We’ll wait right here!”

There was a short bank of payphones against the brick wall, just beyond the bounds of the patio, and Rosie glanced at them before looking again to Bubbles.

“Call from here? You wanna hear me crash and burn?”

“Not at all, Rosie,” Gale assured him, eyes sparkling with playfulness and intoxication. “We wanna learn how it’s done.”

As they cheered him on, Crosby shoved Rosie gently in the direction of their dorms, but Rosie rolled out of the push. He held up his hands, smirking.

“I don’t need to go get her number.” He tapped his temple. “Right here, boys.”

“You memorized it?” Curt interpreted with a laugh.

“That is adorable,” John pronounced. He trailed Rosie to a payphone—they all did—and massaged his shoulders like a prize fighter’s while Rosie dug change from his pocket. When Rosie shook him off, smiling, John stepped back and crossed his arms as he joined the semi-circle the boys had made around the payphones.

Rosie dropped the coins through the slot, then took a deep breath and lifted the plastic receiver to his ear. He turned to the boys.

“It’s ringing,” he hissed.

And they all saw the moment she answered: Rosie’s hand clutched tighter around the receiver, his eyebrows shot up, and his gaze darted up towards the lately-appeared stars in relief, then down to the patio stones between his shoes as he focused in on her voice.

“Hi, Liss. It’s Robert Rosenthal calling.” He swatted his hand at Curt, who was pretending to look impressed as he mouthed “Robert” at Gale. They couldn’t remember him ever going by his first name; he was always Rosie to them. “From— You do? Ok, good.”

They took the side of the conversation they were hearing to mean that this was the girl from the store, that she hadn’t given Rosie a fake number, and that she’d known who he was right away. A very good sign. The boys monkey-barred between Rosie’s “uh huh” and “mhmm”s, his noises of agreement as he listened to Liss, and they watched him smile and smile into the receiver’s mouthpiece. Eventually, Rosie and Liss had talked so long that he had to feed more change into the payphone. They peeled off to sit at a nearby table. Gale watched Rosie, and he watched John—shoulder-to-shoulder with Nash. When Curt rose to go back inside and find a bathroom, Gale went too.

“Well, yeah,” Rosie was saying to Liss, running a fingernail down the metal ridges of the payphone cord. “I was hoping you’d call too. I mean, that I’d call you. You gave me your number.”

On the other end of the line, Liss laughed.

“I did,” she said. “Are you a little bit drunk right now, Robert?”

Rosie felt the flush in his cheeks deepen.

“A little. You don’t have to call me ‘Robert.’”

“That’s what you told me your name was,” Liss reminded him, amused. “What do you go by? Rob? Robbie? Please don’t say Bert. I probably could learn to separate that name from Sesame Street, but I don’t want to.”

“Most people call me ‘Rosie.’ I introduced myself as Robert because I… you…” he stammered, then laughed at himself. Because the second we locked eyes, I didn’t know if I was coming or going, he was trying to say.

“I get it.”

“Yeah?” he breathed, relieved.

“Yeah.”

Her straightforwardness terrified and reassured him—and not much could do either. It didn’t make his heart beat any slower though. That Poesque organ was pounding in his chest, making itself known. He felt like he’d been seen when he hadn’t even realized he’d made himself visible. In this way, it seemed to Rosie that love was a terrifying game of laser tag. He hadn’t used the word “love” out loud—not to the boys, certainly not over the phone to Liss—but Rosie was possessed of a quiet certainty that love was happening to him, completely unexpected.

“It was trivia night here,” he told Liss, when someone used the rear exit of the Barracks and a swell of sound escaped as the door was pushed wider. “You should come sometime.”

“That sounds like fun,” she said.

He wished she were there already. Had he not been drunk, he knew he would’ve been driving to meet up with her. He recalled Curt’s early attempts on his skateboard, how Curt had said that what you had to do before anything else was find your center of gravity so you could keep your balance. Rosie believed that was what he was experiencing: he’d found his center of gravity. It felt to him as though he was suddenly aligned with a force of considerable magnitude. A powerful feeling—and yet he grinned into the phone like a kid.

Meanwhile, the boys had decided it was worth getting another round, since Rosie was taking an unexpectedly long time on the phone. Bubbles offered to go back into the bar. John accompanied him. They wove between tables and joined the end of the line. Bubbles didn’t seem to mind waiting, but after John had stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and tapped his foot for about thirty seconds, scanning the busy bar, he felt too antsy to keep standing there.

“I’m gonna go look for Curt and Buck,” he informed Bubbles, raising his voice to be heard though they were beside each other. “That alright?”

“Ok! You know where I’ll be!”

John nodded and twitched his mouth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. He slipped away through the Barracks’ front doors. This didn’t put him outside. The Barracks, though a pub, was a university establishment, connected to campus via more than its patrons; it was located in the back of the Philosophy building. The front door exit dumped John into a distinctly institutional corridor, from the sickly pastel paint on the walls to the rectangular lights littered with the shadows of trapped flies overhead. He strolled down the hall, letting the sound of the bar lessen and blur. The bathrooms were way at the end, past the water fountains.

He didn’t see Curt and Gale standing by the bathrooms, and he hadn’t really expected to. There was nothing to do in this hallway. John’s plan was to walk to the end then turn and continue on to the entrance hall. He figured the boys were probably outside, smoking on the front steps. Maybe getting a little high. That would have explained why they’d taken so long to come back to the group. They’d probably lost track of time.

John was smiling as he pictured this, coming upon the two of them with their brows furrowed, spliffs pinched between the fingers they pointed emphatically at one another as they said the dumbest shit they’d ever said in their lives. Yeah, he’d take a hit too, then wrangle them, shoo ’em back to the patio. Casting his eyes into classrooms each time he passed a door with a window, John idly decided he would walk the boys around the outside of the building instead of backtracking. This hallway, he thought, killed the lively atmosphere of the Barracks. It was just too—

He stopped like someone had stopped him. Physically. He forgot how to walk or blink or breathe. It wasn’t until his jaw clenched that John remembered he had a body at all—it had all gone numb.

The ache of his teeth startled him back into himself. Reanimating, he hurried down the hall. He didn’t know if the bathroom was empty, only that the closest stall was. He slammed the door wide. It hit the wall with a bang, and, like a pair of dice, John threw himself to his knees on the cold tile floor. He hadn’t had that much to drink, but he braced his forearms on the toilet seat and retched into the bowl until he shook, until snot ran from his nose and tears from his eyes. When it was over—taking the immeasurable as-long-as-it-takes that time was unfairly doled out in when one was in the throes of being painfully ill in the liminal space of a (probably) empty men’s room at the end of a quiet hallway in a darkened Philosophy building on an interminable June night—John felt as hollow and contorted as a bendy straw. He wiped roughly at his mouth with the back of his hand before collapsing against the wall.

Finally, he reached up to shut the stall door, fumbling limply with the lock. It was too late and not the kind of protection he needed, but he wanted the illusion.

—

As in many places, the thing to do for fun in Casper, Wyoming as Gale had grown up had been to ride bikes all day long. The summers had been wide, Casper Mountain crumpled like a bedsheet on the southern horizon. Gale’s routine had involved picking up his bike from where he’d dumped it at the side door on his way in to dinner the previous evening and roaming in lazy loops—not the kind of reliable routes the mailman did, but Gale would’ve inevitably run into a friend who’d been doing the same thing. When there had been a few of them, they’d ridden towards the train station. His friends had always liked crisscrossing the tracks on the way, ducking under the lowering gate and laughing at the flashing red warning lights. Gale had done this too, his face marked with a cold determination the other kids didn’t really understand, the rest of them whooping and bumping their wheels across the tracks.

In the parking lot, they had chattered and loitered, leaning their bikes against the train station. Gale had stayed astride his, paying little attention to the others. With his shoes planted on the asphalt and his chin atop the arms he’d folded over his handlebars, he’d watched people arrive from Laramie and Denver and Salt Lake City. But before that, before the cars had disgorged their passengers, there had been the sound of the train pulling into the station. The screech. The low huffs, so alluring to Gale that that had been the sound to call him towards the tracks, rather than the jangling alarm at a crossing. He hadn’t given in—he’d known better—but he’d closed his eyes to better hear it breathe.

The huffs of Curt’s breathing took Gale back, but this time, the warm push of air was right there on his cheek. Their mouths moved together. Except for the breathing, Gale didn’t think Curt had ever been so quiet for so long.

It had been a lot of little things that week. Or not so little, only seeming small because it was as if Gale had viewed them through a telescope. Breaking up with Marge was one. Because she was so far away, that hadn’t made a big change to his life, but it felt like a long-attached tether was suddenly gone and he’d discovered a fuller range of motion. He hoped she would too. On top of that had been the in-class discussion of the woodchopper, and Curt’s mystery hickey last weekend, and Curt’s unembarrassed insistence that Gale read Giovanni’s Room, and Curt still by Gale’s side when John’s lips met Nash’s forehead. Gale didn’t want to date Curt, but he wanted to take a page from his metaphorical book and make out with somebody outside a bar without thinking too hard about it. In some half-examined corner of his self, he’d needed it, and Curt had been amenable, and then there they’d been.

Gale had been private with Marge too, so it hadn’t felt so different—after Gale had found himself looking at Curt with half-lidded eyes, Curt with his heated stare on Gale’s mouth—to step into a vacant classroom and close the door. That much was the same. And it was a surprise to Gale that kissing a man didn’t feel like Kissing a Man; it just felt like he was kissing Curt, as he had once kissed Marge. There was a zing of giddy lust without any deeper sense of romantic devotion, but Gale didn’t think that had anything to do with Curt not being a woman. They were friends—a little drunk, a little horny—who happened to be comfortable with each other. Which made it so easy for Gale to fist Curt’s t-shirt at the base of his neck as his pulse thundered through him like a departing train, and for Curt to go along with it.

Curt smiled at the parts of Gale now being revealed. This knowledge wouldn’t go anywhere, wouldn’t mean anything, and so it was fine to enjoy Gale’s uncompromising aggression. He had taken control so quickly and so thoroughly that it could almost have been his idea. Except Curt knew better. He knew every small opening he’d given Gale, a million ways to come close if he wanted that, never really believing that he did until their eyes had met in the bathroom mirror and Curt had watched Gale’s cheeks bloom a dark, velvety pink.

I thought there was Bucky, Curt thought, but Gale wasn’t hesitating, kissing him roughly over and over, so Curt didn’t ask.

In a while, they went outside and found the boys where they had left them. Only John was absent. Curt slid into one of the benches and Gale sat on the edge of the table. It didn’t seem like anybody’d missed them; there were drinks on the table and some idiot had brought up the essays they’d submitted to Professor Harding, so everyone was talking about what they’d written, liberally badmouthing Thoreau as the font of all their grief. Gale didn’t want to think about schoolwork, but he didn’t want to attract everyone’s notice by demanding a new topic, so he sat quietly.

When John appeared, Gale straightened as though called to attention. John didn’t look well, somehow.

“What the hell, man?” Bubbles said to him, more confused than angry. “You never came back! I had to wave my arms until Croz saw me through the window and came to help me carry drinks!”

John just muttered, “Sorry,” and stood apart from their table.

“Everything ok?” Rosie asked.

John could tell he didn’t want to, that he was still enjoying the high of his phone call to Liss, and that John was bringing down the mood. But he couldn’t help it. He let his mouth stretch into an insincere, close-lipped smile and let out a quick, “Yep.”

Rosie watched him uneasily. The entire tableau had frozen: the perfect picture of a group of friends on a night at the bar. John stared at Rosie until he nodded slightly, understanding that something was definitely not ok, but that they weren’t going to talk about it. Talking about it was not a strong suit for either of them.

“We’re invited to a party,” Rosie said, now that everyone was there.

The news thawed the boys just enough; Rosie answered their questions. Next weekend. Yes, Nash, Helen would be there. Yes, she and Liss were roommates. Yes, all the boys were invited, but nobody had better make Rosie look bad or he would give them shit like they had never been given shit before. He was already looking forward to it, seeing the inside of a place that wasn’t just one of their regular haunts, though he intended no offence to the familiar. Rosie liked having something to come back to, but he liked having someplace to go.

They left the Barracks that night still talking about it, the dark sky twinkling far above Nash and Rosie’s excitement, and Crosby’s guilty yearning, and Curt’s contented libido. In the dorms, he tapped Gale’s elbow with his own before bounding down the hall towards his room. It wasn’t an invitation, just a farewell; he didn’t expect Gale to go from never having kissed a guy (he hadn’t said, but Curt assumed) to the whole enchilada in one night. There was no pressure. Curt didn’t think either of them wanted to turn a few minutes of messing around into anything more than that.

And Gale was aware that he should’ve felt relieved by how Curt left it, but he didn’t. He trailed John into their suite, full of unspoken dread.

“John,” he finally said, when the door was shut.

“What?”

But John was moving towards his bedroom, not even looking in Gale’s direction. Gale knew, he knew already, but it wasn’t enough. For some reason, he had to feel this too: what he knew he would feel when he looked John in the eye.

But John was a baby, and he wouldn’t allow it.

Gale sat tensely on the couch, waiting in case John emerged from his bedroom. He turned on the TV, tried to read. He chewed his lip until he couldn’t stand it and whipped The Portrait of a Lady across the room, angry at himself, angry at the soft crush of pages hitting the opposite wall. God fucking dammit, John! he wanted to yell. Gale was furious because it wasn’t right that he had done this thing—this rare, uninhibited thing, the huff, huff of Curt’s panted breath—that he told himself wasn’t about John at all and now John was punishing him by refusing eye contact. He wanted to make John look at him.

Gale had never intended for him, for anyone, to see. Part of what frustrated him was his own discomfort. He was trying not to let that sour what he and Curt had done. John wouldn’t care, Gale was certain, that he’d spied Gale kissing a man; he’d never known John to exhibit that kind of prejudice. But something was eating John, and if John had seen—and Gale harboured no doubts—then Gale wanted to read it in his eyes.

They read books, mostly. They found meaning. Gale wasn’t sure he could decide what this had meant for him until he learned from John’s eyes what it meant for them.

He waited another fifteen minutes, then he went to bed.

#seven degrees east #my writing #MotA #Masters of the Air #Curtis Biddick #Jack Kidd #Joseph 'Bubbles' Payne #Harry Crosby #Gale 'Buck' Cleven #Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal #Herbert Nash #John 'Bucky' Egan #Bucky x Buck #MotA fic

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sadcharactersrmykryptonite · 7 months

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Addiction ( in only friends ) and how it impedes your perception of the situations you are in

Never thought I needed to write this but I have been seeing so many posts blaming ray and I wanted to get it out. Later if I have time I would write a dissertation about this topic because it's extremely important.

Disclaimer : Know that I am not absolving ray of his wrongdoings nor am I blaming his behaviour on other characters but we know the root of his behaviour but it seems like there is a lack of understanding.

All this is from my observations with people I know who have addiction so this is my personal experience and not me telling everyone how they should act or feel.

.................

Ray is a selfish person. We all know that. But so is Boston , so is mew, so is cheum. So why is ray getting the most hate. Because he is a drunkard. During ep 3 or 4 , when we saw ray at his most vulnerable , everyone was going oh poor ray. And now everyone is telling the opposite. Now I see a lot of people asking why mew and the others not taking care of him, even me. But this is why. See how easy it was for a major part of the audience to forget his addiction and completely blame ray. Now imagine if you are the one who has to deal with ray on a daily basis for two long years. It's exhausting , overwhelming and frustrating and eventually you are going to form an antipathy. My drunkard friend is not going to listen to my well intentioned warnings so why should I care. You can see it clearly in mews behaviour. Mew has given up caring.

Loved ones start giving up , because the pain the addicted one causes is too much to bear. And that is the reality of addiction. This was most clearly shown through rue from euphoria. Her mother, friends, sister cared about her but you can see the toll it creates on everyone.

Addiction is a harmful disease and one of the reason why is that it morphs the user into someone unrecognisable. Look at sober ray, his moments with sand, he's adorable, fiesty, sassy and very charming. But what he becomes when he is drunk or high is a selfish guy who doesn't care about anyone but himself.

Once again I am not blaming the entire thing on alcohol, but trying to say how that much addiction can cause one to act in ways they won't normally wont when sober.

Alcohol and drugs is ray's escape from his inner thoughts and his shitty lonely life. But he's got so dependent on it and his pain is too much that he greatly needs that buzz of happiness that alcohol and drugs gives him. He's so dependent on it that he can't be happy without it. I know that most portrayel of alcoholics have them be absolutely useless and trashed. But ray is not like that, which is even more dangerous , because he is a functional alcoholic.

And it's dangerous because it won't be clear to a lot of people about how he needs help. And more importantly it won't be clear to him about how he needs help. When ray thinks to himself all he can focus on is that he can do chores, he can talk to people normally, he can walk in a straight line, he is not an alcoholic in the way we are always shown, but he is. He is seen with drinks almost all the time, he spends the most time in a bar , he is probably walking around conscious but still drunk. And as long as he is a functional alcoholic , ray would never go or ask for help.

When you are that dependent on this , any tiny problem would have you running to escape , because the escape as an option is easy then doing the messy work of knowing when you are wrong or wronged and dealing with the emotions that come with it. We have seen ray doing it, especially when paired with mew.

When you are that dependent you don't see that you need help. To ray he is having fun, he's not miserable when he is drunk or high , when he is in that state he gets everything. So what if he is called a burden, he is still on top of the world. So when people say to him that he is an alcoholic he's confused , because he is not an alcoholic. He's having fun.

Now during ep 8 we are actually seeing him being selfish and an asshole. During ep 6 we saw him very effectively damaging his relationships. The common point between these two eps is that he is under the influence. Those are his sober thoughts but he won't say it aloud when he is sober but when he's drunk he doesn't have any inhibitions so he says everything that comes to him. Combine that with the pain of being called a burden , of unrequited love and he tries to escape from the feelings by drinking again and it forms a vicious circle. It came to a point where he lashed out and as always hurt people under the influence of something can be destructive.

I am not saying that what he did was right or the pain he caused was justifiable or should be forgiven. They shouldn't but rays feeling shouldn't be minimised too. Addiction is complex and asking for help can be a hard task. And in the case of ray I don't think he realises that he needs help. That's the problem with addicts, they don't know that the thing that's giving them happiness is the same thing that's causing them harm. Or they know but they are far too gone that they don't care.

Be it smoking , drugs or alcohol or anything else , people use it for escape but the usage becomes too much that their entire day is only fulfilled , when they get their daily dose of happiness from it. Which changes their perception to accomodate one and only one thing , the next fix, the next drink. Which is why they become selfish cause their entire world is wrapped around that bottle and everything else comes secondary.

Addiction has the potential to completely change a person. You know the person you grew up with or you know personally is somewhere inside there but what you see when they are under the influence is someone you never dreamed your loved one's can be. And it's painfull.

Another way people with addiction is dehumanised is that everyone uses them. You want a drink ? that person will always have a bottle with them, you need a fix that guy knows a person , want to have fun that person will show you a good time . I think a lot of people have heard these phrases.

For most people it's harmless fun, for the addict it's an ego boost . And it encourages them to continue that lifestyle. Which is what happened with raymew and the entire friends group in general.

They use ray but they are willfully blind to the harm that causes him. Mew was the one who wanted to try smoking, coke and party, ray never forced him, because for ray that is his happy place. Substances is the one thing that gives him happiness, he does not have the capacity to stop or think of it as wrong.

To ray , mew has finally chosen him, he is finally doing the things he loves. He's not going to stop mew from doing anything when he thinks he finally getting what he always wanted. Ands it toxic and it's not right but that's the reality of an addict.

And he should be happy about it but he isn't because he needs sand. And that is what confused him to spiral further and ignore his emotions and snort coke. Because that's the best thing he can do, run away.

Why is sand so important to ray ? I said in an another post that sands generosity is out of the ordinary. He's mature for his age in a way that makes me feel like he has known an addict before.

And ray needs that. He doesn't need enablers. he needs someone to physically stop him from taking it. Or atleast make him realise that what he is doing is dangerous. And sand is the one who's going to do it.

Thing is it's not sand's job to do it. But till ep 8 he was choosing to be that person. Saying that ray is forcing sand to do something is just taking away the agency from sand. He's not a kid. He's making his own decisions.

And if he is helping him it won't be an easy journey. If they are bringing the addiction rehab plot line into the show then I could see a scene happening that is reminiscent of the car chase scene from euphoria.

#only friends #only friends the series #only friends ray #only friends meta #ofts ray #ofts #only friends sand #only friends spoilers #ofts sand #alcohol #alcoholism #tw drugs #rue #euphoria

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