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awanderingdeal · 3 years

Note

I vote leo meeting the harvard team! 💕

So this fic has been a bit of a mare to write, but we are here!

You can read the first part of this here

Rating: T

CW: Alcohol, academic superiority complex and coming out.

Logan, Finn, Leo, Percy, Will and the general Sweater Weather universe belongs to @lumosinlove. The other team members were made up by me for this fic.

“Okay, tell me their names again,” Leo said, tugging at the rolled neck of his sweater as he shut the car door.

“Nutty,” Finn laughed. “There’s not going to be a pop quiz. We’ll introduce you when we meet people.”

Leo scowled, letting Logan thread their fingers together. It was weird being able to do this in public still and Leo couldn’t help but glance around. “I just don’t want to make a fool of myself.” Logan squeezed his hand reassuringly, meeting Leo’s gaze with a soft smile.

“Nobody expects you to know anything. And everybody’s great.” Logan wrinkled his nose like he’d just smelt something bad. “Except Wesley, he’s an ass, but I’ll point him out.”

Like many of the others in Harvard square, the building was all exposed brick and white accents, blending in seamlessly with those around it. Inside was different, more modern. Leo didn’t get to see much of the first floor, the one dedicated to the restaurant Finn, Logan and the rest of the team had dined at previous evening, before he was ushered up a grand staircase, but he’d seen the photographs. The cherry blossom ceilings and walls of glass provided the perfect backdrop for the instagram feeds of the hoards of celebrities and influencers that flocked there. Hence his surprise when, after checking their invitations again, an employee pushed open a set of double doors to reveal a room that more resembled a 1920’s speakeasy than anything 21st century. A loud cheer went up as they crossed the threshold.

“Is this a team thing?” Leo mouthed at Logan.

He got his answer from Percy Marshall. Leo had met him a few times before when they’d played the Rangers. “You’re the last to arrive,” Percy chuckled. “I’d say I was surprised, but that would be a lie.” He slapped a hand playfully against Finn’s bicep. Is this outfit change number 52, Finn? Don’t worry, you didn’t disappoint. You look wonderful.”

“Fuck you, Marshy,” Finn laughed. “Tremz was on a call to his sisters actually.”

“Oh, I do apologise,” Percy clasped his hand to his chest. “We wouldn’t dare break up a Tremblay soiree.”

“You’re an ass,” Logan scoffed, plucking at Finn’s slacks. “I was only talking to them because Finn was taking so long. Did you know there are several shades of mustard and only one of them goes with this shirt?”

“Oh look, they argue like an old married couple too,” William Morgan, another of those Leo knew, and Percy’s teammate on the Rangers, teased. “Marshy, these hands are looking too empty. Get these men a drink.”

“Aye, aye, capt’n.” Leo set to follow as Percy led the way to the bar, stumbling slightly as he found Will’s firm grasp on his shoulder stopping his movement. Logan turned as his fingers slipped from his hand.

“Go ahead, Tremzy. I’m going to introduce Leo to some of the team. We want all the gossip without you two around to censor him.”

Logan frowned. “I’m not sure -”

“Relax, Logan. This isn’t a hazing. We’ll be right over there,” Will pointed towards a group perched on stools around two of the tables in the centre of the room, a mix of the old team and what Leo assumed were their partners. “Knut’s a big boy. He can object for himself if he really doesn’t want to come.”

“I’m sure I can hold my own,” Leo cocked his head slightly and smiled. “You better not leave Harzy with Percy for too long. They’ll be three shots down by now.”

The next few hours passed in a whirlwind of introductions. Leo had lost count of the number of hands he'd shaken and the new names he'd learned. It reminded him of those first few days in Gryffindor, being shuffled around from place to place and everybody telling him he'd get used to it.

The quiet of the bathroom was a welcome reprieve to the chaos. “Sweetheart,” Leo laughed, listening to Finn sing to himself in the stall. “Are you okay? You’ve been in there a while.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” A concerningly loud crash preceded the door being pushed open. “I’m here.”

“You’re drunk,” Leo chuckled.

Finn pulled his hands from under the stream of water, shaking droplets everywhere as he squeezed the tips of his thumb and forefinger together. “Maybe just the tiniest bit.”

Leo shook his head fondly. “Let’s go and find Lo.” Glancing back to check Finn was following him proved to be a mistake. “Shit, I’m sorry,” he apologised, rubbing at his forehead and stepping back from the wall of muscle he’d just crashed into. Of course, the tall man with his hair pulled back into a loose ponytail was the one person Leo hadn’t yet met.

“Leo, this is James. Call him Hunter,” Finn grinned with his hand resting in the small of Leo’s back. "Hunter, this is -"

"Leo Knut. I know. Everybody knows," Hunter said and Leo noted the familiar notes of his own accent in the words. He faltered with his hand thrust halfway in Leo's direction, letting it fall back by his side. "Oh fuck, sorry man. Did you want to introduce him as your boyfriend? Go ahead."

"It's cool, no worries." Finn shrugged, the rounds of his cheeks tinged with the slightest of blushes. "Aww, what the heck!" He squared his shoulders, standing a little taller, the corners of his mouth splitting with pride. "Hunter, this is Leo, my boyfriend."

Hunter extended his hand again for Leo to shake. “Nice to meet you. Please excuse me, I have to use the bathroom now, but we’ll talk later.”

***

"Boys." The call had come from behind them and Logan groaned low in his chest as they turned to acknowledge it.

"Wes! You made it," Finn smiled, the corners of his mouth tight. "We weren't sure you'd be able to. With all those big meetings you have to attend and such. Is your wife, Renee, wasn’t it, here? I'd love to meet her."

Something flickered in Wes' smug expression. "They stayed in California. Nate has a very busy schedule. Harvard is very important to me, as you know, so I came alone."

“Isn’t Nate three?” Logan blinked.

“You have to give them a good start if you want them to get them to get into a good college these days, I’m sure you understand. Where was it you went, Leo?"

Leo pursed his lips, letting the same calm wash over him that he channelled for interviews. “I didn’t go. I got drafted straight out of high school.”

“Oh, well, that’s a shame,” Wes said. “College isn’t for everybody though, is it?”

Logan bristled beside him, and Leo placed a placating hand on his shoulder. “Indeed,” he blinked. “I didn’t need my intelligence validated by a degree then, and I still don’t now. And I was hardly about to turn down an offer from The Gryffindor Lions now, was I?”

Wes grumbled something that sounded vaguely like an agreement before turning on his heel and walking off in a manner that Leo could only describe as petulant.

“You’re so hot,” Finn took Leo’s face between his hands and pressed a kiss to his lips. “I’m going to get a drink. Do you want another?”

“Please,” Leo nodded. Logan raised his still mostly full glass as a rejection of the offer.

“You should have let me punch him,” Logan huffed. “He would have deserved it.”

"And get blood on your shirt? Let’s leave that on the ice, shall we?” Leo tugged at the lapels of Logan’s jacket.

***

"So," Logan started as they claimed one of the low tables in the corner, a little tucked away from the rest of the room. "What do you think?"

"It's always nice seeing where you two started," Leo hummed, threading his fingers through the thin curls on the nape of Logan's neck. "I just don't know how you used to do this everyday. Live amongst all this energy. The guys all seem great, but it's a lot even now and I'm assuming you've all mellowed somewhat with age."

"I am not old," Logan scoffed. "Mais non, I agree. Wasn't always like this though. There's more than one graduating class here and we've been apart a long time. A lot of excitement."

"Sorry, sorry, I got caught up with Biscuit. He has triplets now, isn't that crazy?" Finn said, pressing a glass into Logan’s hand and setting Leo’s in front of him before flopping onto the couch opposite. "One Margarita for the fine sir."

"Thanks, Harzy," Leo laughed lightly.

"I can't believe him and Vanessa are still together," Logan hummed, taking a long sip of his drink. He leaned back, crossing his left leg over his right thigh and snaked his arm across the dark leather, brushing his fingers against Leo's shoulder. "I only introduced them because she was flirting with you at that party, the one just after we got back from winter break my junior year, and I wanted to distract her."

"Oh, so that's why you got all moody," Finn said. "She wasn't flirting, she needed help with an essay, idiot."

"The fact you remember Logan's mood on a night seven years ago says more about you than him," Leo snorted.

"First of all, Tremzy being grumpy? That's just a good guess. Second, some of us were still stupid at 20, Knutty." Finn sighed wistfully. "Hey, at least it doesn't feel like I'm being stabbed in the chest these days when I think about it. Progress, right?"

Logan tipped his glass in Finn's direction, nodding his head briefly. "I'll cheers to that."

"To -" Leo started, letting the toast die off as another of Finn and Logan's old team mates approached. He hoped the disappointment he felt wasn't written across his face; whilst he hadn't really expected to be left alone for too long, he had hoped for the brief respite to have lasted longer.

"Hey." The newcomer had his hand shoved into his pockets and his shoulders stooped, almost as if he was trying to hide himself. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"Ken!" Finn patted the empty seat next to him. "Of course not. Come, sit."

Leo extended his arm, offering his hand. "Nice to meet you. Ken was it? I'm Leo."

"Ken's what the team always called me. Don't really hear it much these days." Leo thought he saw something sad in the smile sent his way. "My real name is Obi."

"That's because you went off the radar," Logan gave a pointed look.

"About that -" Obi swiped Finn's drink, ignoring his disgruntled protest. He drained what was left of it, pulling at an non-existent loose thread on his sweater. "I wanted to say thank you, you know. For having the guts to come out. I know Black and Lupin were first, but that was forced wasn’t it. You made a choice. I know that must have been hard. It was one hell of a ballsy move."

Leo looked between Finn and Logan, expecting them to answer, but neither of them spoke. "We didn't have much of a choice, not if we didn't want to be watching our back every second of every day."

"It was still brave," Obi muttered. "I couldn't have done it."

"Ken, what are you saying?" Logan never did have much patience for others taking their time to get to the point, even though he was a fan of the scenic route himself.

"They gave you a whole Harvard degree and you need to ask that question?" Obi huffed a laugh. "I'm gay. I met Marco, my now husband at the end of senior year, and freaked out. I didn't know how to make these two worlds work, so I didn't. I moved to DC with him, and started a new life. I'm an accountant, he works in marketing. We have four rats, and a Vizsla called Poppy. It's all very domestic. I love it, but I was a coward.”

"You're not a coward. You don't owe that information to anybody, Ken. Not the others, not the media, not the NHL and not us. Not now, not then, not ever.” Finn took a breath, holding up his finger to signal he wasn’t finished. “Besides, it's not as if Lo and I planned this. We went into this with every intention of stuffing this deep, deep into the depths of denial, never for anybody to find out. Including ourselves. And then Nutty came along.”

Obi smiled at Leo, turning his attention back to Finn. "When did you become Gay Yoda?"

"I spend way too much time in our psych's office. Just spreading the wisdom. Heather would be proud."

"Do the others know?" Logan asked.

"Not yet, I think I'd like them to though."

Logan shifted, leaning forward in his seat. "There's no rush, Ken. We've got your back, whatever you decide."

"So, do you have photos?" Leo cocked his head. "We got to show off. Now it's your turn. Even if it's only for us."

"Of Marco?"

"I'm sure he's wonderful, but I was actually talking about Poppy. And the rats," Leo teased.

There were moments when Leo wondered whether they had made the right decision. When he was playing in front of hostile crowds, or fending off stupid media questions, or blocking bigots on twitter. And then there were moments when he knew the decision they had made was 100% perfect. Right now, that was one of those moments.

#leo knut #finn o'hara #logan tremblay #rating:t #cw:alcohol #cw: academic superiority complex #cw: coming out #sweater weather #lumosinlove

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ckret2 · 3 years

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Alright let’s talk GVK spoilers!!!

My reactions as best I can remember them!

- love how Kong is humanized from the very first scene, like every time he shows up he’s humanized so much more than other titans are. If that was at the expense of other titans being made likable I wouldn’t enjoy it so much, but like, Godzilla is made pretty lovable over the course of Monsterverse, Mothra is too, and all the titans featured for long are given recognizable emotions that let us see them as more intelligent and feeling than “just” animals; so all of them are made understandable/likable/sympathetic. But of them all, Kong is the only one really humanized. Which makes sense, because like, big monkey! Basically our distant cousin!

- And they kept playing, like, normal songs for him, which cracked me up.

- I really appreciated how you could SEE the titans in this movie. After all the weather effects to hide the titans in KOTM, there was such a clear difference in this one from the very start. Kong in the daylight! Godzilla makes his first attack at night, and even then you can see him much more clearly than you can for most of KOTM! Nice!

- after the Iwi were portrayed as silent stoic witnesses in Skull Island, I really appreciated that they took an Iwi character, made her a main character, and gave her dialogue and a real role to play in the story while also keeping her deaf/mute. I think that was a good way to improve on the way that the Iwi got got sidelined in the last movie while still maintaining the worldbuilding!

- I didn’t appreciate so much that, y’know, they murdered the rest of her people off-screen in order to do it. Couldn’t they have gone “her parents died so she got adopted by a Monarch agent that was close to her family, but like, the rest of her tribe is fine”? Or at the very least “their island got fucked up so they had to be evacuated but like they’re settling in somewhere else”? “They’re living under this island dome with Kong and they know what’s up and Monarch’s keeping them in the loop and they decided they’re chill with their new dome home, but this one girl likes to go on adventures with Monarch”? Something? Did we have to kill them all off? Y’all make up an entire fictional indigenous culture and then murder them off-screen when you don’t need them? Just let them live.

- a few minutes in I was like “hold on, we’ve got two characters that speak sign language, we’ve got a giant gorilla, gorillas learn sign language, is there any reason they can’t teach Kong?” and then later I was like “OOOOOH!!” Humans and titans learning how to communicate with each other has been one of my favorite themes to explore in Monsterverse fanfic so I was absolutely tickled to see it getting explored in canon, too.

- That said I think it’s hilarious that the girl managed to teach Kong to sign without, like... anybody seeing. Kong’s hands are above the tree line and there are cameras everywhere, how did NOBODY with Monarch see him signing.

- Bernie’s weaponized being an annoying coworker to such a degree it can only be called an art, and I really appreciated it.

- Godzilla’s extra chonky in this movie and I dig it. Roomie noted he was extra crocodilian and I dig that too.

- “There’s been no confirmed titan sightings in three years” I don’t buy that for a minute. They’re BIG. Rodan NESTS IN VOLCANOES. They found a MOTHRA EGG. Humans have A SCARILY WELL-FUNDED ORGANIZATION DEDICATED SOLELY TO FOLLOWING TITANS AROUND. Like, most of the lore in GVK that I don’t personally like, I can be like “eh... I can tweak it just a little bit with headcanons to make it work for me...” but NO confirmed titan sightings? You expect me to believe ALL of them moved underground when we’d previously seen them all prefer to live above ground? You expect me to believe that now that they’re all AWAKE, they learned how to HIDE?? Uh-uh. And at the end of KOTM there was stuff in the credits about using titan droppings as biofuel, obviously they’re still walking around up top! Can’t take that from me. Nope.

- Who the FUCK is Ren Serizawa and how is he related to Ishiro Serizawa? IS he related? Maybe they just dropped the surname as another “yeah this is a Godzilla movie for Godzilla fans” easter egg but I have a hard time believing that he can’t be somehow related to the other character with the Very Important Last Name who was so important in the last two Godzilla movies. If he is related I’m sure it’s been explained in a tie-in comic or the novelization or something, I’ll look it up later.

- I had to look up how much weight huge battleships can carry while writing a KOTM fic where Ghidorah hitches a ride on one, and y’all, I had to pull weird gravity-negating magic to get him to ride on that boat. Godzilla and Kong woulda sunk that boat like a rock. All I could think during that scene is “this wouldn’t work and I know that because I DID THE RESEARCH and I wasn’t even getting PAID.” I’ll choose to believe that Monarch gets special heavy duty ships designed to carry titans but nobody mentioned it because it wasn’t relevant to Kong’s journey.

- The bit where they could see where Godzilla was swimming because he’d got half a ship hooked to him that was bobbing around on the surface, didn’t Jaws do something like that with a buoy? It’s been ages since I’ve seen Jaws. Anyway good reference.

- Insert “they’re gonna need a bigger boat” joke

- I LOVED the part where they shut down all the ships to get Godzilla to leave. Both because, one, it’s a spectacular callback to KOTM’s “turn off all the guns so he knows we’re not a threat” that makes it seem like now that’s just what Monarch knows what to do to get G to chill out, and two... we know that Godzilla backs off either when he’s killed his enemy or when his enemy has yielded to him. At the end of KOTM—and the end of GVK—the act of yielding is presented as very ceremonial and uniform across species: everyone lowers anything they’ve got that could be dangerous (claws, fangs, beaks, axes) and bows to show Godzilla they’re not gonna fight. Battleships, obviously, can’t bow, but even without being inducted into whatever secret titan cultural intricacies might be going on, humans have figured out their own way to “bow” to Godzilla: cut all the power, so their ships can’t move and can’t use weapons. I know the movie presented it as “playing dead,” but c’mon, if Godzilla could hear MechaG power up from halfway around the planet then he could hear that Kong’s heart was still beating, and he’s been around enough boats to know humans can turn them off and on when they want. The humans bowed to Godzilla. He accepted that they yielded and left.

- Mark Russell looked like such a dad in this movie, like he’s retired 100% from being a rugged action hero and now he’s just Pure Dad. I like him better when he’s a dad, it’s a good development for him. He got like 3 lines and I’m like “I appreciate this character development.”

- Despite all my qualms about how conspiracy theories and extremist groups are handled in Monsterverse (and WHICH conspiracy theories they decide to reference), I really love Madison and Bernie’s dynamic. The adult man who’s the excitable wide-eyed believer in every BS conspiracy you can possibly imagine; and then the serious, severe Teenage Girl On A Mission who’s hypercompetent because she was raised for five years by a friggin doomsday cult militia; and despite having wildly different personalities they’re just, in total agreement about everything. Handled just a BIT differently (like, leaving out the more gross IRL conspiracies) they would be a wildly fun comedic duo—especially with Josh the Only Sane Man coming along as the hapless sidekick. And they all play off of each other so well! Both in a comedic sense, and in more serious moments—when Bernie talked about his wife, there was a real moment of empathy between him and Madison with very little said. I’d watch an entire movie just about the three of them. I’d watch a TV show.

- On the one hand I wasn’t too much of a fan of KOTM’s “all titans... are inherently In Tune With Nature... nature has a Balance, because that’s a Real Thing and not an anthropocentric concept to describe how we like nature to act, and they automatically restore it... because they’re like, some kinda borderline divinities or something... we should probably be worshipping them...” thing; but, now that it was totally absent in GVK, I sorta miss it. Like I feel like there needs to be a balance, a few humans who are like “i lowkey worship these dudes?” and a few others who are like “they’re cool but like, that’s a lil extreme” and that neither side be presented as Right in how they regard titans’ relationship with nature.

- “All titans come from THE HOLLOW EARTH” nah I don’t buy that it’s silly. Basically, what I object to is the idea that all titans have some sort of intrinsic similarity (they all come from the same hitherto-unknown location; they all are part of the same pack that has the same alpha; they all are fueled/fed by the same energy source; etc) rather than letting them be SEPARATE species whose only unifying traits are “they’re all big enough to fuck everything up everywhere they go” and “they’re big enough that the typically-insurmountable barriers between different biomes (mountain ranges, valleys, long distances with terrible weather) aren’t insurmountable for them, so even if they’re specialized in different environments they still all have to deal with each other pretty often.” I’ll make some exceptions for convergent evolution (i.e., claiming multiple titans developed similar traits that are relatively easy to spontaneously evolve and a prerequisite for a creature to survive at such a large size). But I can’t buy “this big gorilla has more biologically in common with this big crocodile-iguana than he does with, say, gorillas,” or most of the other “all these titans have THIS IN COMMON” claims that Monsterverse makes, including “everyone’s from hollow earth.” So I’m tossing that out the window and substituting my own headcanons. Some might’ve evolved there but some evolved on the surface. Maybe a majority of them like ducking in and out of the hollow earth like some kind of titan shortcut system. Kong’s species, I can buy, IS native to hollow earth, considering that they built a whole-ass society down there with tools and architecture.

- I’m SO curious about the little underground Kong home, the Godzilla motif in the floor, and the axe that appeared to be made with a Godzilla scute. What’s the story there??? We know Godzilla’s species and Kong’s species are ancient rivals. Is it because Kong’s species hunted Godzilla’s to steal their scutes to make weapons, seeing them as a valuable resource the way, like, early humans considered woolly mammoths a valuable resource—thus making that Godzilla on the floor equivalent to cave art of mammoths made by people who hunted them—until the Godzillas got pissed and started fighting back en masse? Or were Godzillas and Kongs already enemies when Kongs decided to start making weapons out of their corpses? Did they use to be allies, fighting together, with Godzillas voluntarily offering shed scutes and/or bones of their deceased members to Kongs, and that place used to be a shared home until they started fighting?

- What about that power source, is it something that was already there that both Kongs and Godzillas started to deliberately harvest for technology/atomic breath? Or did Godzillas automatically channel that stuff and Kongs exploited/borrowed/traded with Godzillas to utilize it too? Or is the power from Godzillas who collaboratively poured a bunch of power into the place thus that Kongs were able to use it too? I doubt Godzilla’s species CREATED all that weird energy but the question remains of whether, like, they channel it FROM underground, or naturally produce the same thing in their own bodies, or what.

- Godzilla using his atomic breath to dig a hole STRAIGHT TO KONG just to KICK HIS ASS is hilarious. How lucky that Hong Kong just HAPPENS to be straight over Kong’s house! Were all the tunnels to the hollow earth made by pissed off Godzillas who wanted to kick monkey ass??

- I loved the aesthetic of the battle scene in Hong Kong, with the brightly colored neon building outlines, VERY cool look. The choreography of the battle scene was great too, especially

- we literally broke into applause when Kong shoved the axe handle in Godzilla’s mouth. Love it, perfect callback, that was the ONE thing from the original King Kong Vs Godzilla I was hoping to see referenced and there it was.

- You could really see a difference in how Kong and Godzilla fought—Kong doing a better job at using tools and the environment, Godzilla fighting more like a reptile. They seemed to emphasize Godzilla’s more animalistic behaviors in this movie to accomplish that contrast—he was down on all fours and moving like a crocodile more often, he was clawing at Kong’s chest—but even though it seemed a bit different of a combat technique it also didn’t seem out of place compared to how he fought in prior movies. And we’ve already seen that if Godzilla’s involved in a fight and one of the combatants knows how to use the environment, it’s typically not gonna be Godzilla. (See: Ghidorah using the reflection in a building’s windows to see what’s behind him, and recognizing a nearby power source and biting it to juice himself up.)

- So many of Godzilla’s enemies seem to have specialized in negating his atomic breath in order to combat him! The MUTOs directly suppress his ability to use it—and it makes sense that that’s an inborn ability they have, since they evolved to use Godzilla’s species as prey. Kong has a weapon that both acts as a shield to absorb the breath and turn it back against Godzilla’s species—they didn’t evolve to counter Godzilla, but they developed tools once a rivalry happened. Ghidorah’s the exception—which makes sense, since he came from space—but even at that we see him using tactics specifically to take into account Godzilla’s most powerful weapon (such as keeping one head on lookout for when he starts glowing so that they know when they need to dodge).

- LOVED the reveal that MechaG was based off of Ghidorah’s brain, it has vibes of both the Kiryu Saga and the way that Heisei MechaG is based off of Mecha-King Ghidorah. Not the most surprising plot twist, since we’d theorized that they might use San to make MechaG, but I wasn’t 100% sure they were gonna go with it until they finally did. Even when I was going “huh, the mecha pilot’s chamber looks weirdly organic” I didn’t make the connection to WHY until the reveal, lol.

- “Ghidorah’s necks are so long that the heads have to communicate with each other telepathically” that’s COMPLETELY WILD but I love it, it follows very well from their prior portrayal as telepathic empaths in Heisei, it lines up with their emphasis on electricity (because BRAINWAVES AND ELECTRICITY, hey ho movie monster pseudo science!), and it very much compliments my own private headcanon that they’ve got some psychic/mind control abilities.

- The movie ended with both “Godzilla won, technically” but also “since they teamed up as equals, the ending doesn’t FEEL like ‘Godzilla wins, Kong loses’ but rather ‘they both won against a common foe’” and since I’m on both Team Godzilla and Team They Should Be Friends, I’m happy with this outcome. Plus since the last time they fought, the Japanese movie company graciously let the American monster win, so it’s only polite that the American movie company graciously let the Japanese monster win.

- There were just a few too many humans in this movie. I was intrigued by Ren but we didn’t get much out of him, but like I guess somebody had to be in the pilot’s seat other than the Apex CEO. Didn’t care for the author of the hollow earth book, I feel like his role was superfluous. Didn’t need the Apex CEO’s daughter there at all, coulda done without her. How about this, combine all three roles. Instead of having a whole-ass author who knows about the hollow earth, just casually reference that Rick from KOTM wrote a book about it since he was the expert, and (since he wasn’t in this movie) say that he tragically died going to explore the hollow earth himself, and that way we’ve got the book with the “titans are from there” theory AND an excuse to share the “humans die when they go underground” info. Now, have Ren be working for Apex as a pilot for Mechagodzilla, but have him be MechaG’s pilot because he’s also a good pilot in general, and can fly those HEAV things. Have Apex send him to Monarch to be like “hey, you guys trust me right, since I’m Ishiro Serizawa’s relative? We at Apex have heard all about your failed hollow earth expedition, and due to Ishiro I’ve got some past ties to Monarch so I’ve got high clearance with y’all, so I could bring over this useful Apex tech that’d let you go underground and use what I know about hollow earth from my past time at Monarch to help guide things.” Once they’ve got the little chunk of energy stuff and go topside, he hustles it straight to Apex and straps into his seat to run MechaG. Bam, you’ve combined “person who knows enough about hollow earth to help the expedition,” “person who represents Apex’s interests and gets the energy,” and “person who pilots MechaG” into one character, in a way that takes three flat/underdeveloped characters and turns them into a single interesting character with a lot going on and some intriguing ties to the rest of the cast.

I think that’s everything?? Hoo.

#gvk #godzilla vs kong #gvk spoilers #godzilla vs kong spoilers #godzilla #meta

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missymurphy1985 · 3 years

Text

Nobody's Perfect (part5)

Warning - smut (always)

Taglist Taglist @queenshelby @margoo0 @being-worthy @peakyscillian @ntmynouis @janelongxox @elenavampire21 @noctvrnalmoth @ysmmsy @cloudofdisney @lauren-raines-x

You'd spent the rest of that afternoon discussing your characters, and rehearsing your rewritten scenes together. The new dynamic working well for you both off screen and on, and both Steve and the Director Anto couldn't help but be impressed at the new found chemistry the two of you had together over the last week. James, the assistant director, had pulled Cillian away for a chat in his trailer, and he had a face like thunder when he came out afterwards.

"Hey... You okay?" You bumped into him as he was walking back to his trailer.

"I'm good." He squeezed your arm, but carried on walking away from you.

"James had a word then." Sophie's voice behind you startled you.

"About what?"

"There's rumours flying around - about the two of you, have you not heard them?"

"What rumours?"

"The two of you? Sleeping together?" You scoffed at her.

"God, don't be ridiculous Soph, he's nearly 20 years older than me for goodness sake..."

"Y/n... Just be careful. Okay?" You were stunned - what business was it of anyone's who you shared a bed with? You looked round to see if anyone was nearby, wanting to go to his trailer but there were cast and crew members everywhere. You headed to your own trailer instead.

"Sophie told me what James said Cill..." You texted him, sitting down on your sofa.

"Why can't I just be allowed to move on? Why is there always something that's standing in my way huh?" A quick reply.

"What do we do?"

"If he finds out we're together off camera it could cause you real problems y/n. He sees it as massively unprofessional.. thinks it'll affect the way we are together.. I think it's fucking bullshit personally, you're playing my wife for god's sake..."

"Not married yet Cill... That's next week's scene."

"We need to spend less time together off set.. we're clearly raising suspicions." Your heart lurched, but you knew what he said made sense. At least until filming finished next week, then it was no one's business what happened.

"Okay... Gonna be hard though.."

"Can't wait til I can see you again properly xx"

"Me too. I've seen Clara's wedding dress already, it's beautiful Cill xx"

"Not as beautiful as you will be in it xx"

"I'm heading back to Ireland for a couple of days in the morning - mam's birthday. I'll be back Sunday night xx"

"I'm heading to my sister's place in Liverpool tonight. Wish I could spend it with you though xx"

"Me too babe. Gonna be a long weekend without you xx"

The weekend was the longest you'd been apart since day one of filming, and it was just as difficult as you thought it would be. You'd tried not to bother him so he could spend time with his family, but he couldn't get enough of you. He'd send you photos of him and his brother drinking in Cork city, you replied with photos of you and your sister in Liverpool.

You were waiting onset, your hair pristine, makeup done, and the long, white, flowing dress fitted to perfection, even over the small 'bump' you were wearing underneath your dress - Clara was 5 months pregnant. You hadn't had chance to see Cillian since his return the night before - his flight back had been delayed and he didn't get in until nearly 3am. All you were waiting for was Paul Anderson, his character Arthur, was to walk you down the aisle, after your onscreen father had been killed off in an earlier episode. Paul came onset and couldn't take his eyes off you. He pulled you close for a gentle hug, earning a glare from your hair and makeup lady Jenny. He chuckled and pulled away, before leaning in to whisper in your ear.

"Cillian's a very lucky man, and I hope to god he realises that y/n." You pulled back sharply, shaking your head.

"There's nothing between me and Cill, Paul.." he winked at you and offered you his arm, ready to film the scene. Jenny came over to fix your veil over your head, covering your face. The main director, Anto, called Action, and the wedding march music played. The doors to the small newly built chapel opened and you and Arthur walked down the aisle. You could see Cillian in his navy blue suit at the end, his eyes on you. You could almost feel the emotion radiating from him.

You stood next to him, and he lifted the veil over your head. You could tell he was fighting Cillian, and trying to remain as Tommy, but he couldn't stop himself winking at you when he knew the camera wouldn't be on him, making you blush. His eyes also wandered down to the bump under your dress, and you could tell it was bringing back painful memories for him, but he held it together to get the scene done.

The scene complete, it was time for the cast to move onto the reception set. You were about to walk with everyone before an arm pulled you behind a curtain.

"Paul's covering me for 10minutes, y/n, I needed to see you..." His lips were on yours in seconds, as he pulled you down a small set of steps into a secluded backstage room. Locking the door behind him, he pulled you back to him quickly. You could feel how hard he was underneath the trousers and you gasped as he started to hitch your dress up your legs.

"Fuck.. Cillian we can't do this here..."

"We've got... 7 minutes.. yes we can..." He spun you round and leaned you over an amplifier, must've been a spare for the music they needed for the wedding scene. Lifting your dress over your hips, you heard him unzip his trousers and line himself up against you.

"No underwear?" He questioned.

"Tight fitting dress... Shit..." He pushed himself in and quickly built up a powerful rhythm. You'd gone on the pill after your little mishap earlier that month.

"Fuck.. you got tighter.."

He pounded into you, you had to cover your mouth to keep yourself quiet. Your much needed orgasm was building rapidly, as you heard him panting behind you, his hips snapping into you harder.

Before you knew it, you came hard over him, and he followed quickly with a deep groan - hot streams of cum flowing into you like a fountain. He pulled out slowly, and you felt a tissue between your legs as he cleaned you up - you couldn't risk a trace of anything being left on you before you did the next scenes. He zipped his trousers up and helped to pull your dress back down, checking both of you over to make sure you still looked as you did before, incredibly you did. He pulled you to stand, and adjusted the bump under your dress slightly.

"You look beautiful, y/n. You really do."

"You look so handsome in that suit Cill..." He kissed you, his hand lingering on the bump a little longer. You felt butterflies, you couldn't help it. Separating, you made your way to the next scene.

Walking into the set, you could see James eyeing you from the corner suspiciously. Cillian was already there, stood with Paul having their hair and makeup readjusted slightly for the new lighting. Jenny waved for you to come to her for the same thing. The penultimate scene for the cast and crew.

You and Cillian were wrapped up in each others arms that evening on the sofa in his hotel room, some cheesy 90s horror film on the TV, but neither of you really paying much attention to it.

"Babe, I think we need to talk..." He said, as he pulled back and you sat up, fingers still entwined with his as you played with the hard skin by his thumb nail.

"Sounds ominous..."

"Filming ends tomorrow... James has already threatened to go to the press about us if we don't stop this.."

"What are you saying, Cill?" You released his hand, preparing yourself for the worst.

"Y/n this is your dream.. and I can't be the one to end that for you.. but at the same time I can't be the one to end this either. I need to know what it is you want? The press will eat us alive - there's 20 years between us.."

"I want you." Not even a glimmer of doubt. "I've been thinking long and hard about this all weekend. If I have to choose Cillian, I choose you. Every time. I don't care about the tabloids."

"Your career -"

"My career means nothing if I don't have you beside me! Don't you want me?"

"Of course I want you, that's not even a question.."

"Then what's the issue? Steve is one of the nicest guys in the industry and he ADORES you.. surely he can't feel the same way as James? I'm sick of sneaking around, pretending like nothing is going on between us! I wanna shout it from the rooftops! I want to be with you properly, and if that means I take a beating from the tabloids then so be it. If it means I'm not in series 2, so be it. There will always be other stories, other roles - there will never be another you..." You leaned forward and captured his lips in yours. He returned the kiss, and pulled you into his lap.

"I'm falling for you.. in fact no, I've fallen for you. Completely. Seeing you in that dress, with the bump underneath.. even though you were Clara, all I saw was y/n. I saw everything. Our future - what could be. It terrifies me but excites the shit outta me at the same time."

"Cillian.. I love you. I've loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you."

"I love you. I'll sort this. Let me talk to Steve tomorrow. James clearly had this weird little power trip going on.. but I'll sort it. You'll be in series 2, I promise you that."

"Even if I'm not - "

"Y/n, I'm executive producer of series 2 - trust me, you'll be in it." You smiled.

"And the press?"

"Fuck the press."

"I'd rather fuck you?" He grinned and kissed you again. Deepening the kiss as you grinded your hips into his, that erection pushing into your core with each push.

"You coming to Ireland with me when we wrap up tomorrow?"

"Try and stop me."

#cillian smut #cillian x fem!reader #cillian murphy #cillian murphy x reader #cillian x smut

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beauregardlionett · 3 years

Text

i think i might understand the concept of home

AO3 Link

Yasha’s car had broken down on the side of the road in some tiny town she only meant to pass through. She hadn’t even read the welcome sign half-a-mile back, so gods knew where she was. Thankfully, there was a shoulder and a sidewalk, so she wasn’t stuck in the middle of traffic. She had the hood popped and stared helplessly down at the tangle of mechanics she did not understand.

Nothing was smoking, so she figured that must be a good thing.

“Need a hand?”

Yasha glanced up, catching sight of a woman standing just outside the coffee shop Yasha broke down in front of. She stood defined in the sunlight, composed of sharp lines and lean muscle, contained by planes of smooth, coffee-colored skin. She had on a simple grey sports bra under denim overalls littered with stains and distressed patches torn in random places on the legs. Her hair was in a low bun sat over what looked like an undercut all tucked messily beneath a backward cap.

Damn...she was hot.

The woman cocked an expectant eyebrow, reminding Yasha she had yet to answer.

“Oh, um...yes?”

Hot Lady smirked and stepped off the curb to stand at Yasha’s shoulder, leaning over the open hood and inspecting the mess. Yasha was busy inspecting the tanned slope of neck to bare shoulder, all of her quite a sight in the midday sunlight.

Gods, was that a tattoo on her back?

With abrupt yet easy precision, Hot Lady hauled herself up onto the lip of Yasha’s truck and shoved her hand between various pieces of metal. Startled, Yasha looked down at the engine, hoping she wouldn’t have to call emergency services for a hand lost in her car engine.

“The alternator might be shot,” Hot Lady said, squinting as she moved her hand around a little.

“What does that mean?” Yasha managed, only a little strangled.

“Means you need to get your car into a shop because you aren’t going to have much luck getting far without it.” Hot Lady removed her hand and gave a little hop back down to the pavement. She wiped her hand carelessly on her overalls and shrugged a little.

“It’s not a super challenging thing to fix, but it will take a minute. I can point you to a good garage if you need.”

“That would be very helpful. Thank you...um...”

“Beauregard,” the woman said, sticking out her hand with a grin. “Call me Beau.”

After hesitating a moment, Yasha grasped Beau’s hand and gave it a tentative shake, cheeks warm. Her face flushed even warmer when Beau raised her eyebrow again, clearly waiting for Yasha’s name.

“Yasha,” she blurted, horrid awkwardness muddying her chest. “I’m Yasha.”

“Nice to meet you, Yasha,” Beau said as she slowly took her hand back. Yasha already like the way her name sounded rolling off of Beau’s tongue - perhaps far too much for someone she just met.

“You might need to shack up somewhere for the night,” Beau said, pulling her phone from her pocket and texting someone. “Depending on how long the garage takes with your car. I haven’t seen you ‘round here before. You got a place to stay?”

“Oh...no,” Yasha managed. “I’m just passing through.”

“Well, I texted my buddy over at the garage to come get your car. He’ll be here soon. There’s only one hotel in this town, and to be honest, it sucks. My buddy Caleb moved most of his stuff out of his apartment, but he hasn’t turned the lease over yet. He got a big wig job two hours from here and they had him start early, despite the fact he still had a month on the lease. You can crash there if you want. I’m pretty sure he left his mattress.”

Yasha blinked, dazed and flabbergasted at the turn this conversation had taken.

“I...what?”

Beau looked up from her phone, fingers pausing in their rapid texting. She seemed to take in Yasha’s stunned expression and grimaced slightly.

“Sorry, that was a lot all at once.” Beau tucked her phone away and crossed her arms over her chest. Yasha recognized the defensive tactic attempting to look casual with ease. She performed that move often enough herself.

“This ‘helping’ thing isn’t my forte - more Jess’ thing. But uh...yeah. If you need a place to stay, you’ve got one. Promise there're no strings attached or anything like that.”

“But...you don’t know me.”

“True,” Beau shrugged. “But it’s not like there’s anything to steal from Caleb’s place. It’s basically an empty apartment he’s not getting anything out of. Might as well put the place to good use.”

“Okay,” Yasha said after a moment of strange quiet. What else was she supposed to say?

Beau blinked up at Yasha, then grinned, wide and delighted. “Cool.”

A few minutes later, a tow truck pulled up. Beau greeted the driver enthusiastically as Yasha watched on, wondering what she had gotten herself into.

“This is it,” Beau said, shoving open the door with her hip as she wrestled the key out of the lock.

Yasha followed Beau in, fingers curled tightly around the strap of her meager duffle bag. The apartment was near barren, as Beau had said. It had a small living area that faded seamlessly into a kitchenette. Down a short hallway appeared to be a bedroom and bathroom, both doors open. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The only sign someone had recently been occupying the space was the old mattress just visible through the bedroom door and the sagging sofa in the living room.

“Sorry there’s no food in the kitchen, but there’s a store about a block from here if you’re up for a walk. I’d hang around but I have to get to a class.”

Yasha twisted to look at Beau, something bubbling up in her chest that felt a lot like gratitude and a little like something indescribable. She watched as Beau fiddled with her key ring, only realizing what was happening when Beau pulled a key off and tossed it to Yasha. She just barely managed to catch it and not make a fool of herself.

“That’s the key to the door for ya. And,” Beau pulled a crumpled, folded piece of paper from her pocket, holding it out to Yasha. “My number, in case you have questions or you need anything. I’m a night owl and an early riser, so chances are I’ll answer whenever.”

“Thank you,” Yasha warbled after a long moment, clutching the key so hard the grooves of its identity imprinted into her palm. The notches stung like she would never forget their shape. “I mean it. This is...a lot.”

Beau rubbed the back of her neck, scuffing the toe of her sneaker against the worn floorboards. “It’s nothin’ really...”

“No,” Yasha insisted. “It’s a lot. Thank you.”

Beau’s gaze met Yasha’s intense stare, her bright blue eyes wide as they took in Yasha’s sincerity. A handful of seconds stretched into eternity before Beau ducked her head, rubbing at the back of her neck.

“Yeah...sure.”

Yasha was getting the impression she wasn’t the only one completely out of her depth in this situation.

“I’ll come around tomorrow with updates...bye.”

Yasha watched her duck out the door, disappearing down the hallway before she shut the door behind Beau and clicked the lock.

The garage had Yasha’s car fixed and ready to go after two days. Yasha was still in town three months later.

In all honesty, she’s not sure how it happened.

The night she planned to leave, Beau had swung by and insisted on seeing her off. They ended up at a diner, tucked into a booth, talking like they actually knew each other. Next thing Yasha realized, it was nearing midnight, and they were being asked to wrap up so the diner could close. The chef had called to them from the window, an older looking man with bright pink hair who gave Beau a knowing look and a wink.

Somehow, that unplanned extra night turned into months. Yasha had taken on the lease from the absent Caleb for his apartment. She found a job at the local florist, a job she quietly enjoyed. The gravity of her situation only set in after she bought sheets for the mattress.

She met Jess - real name Jester, or Genevieve, but Yasha couldn’t sure - a bubbly girl with deep blue hair and the sweetest attitude ever. Her fingertips were permanently paint stained, and she left hastily sketched dicks everywhere she went. Yasha also met the tow truck driver from the first day, a guy named Fjord. They were a weird mix of individuals, but somehow they got on just fine. They ate dinner together every Thursday night at the same bar owned by the guy who tended the bar - one of those small town things. His name was Mollymauk - Molly for short and sometimes they instead of he - with inordinately purple hair and makeup to match.

Yasha never really spent a lot of time in her apartment. She didn’t see the point, not when she had access to the florist shop, or the diner, or anywhere else with Jess, Fjord, Molly, or Beau. Especially not when Jess’ apartment she shared with Fjord was so much warmer, much more like a home.

It took three months before Beau stopped mid-sentence of a story and blinked at Yasha over their pancakes in the diner.

“This is probably a stupid question, but did you have somewhere to be?”

Yasha looked up, confused. “Right now? Uh...no? My shift at the shop doesn’t start for another three hours.”

“No, no, I meant like outside this town. You told me you were passing through, before.”

“Oh,” Yasha set down her fork and looked out the window. Her chest felt tight. That afternoon seemed like a lifetime ago - a whole other person ago. “Not really.”

“Do...uhm,” Yasha looked over at Beau to find her pushing her food around her plate awkwardly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

This was difficult for both of them. If Yasha had learned anything in her time here, it was that they both struggled to convey their emotions eloquently. But that Beau tried meant everything to Yasha. The least she could do was meet her halfway.

“I was running, and I didn’t know where or when I would stop. But I guess this place is where I’m meant to be.”

“Why were you running?” Beau stared at her, gaze intense in a way Yasha found endearing. She watched like nothing else in the world could distract her.

“I...I had a wife. And I lost her rather abruptly almost six months ago. I tried to stay for a while, to keep what we had built together, but I wasn’t strong enough. So I ran and hoped that I would find something worth staying for again before I fell off the world.”

Beau stared at Yasha openly over their half-eaten breakfast, eyes wide.

“You stayed here. Does that mean you found something here?”

Yasha looked at Beau, at her messy bun and her undercut that needed a fresh shave. She took in the puddle of syrup, slowly saturating Beau’s pancakes and the half gone pile of bacon. Beau’s cellphone sat face down on the table so her attention stayed on Yasha. She realized the baggy sweater Beau had on was one Yasha had misplaced almost a month ago. Yasha lost her breath at the butterflies that fluttered to life in her stomach.

“I think so,” Yasha breathed, tethered and unhinged all at once.

They didn’t talk about it, because of course they didn’t.

But two weeks after their pancake conversation, Beau invited Yasha out for a night on the town. There were only two bars with decent night life here, and Yasha had been to both of them exactly once during her time here. (The daytime trips to Molly’s bar didn’t count, of course. She had only been to their bar for the night life once.)

She met Beau in the middle, and they walked together the rest of the way.

Beau had gotten her undercut shaved tight again, but it was hidden with the way her hair spilled loose and long down her back. She had a cobalt lace crop top on - the one with the built-in bra. The way it showed off the definition of her muscles was doing things to Yasha. The black cigarette pants didn’t help either.

A few drinks and way too many EDM songs later - or maybe only a few? Yasha couldn’t tell them apart - Yasha remained upright from adrenaline alone. Somewhere between the drinks and the beat of the music, Beau pressed up against Yasha, wiry arms winding around Yasha’s neck as they danced. Yasha wasn’t much of a dancer in any regard, but she was just tipsy enough to not care.

Beau’s hips fit comfortably in the space between Yasha’s hands, and Yasha resolutely tried not to follow that train of thought. For no other reason than she didn’t want to ruin a good thing, and there was no way Beau felt the same.

Beau pushed onto her toes, shiny black boots creasing with the motion as her lace top rode up her enticing torso.

“I really want to kiss you,” Beau called over the heavy thrum of the base. Her voice nearly got lost in the din, but Yasha heard her. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t. The weight of her heart dropping into her stomach hit too heavy and real to ignore.

Fuck, she wanted to kiss Beau, too.

Yasha’s t-shirt stuck to random parts of her torso with sweat, a detail she was now hyper-aware of with how little space existed between her and Beau. The press of bodies around them was abruptly unnerving. So much so, Yasha wound an arm around Beau’s shoulders and steered them both free, ducking into the hallway that lead to the bathrooms as Yasha gasped for air.

Beau leaned her back against the wall for support, peering at Yasha with far too much clarity for someone who could barely stand upright.

“Are you okay, Yash?” Her voice was quieter now that they had moved out of the main bar, but the base still pounded like a heartbeat through the floorboards.

With more confidence than Yasha would ever possess in her life, she caged Beau in, a hand on either side of her head against the wall. As Beau stared up at her with unabashed awe, Yasha’s face warmed with flushed embarrassment.

“I want to kiss you so bad.”

“Then do it,” Beau said. It sounded like a dare, but she said it as if she were asking permission.

With a quick swoop into Beau’s space, Yasha pressed her lips to Beau’s with the barest amount of pressure. A feather-light, electric brush of a promise, a question, and an invitation. Yasha moved no closer.

Beau leaned in, and as far as kisses went, it was simple. Neither of them surged toward the other, or grappled for purchase to deepen the embrace. It was an easy press of lips, testing the waters despite the alluring tug of the tide.

Tipsy seconds later, Beau pulled back first with a soft gasp. Yasha’s eyes fluttered open, and she felt like a cheesy teenager when she realized they had closed without her knowledge.

“Do you want to do this?” Beau asked, voice soft and a little wrecked despite the chaste kiss.

Yasha, never one for many words, gave a quick nod and ducked back in. It wasn’t confidence, more like the beginning of a realization.

Beau held onto her, this time hands back around Yasha’s neck and fingers tangled deep in Yasha’s wild hair. Yasha took one hand from the wall to cup the back of Beau’s head, fingers sliding easily over the short hairs of Beau’s undercut.

It wasn’t a fireball kiss, but it tasted like the whiskey shots they had done half an hour ago. Beau’s lips were soft and a stark contrast to the way she kissed Yasha. It wasn’t falling stars and fire lit in her chest, nor was it a cosmic shift of puzzle pieces snapping into place. As before, it was a realization, a revelation of something that might have been there for a while.

Beau kissed Yasha back, and she thought about pancakes at the diner and memorizing the way Beau’s eyes scrunched when she laughed. Yasha rubbed her thumb over Beau’s jawline and Beau’s sharp grin burst to life behind her eyelids. A tug to Yasha’s hair reminded her of Beau offering to braid Yasha’s messy locks every time they all slept at Jess’ place. Beau licked into Yasha’s mouth and all at once, Yasha pictured her apartment. She saw the walls she had kept carefully bare, the sheets she had bought, but no other furniture. The echoing emptiness of a place abandoned for a better chance, and inhabited by the echo of who Yasha used to be.

And what did people say about echoes being louder in empty rooms?

Beau kissed Yasha, and Yasha realized she didn’t want to be an echo anymore.

Beau made her feel solid in a way that was undemanding. She merely held out her hand and asked for the pieces of Yasha that were real, the parts she was willing to share. She helped Yasha make them into a complete picture.

Yasha kissed Beau back with all the gentle strength she could muster through the weight of her epiphany and the whiskey.

This time, Yasha knew she found something worth staying for.

#cr #critical role #beauyasha #beauregard lionett #yasha #writing #my writing

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tinyboxxtink · 3 years

Text

Weird Secret Friends *Chapter 3*

I fixed it!!!! Huzzah!!!

If you didn't see it earlier, it was crap-tastic on my phone.

I'm glad so far people love this. <3

Part 2

Part 4

Tag List

@madamsnape921

@lolliepopsicle

@chasingeverybreakingwave

@milkshqke

@wanniiieeee

@word-scribbless

@gibbs274

@sassyada

@aprildecker-blog

@bookishfanfic

@stars-in-the-skies-world

@stars-trash-18

@omgsuperstarg

@objection-argumentative

-------------

When you returned everyone was laughing at chatting, except for Sonny who was drinking vodka and soda while on his phone. He looked up and saw you both returning, he jumped up to meet you.

“Hey, counselor. I hope Y/N wasn’t too hard on you,” He half laughed.

“Are you kidding me, Sonny?” You scoffed.

“She’s fine, Sonny,” He smirked. “I like a little fire in a woman,”

“Oh?” Sonny’s eyebrows suddenly raised, causing you to give Barba a look. He was blowing your cover!

“I mean, I expect it from Jersey girls anyway,” He flipped his compliment quickly.

“God…” You muttered, looking at the floor. Pick a side, counselor.

“Anyway, um,” Sonny cleared his throat, trying not to think about Rafael and you together. “So when do we do presents and cake? I’ve kind of got an early--”

“I’m sorry, what?” Rafael furrowed his brows at Sonny. “Did you-- Carisi did you really just say that?”

“Do you see a present table? Do you see a giant rat mascot running around?”

“...What? Did I say something--?” Sonny became flustered.

“What do you think this is, a fucking Chuck E Cheese?” He suddenly snapped, causing shocked looks from both you and Sonny.

“I’m sorry Barba, I--”

“Alright that’s it,” You stepped in between the two of them, glaring at Rafael.

“Excuse you?” Rafael crossed his arms.

“Y/N, knock it off,” Sonny hit you softly.

“You have been nothing but rude to my cousin since we got here, Mr. Barba,” You pointed a finger to his chest.

“He was just trying to be nice, getting you a gift out of the goodness of his heart, something you would know nothing about!” Maybe now you were overcompensating.

“Y/N!” Sonny said through gritted teeth.

“What?!” You turned to see everyone at the party staring at the three of you in shocked silence. “Oh…” Your voice turned soft, your face turned red.

“Well,” Rafael straightened his suit and tie, recovering from your little rant. “I guess I should be a gracious host and open it then, shouldn’t I?” He gave you a look.

“...Holy shit,” You heard one of the guests gasp. “That thing is over $1,000! My wife wouldn’t even get me that for Christmas,”

“NO!” Sonny objected rather loudly,. “I mean, that’s not necessary Barba. It’s just a little something, it’s fine,”

“No no, your cousin is right,” He shook his head as he walked over next to Sonny’s chair and retrieved the large gift bag and placed it on the table. Sonny bolted over, you trailed behind quickly.

“No, seriously Barba, don’t,” Sonny began to panic. You suddenly realized how this was going to look, maybe you shouldn’t have pushed.

“Carisi why are you being like--” Rafael was questioning him but was silenced mid-speech when he pulled out the briefcase. His eyes went wide, you swore you heard a few people audibly gasp, You looked around completely lost, finally noticing the absolute horror on Sonny’s face.

“....Is this a Louis Voutton Robusto 2 in Taiga leather, Carisi?” Rafael whispered, running his fingers over the fine leather.

“Oh my god,” You couldn't watch this. Sonny had such a big heart, too big of a heart. He tried so hard...why didn’t you step in sooner?

“Uh y-yeah, sure Barba whatever you want,”

“Carisi, can I speak with you a moment outside?” Rafael blinked rapidly, trying to wrap his head around what was happening right now.

“Do you guys need somewhere to make out?!” An obnoxious man laughed, making the other guests snicker.

“Oh shove it Buchanan,” Rita hit him. “Sonny’s just his puppy,”

“Oh god,” Sonny muttered under his breath as he followed Barba outside. He didn’t know which was worse for people to think right now.

“This is totally inappropriate, why would you even--” He threw his hands over his head. God it was one thing knowing Sonny had a thing for him, but for him to finally make a move like this-- in front of his peers? His colleagues? The audacity.

You wondered if you should follow them. You were the one to cause this mess, after all. Also you really didn’t like the looks you were getting from the rest of the party-goers. You quickly began to follow after them, you could hear Rafael yelling from a mile away.

“What the hell is WRONG with you, Carisi?!”

“I-I’m sorry, Barba I--”

“WHAT?!” Sonny’s eyes instantly went to you. “W-Why would you…? Why would you say that?”

“I’m sorry, counselor I just thought--”

“You just thought what, Carisi?” He growled. “That if you bought some ridiculously expensive gift I’d suddenly realized you were ‘the one’?”

“What?!” Sonny suddenly snapped. “What the-- what the fuck are you talking about, Barba?”

“Uh I don’t know Carisi, maybe the fact that you have feelings for me?”

“What?” Rafael suddenly realized either you were wrong, or he was sticking to denial. Either way, he was probably busted.

“I bought you that briefcase because I want you to like me as a COLLEAGUE, Barba. Do you know what kind of clout you get in our field by being friends with the ADA? And-- And nothing I do ever seems to be good enough, I was afraid you’d never...accept me, unless I…”

“Bribed me?” Rafael asked softly.

“I--I don’t know, I--”

“Well,” Sonny shrugged uncomfortably. “When you say it like that it sounds dirty,”

“Right,” Rafael rubbed the back of his neck nervously.

“....But why, in the fuck--” Sonny crossed his arms now. “Would you ever accuse me of--- of that?!”

“Is it because you have feelings for me and you were hoping I felt the same way but it freaked you out when I made some ‘declaration of love’ in front of all of your work buddies?”

“WHAT?!” Rafael practically screamed. “Absolutely not--”

“I’m just gonna ask you one time, straight out,” Sonny approached Rafael, his stature over him becoming more obvious the closer he got to the ADA.

“Then why? Have I seriously given you an impression that I-- want your cannoli?” He tried to find an appropriate word. And he was genuinely asking, he had made damn sure not to act that way for so long, there was no way he had fucked that up.

“Uh...yes, yes you have,” Rafael tried to bluff. He had no idea how this situation had flipped, or if it was better for Sonny to think he had feelings for him, and not his baby cousin.

“That’s bullshit,” Sonny shook his head with a sarcastic laugh. “I have made damn sure--” He glanced at you again, he knew that look. That was the same look you had when you had broken his mom’s favorite vase and had blamed it on the dog.

“Damn sure what?” Rafael quickly tried to distract him.

“Damn sure you didn’t think that,” He answered hazily, thoughts filling his mind.

“Because you do,” Rafael tried to keep defensive.

“....This isn’t about me, this is about you,” Sonny’s eyes suddenly narrowed as he was quickly becoming aware of the glances you at Rafael were sharing.

“Ohh no I think it’s about--”

“WHY would you accuse me of trying to...seduce you?!” Sonny cut him off.

“Does that sound like something I would do, whether it was true or not?”

“So it IS--”

“DAMMIT, Rafael!” Sonny stomped his foot. He was getting bold now as the wheels started turning.

“What?” Rafael laughed like it was ridiculous, looking everywhere but Sonny’s eyes. “When would she even--”

“...Did my cousin say something to you?” His eyes were narrow, he was scowling between the two of you. Fuck. FUCK. Don’t panic. Keep your cool. Don’t move.

“When you followed her just now?” He crossed his arms again.

Whew. Well, thank God. At least that bullet was dodged.

"Was she? Because it seems like telling you was the worst thing she could do!!!" Sonny snapped.

“....She might have said something along those lines,” Rafael glanced at you with apologetic eyes as he threw you under the bus.

“Wha-- are you kidding me?!” You hissed at him, but Sonny was already fuming at you.

“Y/N!!! What the fuck is wrong with you?!” He started to stomp over to you. “You can’t just throw your assumptions at people, because you think your ‘emotionally stunted’ cousin can’t deal with some confusing feelings he has,”

“Uh…”

“Ya can’t just SHOVE someone out of a closet!” He kept yelling, oblivious to the stares he was now getting. “Especially not to my boss!!!”

“Sonny, I--”

“See I knew it!” Rafael clapped his hands together, trying to rescue you after he threw you to the sharks. “I knew you had feelings for me, I didn’t need her to tell me,”

“FINE,” Sonny threw his hands up. “Fine, Rafael. You win, okay?” He struggled with tears forming in his throat. “Yeah, I’ve had some-- weird, feelings about you. For a while,”

You and Rafael just stared at him while he “came out” to an entire restaurant.

“And alright, maybe I went a little overboard with the gift, my bad,” He shrugged. "But that doesn't excuse Y/N for telling you her conspiracy theories!"

"Carisi…" Barba sighed. "She was just trying to help."

"Y'know what YN, would you mind finding somewhere else to crash tonight, i can't really look at you right now," he sighed as he turned and walked awkwardly out of the restaurant.

"Sonny I am so--" you tried to apologize.

"Well you heard the man," He grinned, totally unphased by what just happened.

"I'm sure he'll--" his face went from a soft smile into a horrified expression.

"Are you fucking kidding me Rafael?" You scoffed at him in disbelief.

"Well at least he doesn't suspect anything between us!" He pointed out.

"Yeah just that I'm a horrible outing twat," you rolled your eyes.

"Aw carino," He pulled you into a soft comforting kiss.

"What's wrong?" You asked softly, afraid to turn around.

"How fucking DARE you say that, Barba. I'm not some fucking jealous teenager, although clearly that's your type,"

"Oh my god..." you heard Sonny's voice behind you. "Oh my God!"

You definitely didn't want to turn around now.

"Are you fucking kidding me?!" Sonny now stormed over to the two of you.

I can't fucking believe you Y/N! What the fuck is this? How did this happen?"

"Sonny I--" You tried to explain,

"And YOU--" He glared at Rafael. "You had the fucking audacity to sit there and start yelling at me for "inappropriate feelings'," he growled.

"Carisi…." Rafael put a hand up.

"What the fuck do you call seducing my baby cousin??" He snarled.

'Look Carisi I know you might be jealous, but--" Before Rafael could finish his sentence, Sonny's fist was hitting his face and he fell to the ground.

"Hey!" You exclaimed.

"This isn't about my feelings, jackass," he went to punch him again but you ran over and tried to pull him off Rafael as a crowd of spectators was forming.

"Which by the way, you have zero worry of those anymore, I'm not into perverts," he spat.

"Sonny!" You gasped. "...the hell is wrong with you?!"

"We're leaving," he instructed you.

"Like hell we are," you went to help Rafael up.

"Sonny, even if you were my dad, I'm a grown woman," you snapped. "You can't drag me out of here like a child,"

"YN," Sonny had that soft, scary, angry tone. "I practically raised you. I'm the closest thing you have to a dad. So when I say we're leaving, we're leaving."

"Either you come with me right now, or I'm disowning you," he threatened.

"Are you fucking kidding me Son?" You laughed at the absurdity of the threat.

"I'll stop paying for your classes at the community college," he threatened.

Well not only did he just threaten your academics but he embarrassed the hell out of you revealing you weren't even in a real college.

"So?" You stood your ground. "Go for it,"

"I'll stop paying your rent," He kept going.

"Well that's--" You started getting nervous.

"I'll stop payments on your car,"

"OKAY," You finally caved. You just wanted to stop revealing what a fucking sad sack you were having him pay for everything, just like a dad.

You looked at Rafael who was standing now, winding his bloody mouth with a handkerchief from a pocket in his suit.

"I'm sorry," you barely whispered with tears in your eyes and throat. The last thing You wanted to do was leave him there but as Sonny so blatantly pointed out, he basically owned you.

You gave him one last long kiss goodbye, to which Sonny made a disgusted scoff.

Rafael gave you a look of pleading, begging you to stay with him while he held onto your hand. You pulled your hand away from him and turned to Sunny

"Alright let's go Son," you said softly trying not to glance back at Rafael.

Sonny nodded triumphantly and walked out of the restaurant with you close behind, leaving Rafael alone.

#rafael barba #rafael barba imagine #rafael barba x reader #rafael barba x you #law and order svu #rafael barba fanficton #law and order svu fanfiction #weird secret friends

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creativeashproductions · 3 years

Text

Permanence // Luke Patterson

Summary: On the run for most of her life the reader had been accustomed to being a lone wolf in world with eyes everywhere. Living in the age of technology and life online makes it hard for a girl stuck in a permanent state at nineteen physically. All things change when the reader moves next door to a healing teenager and her ghostly band.

Warning: Swearing, loss of death, talk of injuries/hospital, angst, and fluff

Words: 5.1k (yikes)

A/N: Loosely based on the film Age of Adaline. Also includes a scene using the BBC show Call the Midwife as well. I’ve been MIA due to this fic. I love it.

TO BE TAGGED SEND AN INBOX PLEASE!

Masterlist

The love tingled in your lips as the taxi pulled away from the curb leaving behind the white-haired woman. Your hand raised to wave as the woman turned into a speck in the review mirror but never far from your heart and thoughts.

“Going on a trip?” The taxi driver questioned taking a right turn with a jarring sensation. His brown eyes speedily meeting yours, “Does your mom grandma live in San Francisco?”

A mournful smile appeared on the wrinkle-free complexion, “Something like that.”

The reply didn’t faze the driver in a big city he had chosen to make his living with for his family, he had heard worse. The airport reared its head with the big heavily populated by tourists and loud machinery of transport.

The royal blue wool jacket concealed the black blouse tucked into the grey, and black tartan fitted trousers. Paired with the black velvet kitten heels that had been in your possession for a very long time. Hair left down in the soft waves and makeup natural for the plane right.

The flight was over quickly for the young woman with her carry on, and purse collected you immediately headed to baggage claim. The suitcase was easy found and lifted off the conveyor belt with little trouble. Your expressive eyes finding the taxi, some may call you old fashioned for not ‘ubering’, but it was a nostalgic action.

“Where to?” The taxi driver asked with pretty blue eyes shadowed by the crows’ feet at the corner’s of her eyes. Swiftly you listed off the address to the house you had bought with your vast savings, “Half hour ride.”

You settled back into the leather seat as the city passed by with the memories staunchly kept in a locked box escaping. Los Angeles had been the location of the only family trip you had had in your late teens.

Los Angeles, 1936

“Darling! This Samuel, he owns the restaurant up the beach.” Theodore’s bright white smile gleamed as he returned to your side, “He’s personally invited us to celebrate the first night of our life together.

The pleated cark charcoal pants held up with black suspenders snuggle atop the button-down shirt of denim blue colour. The shirt left with the top two buttons undone revealing the white undershirt. Shiny polished black shoes on Theodore’s feet he was dressed as perfect as the day he caught your runaway hat.

“Oh, thank you.” You told the shy man as he led you up to the well-known restaurant with the gorgeous view of the water.

Samuel went further by providing his best table in the house, leaving the host annoyed at the interruption. The dinner was spent with Theodore listing off the itinerary for the week in the city. From visiting the museums to watching a film at the Los Angeles Theatre recommended by Theodore’s connection from work.

“You like to share a dessert Darling?” Theodore asked tenderly holding your soft hand in his smooth one. His smile never faded as you declined his offer satisfied with the large meal from the five-course dinner.

“I’d much prefer the comfort of our hotel room.” Your lips ended the words with a smile that paired well with the glittering eyes. Theodore’s heart expanded as his wife’s smile, he had fallen in love with first.

“The hotel placed a nice bottle of champagne in our room,” Theodore spoke once the bill was taken care of. He pulled your chair out to help you slip on the navy blue wool jacket on from the back of your chair, “You are absolutely beautiful.”

“Still as charming as ever.” You whispered gazing up at him with such love.

You had loved Theodore from the first chaperoned date at sixteen with the handsome eighteen-year-old that had saved your hat. The wind that day had been unbearable as you walked the beach of San Francisco with your mother. At seventeen, you wed; a mere few days previous. Theodore came from a well-off family but worked as an engineer for the city.

“We’re here.” The taxi driver spoke as the car pulled to a stop at a pretty house painted a blue with white accents.

Mumbling a thank you the driver took off once your belongings found ground on the sidewalk and the fare paid. The house door unlocked with a click revealing the furnishing you had sent and hired a company to build. The boxes of personal belongings had arrived in boxes the previous day and awaited unpacking.

The first order of business on your to-do list was changing the locks as well as testing the safety alarm. The next few hours you unpacked your kitchen and clothing as the locksmith took his time finishing up previous appointments.

Your hand hovered over the oval golden framed photo of your wedding day with Theodore with a smile on both your faces. You didn’t look a day older than the day you married Theodore even if it had been so long. The familiar clench at the sight of the man happened every time you saw the photo.

“You’d be so proud of Rosie.” Your index finger caressed the elegant picture of your first love with a mournful emotion.

Pulled from the sad memories as the doorbell rang signalling the arrival of the locksmith. The appointment was swift before you finished unpacking the living room from the bookcase to the picture frames. As the minute handle circled the clock face, you settled in for the simple meal.

“Tea on the porch.” You sighed curling into the cherry red Adirondack chair in the front porch watching as children went inside their houses.

It wasn’t how you had anticipated your life dreaming of a life with a family in a lovely home. You never expected to live in fear for your life, and your child’s as the second World War reared its ugly head. You never envisioned having to move every few years to keep safe. Lastly, you had never foreseen watching Rosie’s hair turn white before your own. You thought you’d be buried beside your husband after a long life. So far, it had been too long at this point with your childhood friends all dead.

“Hi.” The voice of a teenage girl spoke. Your gaze left your lukewarm tea for the girl at the bottom of your porch.

Strands of her curly textured hair pulled away from her face it revealed her clear tawney complexion. The most expressive brown eyes framed with thick lashes that took your breath away with the kindness in them.

“You just moved in right?” The girl asked as you climbed down the steps to the younger teenager, “I’m Julie Molina, I live next door.”

“Hello Julie, I’m Y/N Y/L/N.” You spoke, shaking the extended hand of the young girl inspecting her.

Her fashion was obviously of the current time whereas your own style was a mixture of different eras. The style fits in but touches to bring in the past decades you had lived through.

“Where are your parents?” Julie asked with a furrowed brow.

“I live alone.” You replied sighing as the confusion flashed in the younger teen’s eyes before you elaborated, “I’m nineteen. I bought the house, my parents live in my home state.”

They weren’t living, but they were buried in the cemetery with the other family members that had since passed. Unless a freak accident happened, your plot near your husband wouldn’t be filled. The only person who knew the truth was Rosie, she was your daughter.

“Wow! That’s cool.” Julie beamed glancing over her shoulder as her phantom friends poofed in behind her.

The sudden appearance startled you and while it was confusing you had become well acquainted with weird. You hadn’t aged a day since a stormy night on the country roads in 1938 heading to pick up Rosie. You barely flinched at the appearance.

“Oh damn, Julie’s neighbour is hot.” The leather jacket one spoke scanning the newcomer with an awed expression.

The boy with the sleeveless top sharing the same awed expression. Whereas the blonde in pink’s breath released in an exasperated sigh. Only a corner of your lips twitched up at realization this must happen quite a bit.

“I should head back inside. I have a few more boxes to unpack. It was lovely to meet you, Julie.” Your eloquent words taking the boys by surprise from the lack of modern language and slang. You didn’t use any of the terms that Julie and Flynn spoke in.

Luke followed Julie with glances over his shoulder to the back of the mysterious girl closing her front door. It wasn’t often Luke was intrigued by anything other than his music. Still, something about you was the most interesting thing. Not even touring some of his favourite bands’ personal homes was as interesting.

“C’mon Luke!” Reggie called out to the lingering teenage ghost. Unbeknownst to the retreating guitarist, your curtain had been pulled away as you peeked at him.

Over the next few weeks, you had become acquainted with Julie, even admitting to seeing the boys. It was a mess of Reggie blushing at your revelation of hearing his comments on your beauty. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was a friend group.

Two months later, over the course of a week, you withdrew from the group for the comfort of your living room. A garbage bin for used tissues as it sank in once more that the anniversary of Theodore’s death rolled around. 82 years since he was tragically killed.

You looked a mess and barely reacted when the four friends to it upon themselves to enter your home. Your hazy mind barely caught onto the arrival as Julie ushered your saddened form to the bathroom.

As Julie helped dress you, taking it from the extensive closet, the boys cleaned up the living room, and Alex poofed out. He returned with a pizza he began cooking coming to a stop at Luke’s gaping gaze at the mantel above the fireplace.

“What’s wrong?” Alex demanded rushing to the guitarist side equally shocked. Perfect timing as you came back into the living room with Julie.

“That’s Theodore.” The words came out gravely from the lack of use for the past few days. Your feet brought you to the side of the three boys, “It was raining the day. The sky broke when we left the church.”

“That’s you?” Reggie inquired frantically glancing between the old photo and your exact replica of the picture.

Julie gasped at the sight picking out the scar on the edge of your forehead barely seen in the photo but the matching appearance remarkable. The soft smile appeared as your hand came to grab the frame remembering the lovely day—the beautiful ceremony and the small reception before heading out for the honeymoon.

“Theodore Prescott was eighteen when I first saw him on the beach in San Francisco. Mother and I chose a windy for a walk; my hat blew away. Straight into the trousers of a young man that I would fall in love with instantly.” Your smile grew as your form settled back on the couch, having traded the frame for an old album. The four people were quiet.

“We married a year later in 1937, I was seventeen years old. Theodore whisked me off to Los Angeles for our honeymoon. We dined at fancy establishments, caught a film at the Los Angeles Theatre.” Your smile faded, leading Julie’s heart to clench as she knew that expression from seeing it in the mirror, “He was an engineer.”

“What happened?” Julie questioned grasping your soft hand in her own hand, focusing her eyes on your face. Your face remembering one of the most challenging times.

“Theodore was an engineer for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. A section of the bridge collapsed taking three men down. Theodore was one of them.” A lone tear travelled down your cheek, “It was difficult grieving my husband and caring for our daughter.”

Luke’s gasp was audible, “Are you a ghost?”

“No.” You told the seventeen-year-old guitarist, “I’ve been nineteen for the last 83 years.”

“Eighty-three years?!” Reggie exclaimed completely taken aback blinking fast to take it in, “Did you find a fountain of youth? Some special French creams?”

“Reg, shut up.” Alex elbowed the raven-haired teenager in the side with an apologetic smile, “I’d apologize and say he isn’t normally like this…but you know us too well.”

“It’s alright Alex,” You told the drummer fiddling with his ring as you returned back to Reggie, “It was storming in 1938, but I had promised to meet my parents and Rosie at the cabin. Visibility got worse, and I fishtailed right off the road into the ravine. I’m not sure the science but I know I died, and then I woke up.”

“This so weird,” Luke mumbled listening intently to the story with wide eyes that quickly matched his friends.

“Believe it’s shocking when your daughter graduates from college with her mother looking younger than her.” The bitter chuckle couldn’t be held back, remembering it as the first time you were retitled as Rosie’s sister.

“I just got used to being a ghost.” Alex sighed, settling into the armchair to the left of the couch. Luke sat on the couch next to you while Reggie took the armchair across from Alex.

As the sun rose higher and began to set, you enthralled the teenagers with stories of your long life. Luke was the most interested in the music you have seen evolve over the course of time, and the musicians you had met. In telling them stories, it allowed you to step out of the dark abyss of your mind.

“Freddie Mercury?” Luke asked from the other cherry red Adirondack chair turned to see you in the matching one.

“I had coffee with him in a little hole in the wall coffee shop in New York. He loved whip cream, but he didn’t like the dairy they used. The shop is now a Starbucks.”

The giggle escaped at Luke’s look of absolute awe, “That’s so rad.”

“Rad. Haven’t heard that in a long time.” The sparkle for sure would have sent Luke’s heart thudding like Alex’s drumming in Now or Never; if it still beat that is.

“…so do you think people can fall in love more than once?” Luke had been very undecided in asking the question. Everyone around could tell he felt something for you so unlike any other relationship.

You kissed your teeth, thinking about how to properly articulate your thoughts on such a heavy subject. It was clear that you felt something for the teenage ghost even if you had lived far longer than Luke had.

“I think it’s possible. Luke, I’ve lived a long time and while I’ll love Theodore for as long as I live that doesn’t mean I have been alone.” You revealed to the ghostly guitarist stepping back in a part of your history buried incredibly deep.

“The way you were torn up made me think-“

“I’ll always mourn Theodore, I had a year, and that was never enough. I worked as a midwife in England in the late 1960s.”

Poplar, London, England circa 1960s

The blonde-haired bombshell marched her way through the crowded Poplar district in London scanning the late-night Christmas shoppers. Beatrix, Trixie to her friends, had a young mother a mere street away. The only available midwife to help her happened to be off duty shopping for gifts.

Trixie was thankful for the American accent that distinguished the midwife from the crowd, pointing her towards a store window. Your eyes dragged away from the lovely young mother giving her thanks for delivering her baby a few months prior.

“Trixie!” You beamed, revealing a white smile that lit up your pretty eye colour. Trixie’s anxious expression dropped the smile, however, “Is something wrong?”

“Jenny Turner is in labour. Tom is with her right now, but I need help. Everyone is further away.”

In seconds you had pulled the charcoal cape secured by the bands crisscrossing your shoulders to properly rest. The cloak had armholes with material covering the holes, no sleeves seen. The cape covered the plain light blue nurse uniform with the white-collar and the maroon red cardigan.

Trixie led you to the small apartment housing twenty-one-year-old, Jenny, with Reverend Tom Hereward waiting. This would be Jenny’s second child with her husband Roger leaving the midwife’s nervous after her first pregnancy.

“Hello, Jenny.” You spoke stepping closer to the woman, “Trixie said you requested my presence.”

“You delivered my first baby. I want you here, Roger a county away for work.” Jenny heavily spoke as a contraction ended, “I’m not due for two weeks.”

“Baby Turner is too excited to meet their big brother.” You soothed settling beside the young mother, “You’re in great hands with Trixie. You are close to the hospital and the clinic if you’d prefer to move.”

“No. I want to stay.” Jenny was sure of that, at least. Her hand left yours to clench the white bedsheets as a contraction clenched her midsection.

“Then I’ll be right here with you.”

It was a promise you kept as Trixie delivered a healthy baby girl appreciating your help when you cleaned the baby. Trixie helped Jenny deliver the afterbirth and clean up the room just in time for Jenny’s mother to enter the room.

“I came as soon as I could.”

“Thank you, Y/N,” Jenny spoke with a small tired smile. The smile that made the job worth watching babies being born, of family’s growing.

Tom was waiting outside in the living room as you exited the bathroom. Your heart fluttered at the sight of the Reverend Hereward waiting for you with his patient smile and a tender look in his blue gaze.

“How is Jenny?” Tom asked, holding the door to the street open.

“Tired after delivering Cynthia. Cynthia is an eight-pound baby with no complications. Thank you for praying Tom.”

“Trixie informed me of Jenny’s first pregnancy, and I felt like I was needed. Do you happen to be free tomorrow night?” Tom asked, linking his fingers in yours with a smile that almost looked nervous.

“I am.” You responded as Tom walked you to Nonnatus House where the unmarried midwives resided. You stood on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, “Good night Tom.”

“I’ll meet you at the park,” Tom responded, waiting patiently as you entered the building before he turned on his heel to head to his residence. Unknown to him, you peered down from your bedroom window as he pulled something out of his pocket.

A small box housing a ring he would propose with the very next night. A ring that broke your heart. A ring that you’d never see up close as you handed in your resignation and left England as quickly as possible.

Luke’s invested gaze shuttered as you revealed you had run away before Tom could propose because it could never happen.

“He was going to propose, and you didn’t say goodbye?”

“I don’t know if I could have said no when he asked. I wish I knew what I would have said, but it was unfair. How could Tom, as a Reverend, accept that his fiancée or wife would never grow old? It went against everything he believed in.” You countered with a raised eyebrow, “He married the midwife that was hired a year after I left. Barbara Gilbert. Trixie sent me the letter.”

Luke’s perceptive eyes caught the tinge of sadness in your gaze recalling the second man you had loved. You loved with your whole heart and with that came a lot of heartbreak.

“Do you keep in contact with them?”

“I send a letter to Trixie every once in a while, to check up on her. She married a few years after I left and had a few children. I believe she had a step-daughter.”

Luke’s mouth went to open before a flash of light, and a slight gasp was heard from the blonde drummer. His eyebrows raised as the close proximity between his best friend and his new friend. He shook it off as he turned to face Luke fully.

“Did you forget? We have a gig.” Alex spoke amused as Luke’s eyes widened theatrically vividly recalling the excitement in Julie’s eyes.

You waved the duo off to disappear in a ball of light to the gig they had for the night while you entered your home. You didn’t hear Alex make a comment that Luke couldn’t deny.

“You’ve fallen for her,” Alex spoke just outside the coffee shop that housed the record execs with the power to change their afterlife. The quirk of a smile sealed Alex’s opinion of the girl.

Content to spend your time in the house you retreated to the kitchen. Your hand slipped into your pocket for the phone that had few contacts such as Rosie and Julie’s along with the number of Rosie’s doctor. Mostly pictures of Rosie and landscapes but never your face, not after the 1953 incident.

Living next door to the Molina’s you often shared recipes with Ray, he had taken you under his wing. He felt empathetic with the young neighbour he saw you as a daughter almost, unaware that it would the other way around. You had years on the widowed father.

The wooden spoon stirred the sizzling stir-fry that had been a fixture in raising a rambunctious little girl interested in skinny her knees. The stir-fry was the quickest meal while Rosie played outside or in the little play corner with her dolls. It seemed like the world knew when your phone rang.

“Hello, darling.” You spoke securing the phone between your neck and shoulder, “Did you teach Gladys poker?”

The silence was stifling, “Is this Y/N Y/L/N?”

A cold sweat broke out as the unfamiliar voice came from Rosie’s cell phone roused the deep-seated fear of loss. The wooden spoon in your hand clattered on the tile flooring of the modest-sized kitchen.

“Your grandmother Rosemary Prescott tripped over a cane. You’re her emergency contact.”

“Has she been admitted to the hospital? How extensive are her injuries? Let me get a pen and grab the address.” You rambled frantically scouring the kitchen for the notepad, “Was she alone?”

“She’s still being seen by the doctor, and I’m unable to reveal the details over the phone. Her friend Gladys was there, and she hasn’t left your grandma’s side.” The person responded in an even tone with the failed intention of soothing you.

“What’s the address?”

“I’m a nurse at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.” The nurse prattled off, providing the address and visiting hours.

As soon as the call ended, you had quickly grabbed a quick bite from the meal before packaging it up. Next, you dug out the small suitcase to pack the essentials with the mental capacity of a zombie. The bag was stowed in the backseat of the car while you kept your purse on your shoulder.

You barely comprehended knocking on the Molina door or Ray opening it, “Hello Y/N.”

“Ray. Tonight, I made stir-fry, I’ll be out of town for a few days.” You told the man catching sight of both Carlos and Julie in the background.

“Are you okay?” Ray questioned taking the container from your shaking hands, “Do you need us to do anything?”

“Could I have a h-hug?” You stuttered feeling a smidge better than the older man tugged you in for a hug. Two pairs of arms joined with the Molina kids ambushing you.

“You’re coming back, right?” The question came from the concerned hazel-eyed guitarist watching the interaction with a particular look. A look he knew came from not being able to comfort you.

“I’ll be back once I know Rosie is okay.” You replied, locking eyes with Luke over Ray’s shoulder earning a tender smile from the male.

“I’ll pray for your Grandma,” Ray spoke, stepping back to let both Julie and Carlos say their goodbyes to their neighbour. Everyone but Carlos and Ray half-heartedly smirking at Ray’s belief that Rosie was older than you.

Unlike typical times you didn’t linger in the Molina home with the distracted thoughts of Rosie injured with her mother with her. Rosie is the only thing you would drop anything for, the love of a mother and her child. So distracted by your thoughts you didn’t notice Luke had appeared right beside you.

“Are you driving?” Luke asked, tapping his shoe on the porch step, bringing your sad eyes to meet his, “Or are you taking a plane?”

“A plane. It’s a five-hour drive to San Francisco from here not taking in traffic time. I bought a last-minute ticket.” You replied, heading straight for the car with Luke hot on your heels to the vintage car.

Half of you wanted to refuse his evident intention to join you, but a part of you yearned for the comfort. A stroke of luck had a plane seat beside yours empty, time didn’t exist, but it dragged on at the same time. So lost in thoughts you never noticed the brush on a pinkie on your skin.

While you stared off in the distance, Luke’s jaw was dropped at the silky feel of your skin. Words bubbled up his throat just before he knew it wasn’t the right time to bring it up. Instead, he chose different words to regale you with stories of his childhood.

“I begged for a dog when I was eight years old. Reggie had this golden retriever his family had before he was born. My dad was allergic in the end, so I was content with Reggie’s dog.” Luke spoke, “That didn’t mean I didn’t sneak in this stray one night. We kept him in the garage while we found him a forever home.”

“What was his name?”

“Fender.” Luke sheepishly spoke, catching the tweak of your smile as the clouds in your eyes cleared for a few minutes. Luke loved being able to ease your mind through the flight, not holding back on the embarrassing stories either.

“Thank you.” You told the easy natured teenager with a familiar flutter in your chest that terrified you.

You could name only one other time you had felt that flutter when everything was easy. 1936 with a man you thought would be your one and only. Feeling something that strong for a ghost was incredibly scary.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Luke asked just outside the closed hospital door, separating you from your daughter. Your lips parted to deny his question but you couldn’t so you simply shook your head.

“Come in!” The voice was prompt after knocking on the door. Opening the door, you found Rosie’s grinning in her bed with Gladys at her side, scolding her.

“I’ll get out of your hair,” Gladys spoke shuffling by you out of the door with a quick hug. The second Gladys closed the door, your eyebrows furrowed.

“Rosemary Elspath Prescott. What were you thinking?” You crossed your arms walking closer to Rosie, “You know your ankle hasn’t been the same-“

“-since I shattered during a cheer comp in college. Mama, I know. It was an accident.” Rosie softly spoke just before her gaze met Luke’s with fear planted squaring in her blue gaze. Luke’s lips parted, “He knows?”

“Oh.” Luke blinked at the sudden new change in his afterlife with Rosie actually seeing him, “I’m Luke.”

“This is going to sound craz-“

“Mama, you’ve been nineteen for over eight decades. I think we’ve hit the crazy already, tell me. Before I get a bad heart.” Rosie joked with that twinkle you saw countless times over the years.

The first time you saw it was when you found her on the counter at age two when she learned how to climb. Other times included her sneaking out to a senior party with her friends and the teasing she started when she got her first grey hair.

“You better have taken our discussion about your salt intake serious young lady.” You pointed at her mere seconds before your shoulders dropped. You leaned down to kiss the crown of her head, “Luke’s a ghost.”

Rosie’s lips parted, staring down the boy before whispering very softly in your ear, “Well. At least he doesn’t age. You look happy with him Mama, I’m not getting any younger, and he’s really cute.”

“Don’t talk like that.” The low response came out broken at the horrible future where you would bury Rosie.

A cold hand landed on your waist as you stretched to place an ornament on the tree you chose with Luke. The wire hugged the branch a ghost of a kiss pressed against your cheek, a moment of quiet in the loud house. Reggie and Alex had been baking cookies with Rosie for the last two hours. Julie was finishing her family dinner at her home before she would come over.

“Merry Christmas,” Luke murmured tugging you in his chest. A flutter of butterflies moving in your tummy.

Once Rosie had been discharged from the hospital, she had been convinced to temporarily move to Los Angeles. For the first time since Rosie’s senior year in high school, you got to live with her. Subtlety had never been her strong suit with nagging you and Luke about getting together.

“Merry Christmas.” You replied, stretching to peck his lips once before cuddling into his chest with the thick sweater.

“Would you like a cookie…Dad.” Rosie teased, bringing a tray into the living room with the gooey chocolate chips.

Another revelation other than being able to touch the boys was that once Julie saved them from Caleb, they could eat small quantities. They couldn’t eat a lot, and they didn’t need it, but it was a comfort to the group.

“That’s so weird.” Alex chortled, taking in the shocked and uncomfortable expression Luke had. Reggie beamed with a mouthful of cookie. This was the first Christmas the boys had surrounded by only acceptance, love, and untainted happiness.

“How about we stick to Luke?” Rosie chuckled just as weirded out by the odd age gap and the forever youth the couple displayed.

While Rosie interacted with the arrival of both Flynn and Julie, you curled into Luke’s embrace taking in the room. Julie and Flynn listened to the rebellious stories Rosie carried. Alex had retreated to the kitchen with a guy with shoulder-length brunette hair. Reggie was involved in a conversation with Ray; another unexplained phenomenon after the Orpheum.

Your eyes found the mantle with the picture of Theodore and you. Right beside it a lovely photo with Luke dipping you in a kiss and besides that picture was the very last picture of Luke with his parents. How lucky you had been in the years you had lived to end up with a chosen family.

Tag List (PLEASE SEND AN INBOX TO BE ADDED! I CANNOT GUARANTEE YOU WILL BE ON THE LIST VIA POST COMMENTS!)

@safehavenmuse @siennanoelle01 @whiterose291 @mell-bell @blackhood5sos @ficrecsideblog @ifilwtmfc @deadpoolgirl23 @crappy-unicorn @sunsetcurve-h @elioelioeli0 @lovesanimals @popcrone818 @lolychu @deepsleepnat @tenaciousperfectionunknown @aunicornmademedoit @just-a-writer-here @simp4reggie @parkeret @faithiebrock01 @overlyhypedup @differentsoulrascalsalad @aesthetic-lyss @versaceapa @carleywhittaker @lostgirl219 @itsalexx21 @elllaoo4 @merxxleighann @mediocremunge @fantomlovesjuke4ever @dpaccione @oswin05 @kaylinfayezink @aberette13 @faithie-brock-gillespie01 @eharvey0218 @overlyhypedup @benstormy @auriandthepussicats @sarcasticsagittarius1998 @whothefuckstolemykeds @kcd15 @siriuswvrld @princessvader15 @xoxbloodreinaxox @heimdoodle @joshy-obx @lovesanimals @oopsiedoopsie23 @am3l1a-24 @flying-solo-without-you @jaskiers-sweetkiss @lostrandomfangirln @must-be-a-weasley-92 @jatp-holland @ilikealotofpeople-younotsomuch @dxlanhxlland @dasexydevitt13 @ifilwtmfc @arianagrandes-things @kinda-really-lost @marinettepotterandplagg @ssprayberrythings @morgandamrose @thedarkqueenofavalon @zukoshonourr @crybabyddl @spooky-season-bitch @kcd15 @morganayennefertyrell @magnet-girl @all-in-fangirl @kinda-really-lost @tenaciousperfectionunknown @badwolf00593 @blowakissbabe @talksoprettyjjx @thesweetestsinner @kaitieskidmore1

#luke patterson imagines #julie and the phantoms imagines #luke patterson x reader #charlie gillespie imagines #jatp luke #jatp fanfic #luke patterson #caitsy and ash productions

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sunflowergirl522 · 3 years

Text

That’s Peter Part 3

Pairing: Peter Maximoff x Reader

Summary: You’ve been able to hop realities your whole life, running away to your favorite one with your favorite people when the blip happens. You come back to visit Jimmy to find out everyone came back and then get some bad news. When you go to find your boyfriend Peter you find out that he’s been snatched into a different reality.

Warnings: Language, grief

Word Count: 1331

Masterlist Previous Part

When you opened your eyes again and Wanda let everyone go back to what they were doing, Peter was gone. You had walked around the neighborhood as children and their families shuffled home trying to see if you could spot him in the crowd. You don’t even see him when you spot Wanda escorting her boys home or when you follow them hoping to be led to where Peter’s been staying. When you come up empty handed you decide to find somewhere to spend the night. Luckily there was an empty house up the block from Wanda’s.

In the morning you take another lap around the block before spying into the windows of Wanda’s house to see if Peter went home. All you see though are things seemingly glitching out which was weird but you brush it off as a problem for after you find Peter. That’s when an idea hits you that maybe he’ll be on the tv again at the SWORD headquarters. You teleport there just to find yourself still in the hex and in a circus? Wanda must have extended the barrier when she used her magic last night. You’ve gotta find Darcy.

You run through the circus trying to avoid any of the clowns to prevent anyone talking to you. You hear someone yelling at people you assume are running away and run immediately to the source. You make it in time to see Darcy and Vision run into a funnel cake truck.

“Darcy!” Vision seems to shut the door before either of them would be able to hear you. “Damn it, gotta be fast.” You crack your fingers and roll your neck before teleporting into the van just as they drive away. You cheer a bit once you’re inside causing the two of them to jump. But you can’t help it, teleporting into a moving vehicle is tough, you have to time it all perfectly and it’s just too much work. So getting inside before they moved was something worth cheering over in your book.

“Jesus Christ Y/n! What are you doing here? I thought you were trying to get Peter.”

“Who is this?”

“Oh, hi I’m Y/n.” You hold out your hand for him to shake.

“I’m-”

“Vision, I know, I’m a big fan of you and your wife.” You beam at him before turning to Darcy. “I was looking for Peter but he disappeared last night. I haven’t been able to find him since, thought I’d have luck locating him with some help from the show. But now I see what Wanda’s magic act was for last night.”

“Well, you’re just in time to help me answer all of Visions questions. Take it away man.”

“Are my children safe?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Oh, I just came from your house, they seemed fine.”

“Good, what about that imposter Pietro?”

“Y/n you wanna take this one?”

“Pietro is my boyfriend Peter. Long story short he technically is Pietro just from a different reality. He has the same powers and he had a twin but well, it was reversed there. She was the twin that died.”

“Okay. Who was I before Westview and what are the Avengers?” You let Darcy explain that to him and sit in silence picking at your nails, a nervous habit you’ve picked up. If Peter were here he’d grab you hands to stop you and place kisses to each finger tip while telling you to be nicer to yourself. But what if you couldn’t find Peter now? Where could he have gone? “So, Wanda killed me?” Vision's voice breaks you out of your thoughts.

“It’s not that simple, you asked her to do it.”

“Why would I have done that?”

“To save the universe, well half of it.”

“Did it work?”

“It did until the bad guy rewound time and killed you himself. There’s a few extra steps but to sum it up-”

“I came back and died again.”

“And she had to watch.” It’s quiet for a bit while Vision takes in the new information and you start to feel overwhelmed with the topic of death that seems to wrap around you. Your mind gets brought back to your dad and how he’s gone and suddenly it feels like the atmosphere in the truck is trying to suffocate you.

“I gotta go.” You force out before teleporting back to Wanda’s street. Immediately you’re greeted with Wanda holding Monica up in the sky with her magic. Monica’s trying to tell Wanda that Pietro wasn’t them and you sigh. Of course everywhere you go there’s talk of him but you can’t find him. What else were you expecting this is just like when the two of you first met. You gasp as Monica has a superhero landing. Why didn’t she tell you that she had powers too?

“I lost the person closest to me too. The worst thing I can think of has already happened to me and I can’t change it. I can’t undo it. I can’t control this pain anymore. And I don’t think I want to, because it’s my truth.” Monica's words hit you like a truck and you start to tear up. You need to find Peter soon otherwise you might just lose your mind. All you want is to confide in him and have him tell you that it’s all gonna be okay. When one of Wanda’s neighbors takes her away you run up to Monica.

“Monica! What’re you doing here? Is Jimmy okay?”

“I had to tell Wanda about what Hayward has planned for Vision. Jimmy’s fine, he's with my guys. Did you get brought in with Darcy?”

“No I came in on my own, I was just with Darcy though. She’s fine, she’s with Vision right now coming here.”

“We’ve gotta get Wanda to listen to reason.”

“Yeah, okay let’s go.” The two of you follow behind the two women to the neighbors house.

“Let’s split up and find a way in.” You nod at Monica and go one way around the house while she goes the other way. You don’t have any luck though and as you’re rounding a corner you spot Peter next to Monica.

“Snoopers gonna snoop.” Monica jumps and turns to look at him and before he can do anything with the hand he raised you show up in front of him and grab his wrist. His eyes go wide at you popping out of a portal in front of him and he seems to freeze in shock.

“Peter, what the hell are you wearing? It’s awful. And what is that, a puka shell necklace?” You reach out to touch it but he grabs your wrist to stop you.

“Don’t touch that sweetheart.”

“Alright.” You shrug and rip your hand from his strong grip and bring it to your side. This is definitely not your Peter. “Just wondering though,” behind your back you create a small portal and stick your hand through it appearing beside Peter’s head, “what happens if I do this?” You rip the necklace off of his neck and bring your hand back to your body ready to defend yourself if need be.

“God what’s been going on?” Peter looks around him confused until he notices you in front of him for what seems to be the first time even though the two of you were just interacting. “Y/n? What are you doing here baby? It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah well, I’m saving your ass apparently. Must’ve been under some sort of mind control.”You dangle the necklace in front of him before tossing it to the side.

“How’d you know?” Monica steps up to be next to you rather than behind you.

“Peter would never wear a fucking puka shell necklace or hold my wrist that tight anywhere other than in bed.” You shrug at her and turn back to Peter. “Seriously though, what are you wearing? You look like a stoner frat guy babe.”

That’s Peter taglist: @ellaenchanted91

Peter Taglist: @amourtentiaa @simpforquicksilver @quickparkers @loveyou3000-mcu @elaineygrace

#peter maximoff x reader #peter maximoff #peter maximoff imagine #wandavision #peter maximof x reader

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mcwriting · 3 years

Text

The Marriage Project (12)

Hi all!!! This is the long awaited 12th chapter! It took months of rewrites of not only this chapter, but future ones as well to ensure this was written to the best of my ability.

This chapter marks the heaviest moment in this story, so please, please be mindful of the content warnings for this chapter. I marked the section that includes this moment.

I also chose not to add tags so that this is not everyone's first impression of this series!

Masterlist

Word Count: 2700

Warnings: s*xual ass*ult, language, alcohol consumption, blood/injury mention

% end of the first week of November- cont. %

Throughout the game, you and the other homecoming court members (aside from any football players or cheerleaders) had been sitting on the sidelines right in front of the student section, so you were somewhat able to talk to your friends.

The team was playing good in the first half. It was probably Tom’s best game that you’d ever seen. At halftime, they did the “official” crowning of court members and recognized football and cheer seniors.

The seniors were presented first, having their parents with them as they walked across the field. They started with the cheer team so Daisy could change back into her white dress.

Then came the court recognitions, you and Tom stepping onto the field after everyone else as the crowd cheered and clapped.

Tom’s arm linked around yours as he helped you stay steady walking across the grass, since your heels weren't quite meant for the soft ground. Someone handed you a large bundle of roses and you smiled widely.

The bright lights, the cheers, the smile Tom gave you.

It was a moment burned into your memory forever.

Then it was over, and the team went back to their game, winning 42-27, their best win by far all season.

You were saying your final thank you’s to people’s congratulatory comments as you began heading out to the parking lot. Alexis caught up with you amidst the chaos.

“You still on for Tyler’s? I’ll drive,” she offered.

“Yeah. Let’s go home so I can change and then we’ll head out, okay?” you said, finally getting to your car.

She followed you to your house, where you changed into a tight long-sleeved bodysuit, skinny jeans, and some heeled booties. You also packed some other things into a bag to sleep at Alexis’s house later.

You told your parents you were staying the night at her house. They definitely knew better by the way you’d left on your makeup and put on real clothes, but didn’t question you, instead tossing out a “stay safe” and “don’t do anything stupid” as you headed out the door.

Things were pretty much in full swing by the time you and Alexis pulled into the yard outside Tyler’s house and found your friends inside, red solo cups in hand. The speakers were blaring something with a strong beat and most people were dancing.

You had a white claw to loosen up. After having refrained from partying throughout volleyball season, Alexis would be designated driver for the night to let you have your fun. You saw plenty of football players hanging around but didn’t find Tom anywhere.

Weird.

*CW below*

After a little bit, you ran off to use the bathroom just down a hall. You went alone since it would only be a couple minutes, you knew everyone there, and weren’t drunk.

When you stepped back into the hall, you almost ran into a large figure. It was Harrison.

“Oh, hi there, little lady,” he sneered.

“Fuck off, Harrison.” you commanded, brushing past him. He grabbed your wrist and yanked you back.

“I don’t think you want to be saying that to me,” he pinned you against the wall. His breath reeked of alcohol. You looked around, but it was dark and no one was close enough to see your predicament.

“What the hell do you want? I’m just here to have fun.”

“And what do you think I’m doing huh? Don’t think I forgot about that little stunt you pulled going to Johnson. It’s your fault I missed two games.”

“Don’t think so buddy. Maybe if you respected women you wouldn’t have been in trouble in the first place. Now get off me,” you commanded, trying to push forward.

Big mistake.

He drove a knee between your legs and placed a hand over your chest, gripping your breast so tightly it hurt. For the first time, you were actually scared, but still stared directly into his eyes.

“Nah. I just think you’re too much of a pussy to take me. Now you’re gonna stay quiet or something much worse is gonna come to you,” he threatened, then placed his lips on your neck.

You squeezed your eyes shut to focus your thoughts. It was like you were frozen in shock and pain.

His other hand started sliding up the inside of your thigh when you panicked, kneeing him in the groin and shoving him from you before sending a fist into his jaw.

You were thankful he was drunk, as it made him disoriented and off balance.

Harrison reeled back, looking at you in confusion as he bent over, holding his mouth in pain. There was blood around his gums. He looked at you angrily before another voice called out.

“What the hell is going on here? I thought I told you to stay away from her,” Tom seethed. There was a fire in his eyes that you’d never seen before.

“You think I really care what you have to say? I was just trying to teach y/n a little lesson about consequences,” Harrison replied, slurring his words, before spitting blood onto the hardwood floor and pointing a finger right in your face. “You really think a couple hits are going to stop m-”

Tom was about to step forward to do something when rage overtook you and you threw another punch to his nose, causing him to fall backwards unconscious.

Tom looked down in shock at the limp body beneath you, then back up to you. Once your eyes met, his features softened.

“Y/n? Are you okay?” he asked, stepping over Harrison and guiding you away from him. As you finally began processing what had happened, tears slipped down your cheeks.

“I… he- he…” you couldn’t get the words out and your breath quickened.

“Hey, hey. I know. You don’t have to say anything. It wasn't your fault. Can I hug you?”

*end CW*

You sniffled and nodded, not meeting his eyes. He engulfed you in his arms, rubbing your back as you buried your face in his neck. Your chest throbbed from Harrison’s grip and knuckles ached from where they’d met his face twice.

After a few minutes, you straightened up and wiped your face, trying to be tough. Harrison was still out cold on the floor.

“Do you want me to go get your friends?” he asked, to which you nodded. He ran off and only a minute later came Alexis and Caroline.

They fawned over you, making sure you were okay. Tom put a hand on either of your arms and looked you directly in the eyes.

“I’m going to make sure he and his awful friends leave, okay? You haven’t done anything wrong.”

The girls led you back into the bathroom while Tom began dragging Harrison off. They helped you clean the mascara stains on your cheeks and make sure you were okay. After about 10 minutes, you finally felt confident enough to go back out.

When you got back to the main room, word had it that Tom, Jake, Chris, and some of the other guys were making sure Harrison’s crew would leave and not come back.

Knowing that you were safe from him finally, you decided to drink in the hopes of forgetting what happened for a little bit and have some fun. You started off with a shot of strawberry lemonade vodka, which led to shotgunning a beer and tossing back another shot (or two) of bacardi.

Not a half hour later and you were plastered. You went crazy on the dance floor, jumping around like a fool as different people came up to dance with you.

You were barely aware of what you were doing and extremely clumsy. The room was turning as you clambered up onto a table. You were spinning in circles until your shoe’s heel missed the edge and you started to topple over.

You couldn’t even react, but after a second realized you hadn’t hit the ground, and were instead in Tom’s arms.

“Alright I think it’s time for you to take a breather,” he said. It was hard to understand him as his voice sounded distant. He carried you out of the warm room and outside, where the cold air hit you like a truck. He set you down on the edge of Tyler’s porch.

“Y/n are you okay? After everything that happened I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

What he said wasn’t funny, but you found yourself cackling anyways.

“Better than everrr! Did you see my twerking?”

“Yes, yes I did. Are you feeling okay? Your face is super red. You aren’t nauseous?”

You shook your head with a big grin.

“I’m fiiiineee, pretty boy. Just because you’re my husssband doesn’t mean you have to follow me everywhere! I’m alllll gooood.” You slumped onto his shoulder, still giggling.

“Alright, princess. Let’s just chill here for now alright? I’ll text Alexis in a little bit.”

You sat in silence twisting your star ring as you began to cool down and your hearing was returning to normal. Tom was rubbing his thumb over your shoulder and had you drinking your second cup of water, but the effects of the alcohol were still present.

“Tom?” you whispered. He hummed. “You’re a really good husband.”

He chuckled.

“You think so?” he paused. “I think you’re a pretty good wife, too. No matter how much trouble you manage to get us both in.”

After a little longer, you felt yourself getting sleepy as the night took its toll on you. Alexis came outside and rushed over.

“Hey! I was looking everywhere. Sorry I didn’t see your text. Let’s go, y/n. You’ve had a looong night.”

Tom picked you up from the porch and led you to the car, half carrying you. He helped you into the car and buckled you up, then stood leaning in the doorway.

“Thanks for your help, Tom. Glad you were there for us,” Alexis said with a small grin as she buckled in.

“Of course. I’d do anything for her,” he replied, giving you a wink before shutting the door and waving. Alexis had barely pulled out of the driveway when she looked at you.

“Okay spill. What’s been going on with you and Tom?” she asked in a serious tone. She was clearly using the alcohol against you, and even though you were much more aware than before, you still started talking.

“I think I really like him.”

“Like we didn’t all already know that. I meant what have you been hiding from me the past three months? I know there’s more to the story.”

You sighed.

“It started last month, when Tom beat up… you know… the first time. We held hands on his bedroom floor that weekend until his mom accidentally walked in. And then we took those pictures and kept saying all these flirty things. I accidentally caught him naked, don’t ask.”

“Oh I’m definitely asking about that later. But continue.”

“Well then I stayed for dinner that Thursday and Sam caught us in the kitchen goofing around. Oh, and then last weekend we kissed, and-”

“YOU WHAT NOW?” she yelled, causing you to wince at the sound before you started rambling.

“We didn’t really kiss per se… It’s because we were fake dating for that couple. It just kinda happened! And now we’re going to homecoming together but it was supposed to be a secret so… don’t tell anyone before dinner tomorrow. Or tonight I guess since it’s Saturday morning.”

“I knew it. Dammit I knew it! Why didn’t you just tell me!”

“You’d make fun of me! Do you think I want to like him? We’ve been at each other’s throats all this time and now I’m just supposed to forget all that because of a little crush? You don’t get it, Lex. It’s not like he’d ever feel the same way.”

You looked out the car window, trying to settle your breathing after getting worked up. Your head hurt and you were still thirsty. Alexis pulled into her driveway and cut the engine.

“I know I would clown you about it, and I probably still will, but we’re friends for a reason. And you’re joking, right? Everyone knows Tom is head over heels in love with you.”

“What? No way.”

“Yes way! Have you not seen the way he looks at you, and follows you like a puppy dog, and gets so protective over you? I mean come on, y/n. He literally said he’d do anything for you and winked before we left. You must be blind to not see that.”

You sat and tried to think about it for a minute, wondering if she was right about him.

“Let’s go in, y/n. It’s getting cold and you need to sleep it off. You’re not going to have a fun morning, that’s for sure.”

You followed her into the house, trying not to stumble. Your balance definitely wasn’t all there. Her garage door led straight to the kitchen where you chugged a glass of water and took some antacids, grabbing more water to take to her room.

You went into the bathroom to shower off the makeup and sweat and hairspray. When you got out and looked in the mirror, you saw the way your chest was reddened from what Harrison did to you. It took everything to hold back more tears.

The moment your eyes opened, everything hurt.

Your head, stomach, feet, chest. Your head was flooded with memories from the previous night. You rolled away from the window to find Alexis sitting on the floor next to a plate and glass of water.

“Well, well, well. Sleeping beauty awakes. I brought you my hangover cure.”

You looked down to see that on the plate sat two advils, an alka seltzer, and some cinnamon pop tarts. It was almost 11 am.

“Thanks, Lex. For everything. You’re the best,” you said, taking a bite off one pastry.

“Don’t be thanking me. Tom’s the real hero. He got a bunch of people together this morning to report Harrison for what he did to you and he’s suspended again, can’t go to the dance. I guess Johnson is gonna deal with it more next week and he might be expelled. Do you have any proof other than Tom?” she said gently.

“Let’s see,” you said, tugging off your shirt, revealing a sports bra. She gasped when she saw the purple bruising around one breast and the hickey marks that had been left on your neck.

“Oh my God, y/n. That’s awful.”

“I know. It didn’t look like this last night. We need to get some pictures.”

After taking some pictures for proof and finishing off your “breakfast,” you and Alexis began preparing yourselves for the dance. You were going to do makeup and hair at her house before going home to change, and then to Tom’s.

If he even still wanted to go with you. You decided to call him while Alexis curled your hair.

“Hey, y/n. Are you okay?” he asked, voice deep and raspy. He must have gone to bed again after organizing the reports against Harrison.

“Yeah, I’m way better. Thanks for everything last night. For saving my ass. I heard what you did this morning, too. You’re the best.”

“It’s the right thing to do, y/n. I’m glad I was there. And you’re sure you’re okay? We can skip the dance tonight if you aren’t up for it. You know my mom would love to have you come hang out any time.”

“Hey, now. I’m not about to leave the dance without a king and queen. I mostly wanted to check if you were still okay with going together after everything.”

“Of course! I want to go with you, y/n. Nothing’s changed that.”

You smiled.

“Okay, well, I’ll pick you up at 5 for dinner. Bye, Tom.”

“See ya, princess.”

You ended the call and sat quietly looking down. You almost forgot Alexis was there until she said,

“So you’re driving him, huh? I alway knew you wore the pants. Now tell me about that whole ‘seeing him naked’ thing...”

A/N: so... there's that chapter. I hope you all understand that this moment is not at all meant to romanticize or glorify the terrible experiences so many people endure, but instead highlight one way this issue is dealt with.

I wish you all the best. Please remember that my messages and asks are always open ❤��

Send a message or ask if you’d like to be added to my permanent or series taglists so I can verify you’ve been added!

Story tag list: @jackiehollanderr, @one-big-fangirl, @l0lmk, @primadonnasdream, @bookworm06, @thenoddingbunny-blog, @agentnataliahofferson, @spider-babe, @stxfxniexreads, @justafangirlduh, @supraveng,

#the marriage project

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scottydog4-blog · 3 years

Text

Okay.

It’s been a day.

There are now a LOT of gifs and Twitter-pinions about the premier, and I have some too.

When I finished ‘More Joy’, I quite literally thought “I want them to go back to how it was”…. and I felt like a complete Sharpwin traitor. I actually wanted to box it all back up and have the old Max and Helen back, corridor walks and longing stares, all happening safely inside the walls of New Amsterdam hospital. And at the same time I wanted to rewatch the whole episode to see new Max and Helen again because they were (mostly) adorable.

Then I spent the day reflecting and the more I thought about what I didn’t like, the more I realised one thing. I didn’t like that they weren’t at the hospital. It felt so weird to see them at Helen’s place, half dressed and TALKING, openly. It was a bit too much for my over analytical, ready-to-pick-up-on-all-and-any-subtext brain. It was a change seeing them like that, and I don’t seem to like change. Which is hard because it seems season 4 is not only about joy, but about change.

Yes yes, the first scene was 🔥🔥🔥 endless gifs. In hindsight, I wish I’d never seen any previews but alas, I’m a spoiler junkie. It was awesome though.

The second scene was slightly dramatic and achieved its goal of throwing a nice cold-bucket-of-water on the moment 🥶🥶🥶

The third scene did feel a little out of left field because in Helen’s season finale London movie her mum was not very likeable and for most of Season 3 Mina was a pain in the ass, so wanting us to root for her to go hang out with both of them instead of her very warm and loving NA fam and her new hot boyfriend is a hard sell! But go read someone else’s analysis of that because a lot has been said about her past and her healing journey etc. I can accept it, it’ll just sting a bit (see hatred of change above).

I’m going for the next three scenes.

Scene four. I loved it because they were up and they were walking about and talking normally and I think them walking and talking is as much part of both of their characters as their longing looks. He’s followed her down endless hospital corridors, now around her apartment, and maybe soon across an ocean. And yes you can complain about the I love yous, or you might love how they happened. Whatever. All I saw was Max react to her saying ‘I love you’ as if finally, even to him, this was completely obvious. I mean, his face is like ‘duh’. It’s why he’s ready to fight so hard for her. He’s not second guessing that she loves him anymore. And that felt good to see.

Scene five. I hated it. I still do. But I hate it because it makes me feel uneasy and uncomfortable, like it becomes painfully obvious that their long distance solution is not going to work and it’s awkward watching them realise it to. Which is the point. Because we all need to get that long distance is just not going to work. If they went down that route for an episode or two (or five) then that would mean Helen would be able to leave, and Max would stay, and that’s certainly not what we want. She’s one of our favourite doctors and she has amazing patient storylines and being Max’s long distance girlfriend is not just a down grade for Helen (and Freema), it’s insulting. What I think most viewers would have liked by the end of this scene is literally for Helen to give up on her London dream so everything goes back to being easy and we would get Max and Helen staying at New Amsterdam, same as they always have been, only now perfectly in love. Also an insult to woman everywhere. But you know who absolutely never tries to suggest that, who keeps making suggestion after suggestion, who literally declares different iterations of “it’s gunna work” every time she implies that it won’t. Max. He never asks her not to do this, only reassures her they’ll figure it all out. And that also felt good to see.

Lastly, scene six. My absolute favourite (yes, above scene one). It makes complete sense now why the last scene on the roof is the most comfortable one to watch. Because it’s them. Max and Helen. Back at New Amsterdam. On their roof. Just existing next to each other. Clothed (lol). “Oh hi” never sounded so good after all the ups and downs during the episode. Glancing at each other as they chat in front of the NYC skyline. That feeling that everything had changed evaporated instantly. Change MAY be coming, but for now they are still here.

And when they do start to talk about them, it doesn’t feel so weird. In fact, this scene is literally pure JOY. How can you argue otherwise? Max, who admitted on the very same roof to the very same woman how he’d let his wife down because he couldn’t turn down his chance to climb ‘Everest’, is now willing to do the exact opposite and GIVE UP his Everest so Helen can climb hers. Because he loves her. Plus, LOOK AT FREEMA’S FACE. How does she do all those emotions like that? And then there’s Max, who just looks back at her like ‘of course I’ll follow you, you’re my joy silly.’

SO MUCH JOY ON THAT ROOF!!!

People are only mad because they are freaking out about how the show creators are going to possibly make this work without them. And that in itself is just totally unnecessary.

New Amsterdam is a show about the Medical Director, Max Goodwin, and all his awesome staff. It’s about patients. It’s about shining a light on things and causes that matter. It’s about New York (see all those rooftop scenes, that skyline is the other character). People LOVE it just as it is. WE love it. Those things are the premise of the whole show. So can everyone CHILL. What they’ve done, is they’ve put that thing we love on the line and now we are all wanting to know how the hell they’re going to fix this mess. And they are going to say OVER and OVER that Max and Helen are DEFINITELY leaving because implying otherwise undermines the whole storyline. We need to feel they are leaving to be invested in whatever happens next. Time jump or mind changes or any number of things they might throw our way to get a back to the premise of the show. And we are going to tune in week after week to find out. And that my friends, is how television works. And thinking they were going to do otherwise was just setting yourself up for disappointment.

To the people demanding Max and Helen be happy for at least one episode… um, they looked very happy in episode 1 and they look very happy up against an ambulance in episode 2, and in the corridor smooching in episode 3, and wandering the streets of NYC some time in the future…

To the people who thought they were getting 5 full minutes of sexy times. I believe what we were told was we’d be ‘happy with the first 5 minutes’ (e.g. that glorious time before Helen said ‘I should never have…’)

To the people who read every single article and Q&A - Schulner LITERALLY said so many times that the season would be about discovering your joy and what happens after you get what you want. I think one time he even mentioned ‘chasing after’ it. We were basically warned and WE ARE LITERALLY LIVING THIS NOW TOO. We got Sharpwin, now we have to live with what happens next. Cause and effect in action.

To the people annoyed with all the drama this show has caused. It’s a… drama show. It was to be expected.

So let’s try to relax and enjoy the ride :)

#new amsterdam #sharpwin #helen sharpe #max goodwin #helen x max

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apenapaperandadoofus · 3 years

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Here's sum more random Jumin contrnt pftttt

I've been feeling in such a Jumin mood lately asnsnsn so lemme just write it pftt

Btw sorry for all the friggin typos on the last one holy shit, it was three am and I was falling asleep while writing it 😅 I will try to edit this one before posting hehe

Practice (Jumin x MC)

You smiled as you browsed through your instagram page. There were pictures about coffee, probably from Jaehee, a meme about how annoying school was by Yoosung, even more memes by Saeyoung, a new musical poster by Zen, and a picture that Jihyun and Saeran took together while standing on a field of beautiful flowers. You gently smiled as you thought about your friends, and you couldn't help but smile wider as you thought about the amazing man that you had behind you at this moment.

"My love, is everything alright?" Jumin asked, and you sighed happily.

"Yeah, yeah, I was just... well thinking about the RFA and such. I can't believe how lucky I am to have someone like you all in my life."

Jumin stopped for a second and you could hear the smile on his face as he replied, "I find myself thinking about that most of the time too. And we're all extremely lucky to have you by our sides too MC."

You blushed and shyly mumbled about how Jumin was way too adorable for his own good, and then you tried to look somewhere else as you saw his smile grow bigger.

"Anyhow, enough of that Jumin! Are you done yet?"

Jumin nodded and handed you a small mirror. "I have to admit that I think this is one of my best works" he said proudly. You didn't say anything and crossed your fingers, hoping that this time it was true.

It wasn't.

You looked at your hair in the mirror. It was sticking out in some places, since they had been able to escape the hair ties that were in your hair. You didn't know what exactly he had tried to do, but you imagined it was something between a braid and a bun.

You turned around to look at your husband, proudly smiling at you.

"I really believe this time I got everything right." He said, and you tried your best to hide your laugh, but immediately failed.

Jumin looked at you confused and you quickly got up from the floor and got on top of him, straddling him while wrapping your arms around his neck.

"Oh Jumin I absolutely and utterly love you!! You are the light of my life and I don't know what I would ever do without you! But I beg of you, please try to give up on trying to style my hair!!!"

As you pulled away you saw Jumin place a finger under his chin. "That's weird. I thought I did everything right, according to the video."

"Jumin, my beautiful darling, love of my life. I appreciate you trying to practice your hair styling abilities on me, but I think we've been through enough messy hairstyles to admit that, sadly, you can't exactly....well....style other people's hair." You then winced as you tried to gently take off a hair tie from your hair.

"That's strange though...I followed every single instruction, and I did the procedure the right way..."

"Jumin I look like Mafalda, or those cartoon witches that have their hair poking out everywhere. Let's just try to admit that you can't braid hair."

Jumin sighed and then caressed your cheek. "Well, then can I just say that you look beautiful?"

You blushed and laughed as you gently pushed his chest. "Jumin! I seriously look like I just woke up from a very violent night of sleeping! Honey, let's just admit that you're as good at styling hair as good as you are at driving."

He sighed. "Well I guess you are right. Still it doesn't make me feel happy to hear how bad I am at styling hair from the love of my life."

You giggled as you saw Jumin pout. Then, you kissed his nose and leaned your forehead against his.

"Jumin, it's fine if you can't style hair. You're pretty amazing at other stuff! Besides no matter how smart and wonderful you are, nobody can really be perfect at everything. Not even the most perfect man in the world." You booped his nose and Jumin smiled.

"I guess you are right love. It is a shame though. If we ended up having a daughter in the future, I wanted to be able to braid her hair while she gets ready for school."

You felt your eyes widen as you gasped and pulled away from Jumin, a very satisfied smile on his face.

"Wh- I-I mean, J-Jumin!"

"Yes my love?"

You felt yourself flush and tried your best to keep your composure. "F-firstly, that is absolutely adorable! And second, h-how did you....find out?"

"That you were pregnant?" He asked, raising an eyebrow." You nodded and he ran his fingers through your now loose hair. "I saw one of the maids throwing the test out."

"But I told them to-!"

"I talked to her and she let me see the test."

You chuckled. "You mean you almost scared her half to death and she showed you the test."

"I did not. I just reminded her that as her boss and client, she shouldn't refuse to let me see the things she found at my house."

"Jumin!!!"

"I did offer her a few days off though. In fact, I took a few days off myself. I was in a great mood after finding out that I was going to have a child with my beautiful wife."

You blushed. "Well...I would've still wanted to tell you myself....I wanted to surprise you...and now that I think about it, I'm sure the whole RFA knows too, knowing you. Wait, is this why Yoosung suddenly came up to me and hugged me while crying last time!?"

Jumin nodded. "I only told V. But it seems that Saeyoung managed to hack into out messages and find out."

"Oh that little!!!-"

"Love. It's fine. I honestly want to throw a big party, and tell the whole world about how happy I am to have a child with the most wonderful person in the world."

You felt yourself soften up as you looked at your husband's happy smile.

"Well...fine. Just....don't snoop through my trash next time."

"Honestly I feel like you weren't going to tell me unless I did. It's been almost a month."

"I was waiting for the right time!"

He chuckled. "I know love, but you should've told me the moment you got the test results."

"I wanted it to be special! Besides you were so busy with work, and I'm sure the whole business with the Italian client was stressing you out...I was just a bit scared about how you'd reply."

Jumin's features softened and he gently kissed your cheek. "Nothing you ever say or do will ever stress me out." Then, he kissed your nose. "Especially not something like this. I....I can't believe how lucky I am to be with you. I never thought I'd get to see the day where I would get to have a family of my own." He then kissed your lips. "That was all until I met you, and you changed everything. You helped me and the RFA so much. And now, you're fulfilling a dream that I never thought I'd get to see. Thank you MC."

You blushed and gently kissed him back.

"I love you Jumin."

"I love you too."

"But I'm still mad about how you knew ahead of time."

"That's fair." He chuckled.

"And I need to beg of you, if we do end up having a daughter to never get near her hair."

He laughed. "Of course love, I'll leave all the hair hijinks to you."

"What- no, not me either, I can't do anything with hair! Last time I tried to braid it, I need up taking half of it off."

"Then I guess we'll just have to hire someone else to do her hair."

"Or we could let her be homeschooled and not get out of the house until she learns how to comb her own hair."

You both laughed and held each other tighter. Later that day the whole RFA came to visit you and congratulate you both, and you couldn't help the big smile on your face the whole afternoon. You were truly lucky to have them all in your life, and you'd never trade it for anything else.

......

You both ended up hiring a maid to help you with your kid's hair. They did not deserve the absolute chaos that unleashed as soon as you and Jumin got your hands on a hair brush and tried to make a braid.

#mystic messenger #jumin han #mysme #saeyoung choi #yoosung kim #jaehee kang #jihyun mysme #saeran choi #choi bois #mysme zen

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letterboxd · 3 years

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Savage Cinema.

From anarchists and adultery to milk baths and massacres, Matthew Turner shares five of the weirdest and wildest highlights of Hollywood’s pre-Code era, as #PreCodeApril comes to a close.

Pre-Code April was directly inspired by Noirvember, a month-long celebration of noir cinema instigated by Marya Gates (Oldfilmsflicker). I did Noirvember for the first time in November 2019, really enjoyed it, and thought it would be great to do the same thing for pre-Code movies. Although I’ve watched most of the classic 1930s films, I realised there were a huge number of pre-Code films I’d never seen (of my Letterboxd list of over 900 Pre-Code films, I have only seen 200).

As a sucker for a bit of wordplay, no matter how tenuous, I picked April partly because it’s six months away from Noirvember and partly because of the shared “pr” sound in April and Pre-Code. I’ve been absolutely delighted by the response—the #PreCodeApril hashtag on Twitter is a daily treasure trove of pre-Code-related joy, but I was genuinely thrilled to see the response on Letterboxd (here is my watchlist for the month). It’s been a real pleasure to see pre-Code movies constantly popping up in my ‘new from friends’ feed. My hope is that it’ll be even bigger next year—and that maybe TCM will want to get involved, the way they do with Noirvember.

Produced between 1929 and 1934, pre-Code cinema refers to films made in a brief period between the silent era, and Hollywood beginning to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines (mandatory enforcement came in from July 1934). The “Code” in question was popularly known as the Hays Code, after then MPPDA president Will H. Hays. As the depression set in and box office declined, theater owners needed fare that would drive cinema-goers to the movies. It was a wild time to be a scriptwriter; they threw everything at the page, designers added even more, and actors played out the kinds of scenes, from the suggestive to the overt, that would otherwise be banned for decades to come.

The following five films demonstrate some of Hollywood’s craziest pre-Code excesses. They’re still jaw-dropping, even by today’s standards, and notably give female characters an agency that would be later denied as the Christian morals of the Code overruled writers’ kinks.

Madam Satan (1930) Directed by Cecil B. DeMille, written by Elsie Janis, Jeanie Macpherson and Gladys Unger

A critical and commercial flop in 1930, Cecil B. DeMille’s utterly insane musical comedy stars Kay Johnson as a straight-laced wife who plots to win back her unfaithful husband (Reginald Denny) by seducing him at a costume party, disguised as a mysterious devil woman. The location of this party? Oh, nothing too fancy, just on board a giant zeppelin. (“Madam Satan or: How the Film gets Fucking Crazy on the Blimp,” as Ryan reviewed it.)

Madam Satan is not by any stretch of the imagination a good movie (the editing alone is laughably bad), but as a piece of pre-Code craziness, it really has to be seen to be believed. Co-written by a trio of women and set in just three locations, it goes from racy bedroom farce to avant-garde musical to full-on disaster movie after a bolt of lightning hits the blimp.

The film is justly celebrated (in camp classic circles, at least) for the wildly over-the-top costumes paraded in the masquerade ball sequence, but there’s weird outfit joy everywhere you look. Keep an eye out for an enterprising extra who’s come dressed as a set of triplets.

Call Her Savage (1932) Directed by John Francis Dillon, written by Tiffany Thayer and Edwin J. Burke

Adapted from a salacious novel by Tiffany Thayer, Call Her Savage was former silent star Clara Bow’s second-to-last film before her retirement at the age of 28. She plays Texas gal Nasa Springer, who’s always had a “savage” temper she can’t explain. In the space of 88 minutes she goes from wild teenager to jilted newlywed to young mother to prostitute to wealthy society girl to alcoholic before finally (it’s implied) settling down with her Native-American friend after discovering that she’s half-Native-American, something the audience has known all along.

Bow’s performance is frankly astonishing, to the point where you simply can’t believe what you’re seeing from one moment to the next. Sample scenes see her savagely whipping both a snake and her Indian friend, smashing a guitar over a musician’s head and violently wrestling her Great Dane… and that’s all in the first five minutes. She’s also frequently in a state of near undress throughout—one funny scene has her maids chasing her with a dressing gown because they’re afraid she’ll run down the street in her négligée.

The rest of the film includes alcohol, adultery, strong violence, attempted rape, murder, syphilis (not named, but heavily implied) and baby death. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of outrageous content and Bow is pure dynamite throughout. The film is also noted for being one of the first on-screen portrayals of homosexuality, when Nasa visits a gay bar in the Village frequented by “wild poets and anarchists”.

Smarty (1934) Directed by Robert Florey, written by Carl Erickson and F. Hugh Herbert

This deeply problematic sex comedy features pre-Code stars Joan Blondell and Warren William (often nicknamed ‘The King of Pre-Code’) at their absolute filthiest. Blondell plays Vicki, a capricious, happily married wife who gets an obvious kick out of taunting her husband, Tony (William). When he cracks and slaps her at a party, she divorces him and marries her lawyer, Vernon (Edward Everett Horton), whom she also goads into slapping her in a deliberate ploy to win back Tony.

Essentially, Smarty hinges on Vicki liking rough sex and it’s completely blatant about it, ending with her sighing “Hit me again” (the film’s UK title!) as they sink into a clinch on a couch, a rapturous expression on her face. It’s a controversial film because on the surface it looks like it’s condoning domestic violence, but it’s very clearly about Vicki’s openly expressed sexual desires—she wants to be punished and dominated, she just has a rather dodgy way of getting what she wants.

It might be unsophisticated, but in some ways Smarty is remarkably ahead of its time and ripe for rediscovery. To that end, it would make a fascinating double bill with Stephen Shainberg’s Secretary (2002). Oh, and it’s also chock-full of lingerie scenes (like most pre-Code films), if you like that sort of thing.

Massacre (1934) Directed by Alan Crosland, written by Sheridan Gibney, Ralph Block and Robert Gessner

Several pre-Code films (notably those made by Warner Bros) took a no-punches-pulled approach to their depiction of social issues, and star Richard Barthelmess actively sought out such projects. Here he plays Joe Thunderhorse, a Native American who’s become famous on the rodeo circuit. When he returns to his tribe to bury his father, he ends up fighting for their rights, taking on corrupt government officials and religious authorities.

Massacre is fascinating because on the one hand it’s wildly insensitive—Barthelmess and co-star Ann Dvorak are both cast as Native Americans—but on the other, it burns with a righteous fury and does more than any other Hollywood film (before or since) to champion the rights and highlight the injustices dealt out to Native Americans. That fury is encapsulated in a horrifying and rightly upsetting rape scene (it happens off-screen, but the cuts leave you in no doubt) that the film handles with surprising sensitivity.

In addition to being a passionate fight against racism and social injustice, the film also has some genuinely shocking sexual content. Most notably, Joe is seen making love to a rich white woman (Claire Dodd, who’s also in Smarty) who has an obvious sexual fetish, flaunting him in front of her friends and making a shrine in her room with Native-American paraphernalia.

The Sign of the Cross (1932) Directed by Cecil B. DeMille, written by Waldemar Young and Sidney Buchman

Yes, this is Cecil B. DeMille again, but no list of weird and wild pre-Code films would be complete without the jaw-dropping ancient Rome epic, The Sign of the Cross. Adapted from an 1895 play by Wilson Barrett, it stars Frederic March as Marcus Superbus (stop sniggering at the back there), who’s torn between his loyalty to Emperor Nero (Charles Laughton) and his love for a Christian woman (Elissa Landi), while also fending off the advances of the Emperor’s wife, Poppaea (Claudette Colbert).

The film is racy enough in its sexual content alone: highlights include the famous scene of Claudette Colbert taking a nude milk bath and an erotic “lesbian” dance sequence, where Joyzelle Joyner’s “most wicked and talented woman in Rome” does ‘The Dance of the Naked Moon’ at Frederic March’s orgy, trying to tempt Landi’s virtuous Christian, to the obvious arousal of the gathered guests.

However, it’s the climactic gladiatorial-arena sequence that will leave your jaw on the floor. Lasting around twelve minutes, it includes: someone getting eaten by a tiger, a tied-up, naked women being approached by hungry crocodiles, pygmies getting chopped up by female barbarians, elephants stomping on heads, a gorilla approaching a naked woman tied to a stake, a man getting gored by a bull, and gladiators fighting to the death, complete with blood and gory injury detail.

The whole thing is genuinely horrifying, even for 2021. Best of all, DeMille pointedly critiques the audience (ourselves included), by showing a series of reaction shots ranging from intense enjoyment to abject seen-it-all-before boredom.

Matthew Turner (FilmFan1971) is a critic, author, podcaster and lifelong film fanatic. His favorite film is ‘Vertigo’. The films in this article are also listed here: Five of the Pre-Code Era’s Most Outrageous Films.

#preCodeApril #pre code april #precode april #hays code #mppa code #cecil b demille #clara bow #matthew turner #letterboxd #1930s films #1920s films #depression films

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xserpentlife · 4 years

Text

Trippin

Requested: Yes - Hey are requests still open? If so do you think you could so one where it's a Jughead or Sweet Pea x reader where the reader is usually super clumsy, so he's usually prepared to save them and stuff, But the reader gets a pair of heelys and he doesn't find out until he sees the reader holding onto one their friends jackets or back packs running through the halls?

A/N: I hope y’all love this. I really love the way it turned out so I hope you do too.

WC: 1845

Sweet Pea’s POV

5 months ago I noticed Y/N for the first time. We were friends, always had been. Walking home from Pops with Fangs on my left and Y/N to my right. We were making our way to our trailers on the Southside. After a long week of school, Pops was our escape. No care in the world we were walking aimlessly along the stone sidewalks and uneven ground. Y/N stepped up and must have mistook how high or uneven the ground was and somehow I instinctively saw her falling as I reached out and grabbed the end of her backpack. I grabbed on to it as she screamed, but I stopped her from falling before she could hit the ground.

“Ahhhh!, What the…!” I lifted her back up placing her onto her feet.

“How did you...?”

“I dunno” She looked at me before turning back and running into her trailer as we soon made our way into Sunnyside Trailer park.

The second time we were waiting for a meeting. An emergency Serpent meeting had been called and luckily I was in the area, I texted Y/N about it and she was on her way running from her job on the Northside. She was trying to get there as fast as she could but the meeting had to start before she arrived. I heard a bike pull into the lot upstairs, and I heard pounding down the steps, and again I felt that instinctive feeling. I opened the door as she came barreling in landing in the booth in front of her. I went back over and stood next to Fangs as she collected herself, slipping out of her work vest and putting on her Serpent jacket.

“You know if you hadn’t opened that door she would have run face-first into it right?”

“Nah, Fangs she would’ve…”

“Bro did you see how fast she was running”

“But…”

“You two have some weird psychic shit going on or something”

“I don’t know Fangs”

“Hey, guys!” I turned to see Y/N’s makeup done, Serpent Jacket on, beautiful. I saw her.

The third time was when I saw her clumsiness once again, her goofiness, as she was running late to a class, running down the hallway full speed. She turned a corner running straight down the hallway as she turned the corner too sharp and came barrelling towards the lockers, but instead she came towards where I was standing and barreled straight into my chest as I fell and she fell right on top of me.

“Pea oh my god are you ok!”

“Date me”

“What, did you hit your head?” she started standing up as she grabbed my hand “C’mon we gotta bring you to the nurse, get up you big oaf” I started standing but I pulled her back down and put my hand on her cheek waiting for her to react before I did anything.

“I’m serious” I brought my lips to hers slowly. She bit her lip as I pulled away.

“Okay”

“Is that a yes…?”

“Yes Pea, i'll go on a date with you” we were a we

The fourth time was months later, finals had just finished and we were finally graduating. Cheryl was throwing her end of the year bash. Red solo cups everywhere, kids trying to play with the various vases and China that Thistlehouse had locked away. Cheryl yells every 5 seconds for someone to put something down, and Toni follows behind her to calm her down. The normal things that always went on. I couldn’t find Y/N though. I had lost her as she wandered away midway through the party and went with Toni and Fangs as they pulled me away for a game of beer pong. I heard everyone screaming shouting a bunch of “Do it’s” and “yes’s” and “you got this'' from various areas of the party until I looking up and saw Y/N. She was on the small roof of the Thistlehouse guest house, where a couch had been placed, standing on it, dangerous as it was for her clumsiness. Aside from that, she was trying to jump into the pool that stood below her.

“Y/N what are you doing!”

“Hi babyyyyyy”

“Y/N baby get down” I didn’t care that she had fun. That was not my worry, my worry was her and the danger she was in at the moment. I saw her ready to jump, luckily the building was fairly short, I could climb up right now, I knew if she would jump I could catch her, or her falling I could do the same. I had Fangs and Jug come up behind me as a backup, as she jumped I stood underneath watching as she jumped directly down completely missing the pool that Jughead thought she was going to hit the edge of, which caused him to fall in, while she landed directly into my arms.

“Oh nooooooo, Juggy”

“Its okay princess”

“Fangs can you help him while I get her home”

“Course” the 5-minute walk to the truck felt like the calmest moments of my life, her and me the trees and woods surrounding us and the sounds of the birds singing. Her head nuzzled into my chest. I felt love.

And now we’re here month 5, and on the 5th month with the love of my life. We both started working at the Wyrm, shifts on the weekend covering bar shifts. We were the only two who apparently knew each other’s movements well enough to work together efficiently and timely enough in the confined space of the bar. But this night, in particular, she was trying to impress Fangs and Toni. She had been learning some bar tricks from Tik Tok and wanted to show them a few of the moves. She was doing good and all, until one I knew wasn’t gonna end well.

“Fangs, T, wanna see a cool trick?”

“Yeah Y/N do it”

“Yeah, I wanna see” I watched the bottle swing up as it was about to land on her head, the spin not quite right on the bottle, she ducked down as the bottle was coming close to her head, I hadn’t even heard anything as I was talking to a customer but I knew. I reached upright as I turned around. Stepping right in front of her catching it before it could even come close to hitting her as everyone around us cheered. She grabbed my hand standing back up again.

“Thanks”

“Anytime” we stared into the eyes of each other, for some reason I didn’t wanna look away. As her lips came to mine slowly.

“Marry me”

“What!”

“I’ll do this again in a fancier way I promise, but… marry me”

“No”

“What?”

“No, I mean I don’t need the fanciness, I just know, Yes Pea!, It’s a yes”

“Its a yes!”

“Mhm” Everyone around us cheered once again. The happiness running through me. She was my person. The connectedness I felt for her I never felt for anyone. The constant clumsiness that she had that always made me laugh. The extra change of clothes I kept in my car because she always spilled food or coffee down the front of herself, not to mention all the coffee that she spilled in my truck on our morning coffee runs. Or even the amount of times I’ve watched her phone drop on her face in the middle of the night and had to kiss it better. Or the hundreds upon thousands of times she's fallen up the stairs. Those are the things I love about this girl. But what I love most is the way I can catch her when she falls, the way I know when she is gonna run into a door and I can open it for her, or even when I can be that barrier and break that fall for her. I can be that cushion that she needs. I love her. I want to marry her.

5 months later we had our wedding, Yeah, it wasn’t a long time to plan, but we didn’t need long. It was small and intimate. I stood at the front of the aisle, the flowers surrounding me as I waited for her to walk down. Our favorite song playing in my ears because she didn’t want to walk down the aisle to the traditional here comes the bride. Fangs was gonna be the one to walk her down, her father, a serpent had been killed years ago on a job, Fangs had been there for her as a brother since she was a kid. A brother to me as well, I was ready. Ready to take this beautiful woman as my wife. Our officiant standing behind me ready to make this whole thing official. FP standing off to the side as support as one of my groomsmen along with Jughead, Fangs my best man once he was done walking her down. Her side consists of Betty, Cheryl, and Toni.

I heard the song start, the music playing as everyone took their seats and began to quiet down. The nerves are beginning to rack through me. FP smacking me on the back as he came and stood behind me. I shook out my arms as I brought my hands together.

The doors shot open as Fangs came running in Y/N holding onto his back *I was wondering why had such a long aisle* She let go soon as Fangs whipped her forward, as she came barrelling towards me, she had a short white poofy dress on. Almost cupcake-like. And I looked to her feet to see Heelys. DaNgER was all I thought to myself. She just kept going as she came barreling into my arms as I caught her and helped her stand upright.

“Fancy meeting you here”

“Oh yeah?”

“Thought I’d make us meet the same way we always do”

“Mmm oh yeah baby, just wanted to live in danger, add a little clumsiness to the wedding huh, you’re the clumsiest person I know so I think you’d do that anyway”

“Hey!” she smacked me on the chest as I leaned down kissing her on the cheek before helping her up onto the step by the officiant. Toni handed Y/N her regular bottoms to the Heelys so that she could wear them as normal sneakers for the rest of the night. The wedding went by smoothly as vows were exchanged and the kiss. The best kiss of my life. I stepped down the stairs about to take her hand but she decided to come down tripping as she did until I caught her so she wouldn’t fall.

“See… clumsy, I look over for five seconds and you end up like this...”

“Hey… well, now you’re married to clumsy MR!”

“Wouldn’t want it any other way Princess” I kissed her before helping her stand up straight, grabbing her hand as everyone clapped and blew bubbles as we exited down the aisle.

#sweet pea x reader #sweet pea #sweet pea x y/n #sweet pea x you #riverdale x reader #riverdale x you #sweet pea x #sweet pea x you reader insert #sweet pea x reader insert #sweet pea x reader riverdale #sweet pea x you reader #riverdale x y/n #riverdale #riverdale x you reader #riverdale reader #riverdale you #riverdale reader insert

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lluvguts · 3 years

Text

Cool Blue ; Chapter Ten

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waiting for stars to intertwine

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☽ a/n: totally forgot to add this to the masterpost. if you've read ch ten on ao3 already than ignore this update!! there's gonna be a wip coming yall's way soon too, so be on the look out for that!! <3 love you guys

☽ warnings: blood, self-harm mention, angst

☽ fic masterlist

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Luca's heart hammered in his chest, the pain resurfacing, and no matter how hard he hugged his sides, trying to squeeze the heat from inside of him like slippery seaweed, nothing worked. He swam past the island, to cooler, harsher waters, to his home--his actual home. Not whatever he was feeling when he was around Alberto; whatever sort of home that was.

He told Alberto. A monster. That was what he was. He wasn't human, and Alberto made quick use of that information by shoving him off his knees in one swift motion, and leaving his dried-out beach towel as a reminder of it. He told him. So why did he...let it get the best of him?

His head swam, a thick heat-haze clouding his thoughts as he neared the mossy structure, blinking in the darkening waters. Luca touched the edge of the cave entrance, and winced hearing his mother's sharp intake of breath at his presence outside the house. She appeared, followed by Lorenzo, glaring down at him.

"Uh..." Luca mumbled, his words slurred. The throbbing in his gut hadn't dissipated yet, and neither had the phantom-like trembling between his shorts. "...Hey mom? Can - Can I come in?"

Daniela assessed her son before her, the shine, the sweat from Alberto's dark skin had crept beneath his scales and made a home there in the crevices, like old sand. He breathed, and the older boy's (the human's, he corrected himself) smell came rushing back with full force. Immediate. Filling his lungs sweetly but enough that he spluttered on the bubbles slipping under his tongue.

"I told you," Daniela said sternly to Luca's father. "When am I ever wrong?"

"What are you talking about?" Luca's mind began to wander without any direction, aggressively going back to the one time when he was younger and would often forget his curfew at sunset, and Daniela had joked (or had she?) she'd send Luca to The Deep with his uncle if he didn't come home at a reasonable hour. "I know it's late, I'm sorry! I just caught up in something, I swear it won't happen again Mom!"

Lorenzo frowned from behind his wife and placed his webbed hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. It was an unspoken discussion translated between the tense water.

"No, 'Renzo! Don't start with this now! You smell it too!" Daniela growled, taking her son's arm and lifting him up in the water, sniffing his crown of blue fins. "So strong, it's a damned sailor's lighthouse beam!"

"And it's land monster too..." Lorenzo commented softly, scenting the air. Daniela's eyes widened in her anger and her grip on Luca tightened.

Her tone was dangerous, venom. "You went to the land monster town? Where there's humans? In your heat??"

"Mom, no--" Luca protested, her claws beginning to hurt from where they were grasping his shoulder.

"Don't interrupt!" She snapped back. Her tail thrashed in the water, making Luca tense even though his body was already on-edge. "You...You're gonna have to wait this out someplace else! We'll send for Ugo. I can't know that my baby was out there...doing things...with some filthy land monster girl."

"Boy."

Luca and Daniela turned to see Lorenzo, who flushed in embarrassment at getting noticed.

"What?"

"It's clearly a boy, Daniela," Lorenza swam closer and examined the fevered pink scales on Luca's waist and chest. "Smell it. It's...I don't know, hun. It's stronger, I guess. I know when there's a man on those land monster boats, and that," He pointed to Luca. "Is definitely a boy. Land monster. A boy-human, whatever."

Monster. A monster. That was what he was. Luca hovered above the long sea grass of their home, in awe. He could get all of that, just by smelling him?

Daniela's flashing yellow eyes brightened and she clamped her mouth shut, words coming out quick and held back. "That...That. Doesn't. Help."

She released Luca's arm and went to Lorenzo. Luca's tail curled protectively around his leg, trying to soothe himself.

"W-Wait! You can't just leave me out here!"

"We're not leaving you," Lorenzo replied simply. "But until your heat is over, you can't be around the other kids, Lu. It's better if you stay with your uncle Ugo until the Summer season is over."

They had gone. Luca watched, but didn't truly see his parents' figures fade into the darkness of the house, where they slept, and he remained awake.

"Stupid heat! I - I hate being like this!" Luca curled in on himself, claws raking his belly, long rutted cuts chasing his fingertips. The pain burned, deeper now with the thin streams of blood billowing up above his line of vision in watery red ribbons. He averted his wavering gaze, but the blood was everywhere, seeping into his very scales. Everything simmered, a constant feeling of dread and want that was unreachable, had no low point but only one shattering crescendo all throughout his body. Constantly. Searching for relief Luca dug his claws into the pink scales deeper, stronger...

"Luca!"

"...Alberto?"

It was just a dream--or a memory. The clean tile walls of Alberto's bathroom came into focus, half-blurred from where he was lying, curled in a ball along the water in the bathtub. Alberto rose sleepily from the floor, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. At some point in the night bath towels were placed in the water for Luca, and though he didn't remember when it had happened, sifting through the weird reoccurrences of the day before, Luca knew Alberto had done it. He looked around in the stagnant bath water, to his abdomen, and the flakes of dry blood that floated across the shiny film of the surface like autumn leaves. He shivered.

The memories were short, hardly a scratch on Luca's conscious mind. Alberto had carried him all this way, from the boat into the house. A tiny serving dish once had peaches on it, but only smelled faintly of them now. Giulia's voice (what he could recall of it, trying to think back made his head hurt, everything hurt, really. He hardly remembered much of Giulia, except for her wild eyes and equally brazen red hair) was tender behind the door the night before, whispering and giggling to Alberto. She left to sleep, and Alberto stayed. He really, truly stayed. And the pain. The pain, the stupid sea-folk problems he couldn't just wait out or buddy up for--

"Are you okay?" Alberto put one cautious hand on the lip of the bathtub, eyeing him. Luca shook his head, as if to chase away the feeling, then realizing it actually translated as a no, Alberto I am anything but okay right now, he nodded his head with more urgency. He shifted in the water, the bath towels huddled around his body made a sort of nest, Luca noticed, even if he had been the one to do this. A nest, making a home for a mate, for love...even out of instinct. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why did he even--

"If you say so," Alberto yawned and fell back onto the pillow he'd brought from his room, and tugged the blanket closer around his chest.

"You..." Luca tried, scanning the faded paint on the bathroom walls, the chipped mirror, the little smudge in ink over the medicine cabinet. He avoided looking at the crumpled blue tarp cast over by the toilet. "You stayed here? With me?"

"W-Well," Alberto spluttered, laughing a bit, not glancing at him. "I kinda had to. Cause, you know, no one knows you're here. And - and, my Papa had work today. Well he doesn't, not really. It's too early in the day for anyone to be open after yesterday, but he likes to be in the town with his buddies sometimes, when everyone else is asleep."

I kinda had to. Like he was...liable. He was just a...what was the word Giulia used? A little pet.

"Oh. Right, okay," Luca said absently, tracing his claw on the edge of the tub. Monster. Stupid monster. Dumb heat. Animal. Stupid, horrible, disgusting--

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"Where's Giulia?" Luca asked finally, maybe a little too quickly.

"Oh! She's uh...probably still sleeping."

"I'm sorry, Alberto."

"Do you maybe want to, um...talk about it?"

Luca put his chin on the edge of the bathtub. "About what?"

"The uh...back at the island--" Alberto wrinkled his nose and stared at his knees.

"Not yet." He felt Alberto's green eyes on his scales, whispering, prodding ever so softly. But he just wasn't ready.

"Hey, it's okay," Alberto leaned down and put his head at eye-level with Luca. "It's a sea monster thing, right?"

Luca nodded, wiping his flushed face. He couldn't cry, sea-folk weren't designed for something like that, but the burning in his eyes sure felt like he was.

"We have things like that, too. For humans, I mean." Luca hated that Alberto used that word, it was...a barrier. Human. Alberto blushed and looked away. "It's pretty embarrassing, actually. But, we go through it too, you don't have to feel so alone...It's normal."

"But..." Luca mumbled, his hands clenched beneath the water. But what I did...It was gross. Why haven't you left yet? Why aren't you turning me in? I'd be worth a lot of money above the water, I'm sure. Alberto? Are you even listening? Take me away! Send me to The Deep--

"Don't be sad."

"I'm not." He muttered.

"We can do something else," Alberto said back, sitting up now to straighten out his blankets. "And if you want to talk about it later, then you can. Since you're...uh...sounding a bit more present now.

"Okay...What is it?"

He watched him rise off the floor and gather the blanket and pillow to his chest, and head for the door. Alberto looked back over his shoulder, smiling now.

"As long as you don't eat it...We can paint?"

#luberto #luca paguro #luca movie #luca fanfic #luca x alberto #alberto scofano #luca2021 #luberto fanfiction #luca fanfiction #gay fish movie #luberto fanfic #luca fandom #luca pixar #luca 2021 #luberto luca #alberluca

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tinalbion · 3 years

Note

Mayor Buckman scenario of modern reader as an “Honored Guest”? She’s the reincarnation of his beloved young wife & mother of his children, who died before the massacre. He can’t kill her. He’ll sabotage, force her to stay if he must. She doesn’t remember the love or life they shared. Yet. He can’t understand her fright, tears & pleas to go home as he puts her ring back on her finger. Fate’s already brought her home to him. He won’t fail her as husband again. Death can’t stop their true love.

Tina’s back, alright! Woo! Let’s GO! Coming back strong (hopefully), been MIA for a bit and figured why not murder everyone with feelings? Thanks for this ask, I love it.

‘Till Death and Beyond’

Mayor Buckman x AFAB Reader

Words: 3k

Warnings: None

---

You stood there in all of your glory, back on the familiar weathered steps of Pleasant Valley, your eyes wandering over the scenery and the faces of the townsfolk as your friends all wandered the grounds. You were preoccupied and so confused by the overly friendly meeting with the mayor of this town, but maybe it was just that good old Southern hospitality you heard so much about. Whatever the case, your car broke down and you all had to spend a few days here, your friend Theo already cursing himself for stupidly taking the detour.

“Only you would be that much of an idiot to follow a sign that looks like it was written by a child,” your friend Connor spat with a short mocking laugh afterward. “And you didn’t even let us vote if we wanted to go this direction, you ass.”

Theo huffed and ignored the smugness of his friend and walked off toward the small group of scantily clad women who smiled as he approached.

You on the other hand watched the scene unfold, keeping to yourself as you observed because that was what you were good at; you watched. You took immediate notice of the mayor speaking to a group of townsfolk as he faced you, his hand movements jerky and seemingly upset. You were curious if it had anything to do with your unexpected visit to Pleasant Valley. Yet you didn’t bother to press the matter, they could have allowed you all to pass through the town unscathed and unbothered, yet they were extending their hospitality to you all and did it with smiles on their faces.

“Fuckin’ weird people here,” Connor remarked in a hushed tone as he hurried his pace alongside Theo, wanting to join the group of women.

Now that you were alone and not having to deal with the overwhelming feeling of keeping up appearance for the guys, you released a deep breath and continued to look around, curious as to why it felt so damn familiar here, why the scent of the woods had made you think of home. Not the place you left to take a vacation from, oh no, a real home that you couldn’t place memory to. The warmth of the springtime Georgia air was gentle against your skin as the smell from the nearby field of flowers filled your senses. Every time you had attempted to put a name to the feeling you were experiencing, it slipped away, the thought just sitting on the tip of your tongue.

You had been so swept up in the thought that you didn’t hear the soft footfalls of the mayor stop just behind you, you spun around in surprise and calmed when you noticed it was him.

“Just figured I’d check in on ya, darlin’, you seem like somethin’ is troubling ya.”

Was this too personal to share, you weren’t entirely sure, but it was kind enough of him to come to you and see how you were handling this series of events that led you here, straight to him. You nodded your head slightly and sighed.

“I’m alright, just taking in the sights, thinking. I appreciate the extent of your hospitality mayor, even though my friends don’t seem like they’re appreciative.” Of course, you had to explain their questionable behavior, it was the same thing everywhere you traveled.

The mayor chuckled as he adjusted the lapel of his jacket, his hands hanging on them as he stood there, looking at you curiously. His eye wandered to your face and it lingered there for too long that you took notice and shifted uncomfortably, pushing some hair behind your ear. He sensed your unease and took a step forward, his clouded mind too focused on you.

You wanted to tell him to back off, to give you space, but something inside of you told you to stay put as you watched his arm reach out, his large, calloused hand placed gently against your cheek. You wanted to recoil but you couldn’t find it in yourself.

“I know it’s you, sugarplum, I know it is…” he trailed off quietly, his thumb stroked your skin. “You look just like her, I know it’s you.”

That’s when you pulled away, pushing his hands off of you as you stared at him with fear behind your eyes. “What the hell,” you snapped, “I am not whoever you think I am, I’ve never met you in my life.”

Buckman seemed confused and hurt, broken by your harsh words and your cold behavior, maybe you just needed some reminding of who you were and where you came from. “I’m sorry, darlin’, I uh, I got carried away... but there are some people I’d love for you to meet if you’re willin’ to humor me.”

You felt unease and discomfort now being around this man, who seemed to radiate such contrasting energy that you weren’t sure if you would be safe or not in his presence, especially alone. Out of fear, you followed beside him, drawn within yourself as your steps seemed quick and skittish.

He watched you from a side glance, his mind wracked with so many thoughts and memories of his beloved first wife, the mother of his children, his princess. He would have done everything to have her back with him like they used to be, much like his beloved daughter Scarlet. He wondered if this was possible to see you here that maybe his child would come back to him, too. He was too absorbed in the thought of his family that he had almost passed the chapel where his two sons, Rufus and Lester, were waiting for him to return.

“Boys,” he greeted cheerfully as he burst through the door, “we have an honored guest with us for this year’s Jubilee, and I am hoping you will all get along!”

You were on display for the two grown men, their eyes widened at the sight of you and silence followed. Buckman was understanding of this, he knew the boys saw it too, just like he had. He smiled warmly as he thought of the impossible; the mother of his children being brought back to him, to them, to the town. He needed it to happen, he would even make yet another deal with Crow to make it so. That was the plan. You had no idea.

Hesitantly, you waved and greeted the boys like normal, but the way they looked at you only made the uneasy pit in your stomach feel much more unpleasant. Lester waved happily, his other hand stroking the wool of the sheep that stood beside him. Rufus unfolded his arms and tilted his head as he watched you curiously, his hardened face changed to softness as he looked at you. It was you, it had to be. There was hope after all that things could work out in their favor.

You backed away, making your way toward the door, explaining in stutters that you needed to get some rest, it had been a long trip after all, and you needed a meal as well. The men nodded and watched you go.

Buckman turned to his sons and spread his arms out, exaggerating his movements. “You’d be daft as a brush if you thought otherwise, boys, it’s her, isn’t it?!” He was even trying to convince himself now more than the boys. They nodded eagerly as Lester began to recall his beautiful mother, the short and fuzzy memories that grew harder and harder to recall the more time had passed in the Valley.

While they were conversing about Lord knows what, you ran back to your room, locking the door behind you and shaking. You didn’t know what to do or how to get out of it, your car was somewhere on the grounds and the guys were too preoccupied with whatever the hell they pleased with the flirty southern girls. You were in your room, alone, terrified that you weren’t going to make it out of this place alive. Panic rose like the bile in your throat and you didn’t know what to do anymore, all you could do was sit in your room while you hugged your legs to your chest, thinking of what you could do to get out of this situation.

Buckman was thinking of what he could do, he took a stroll down to see Crow further into the Valley and try to see what could be done. Crow was one of the few men he could trust, if anything, he would be the one to have an answer. He found the tall and broad man down by the stables where he knew the mayor would come for him.

“Boss, I figured you wouldn’t wanna consult with my dark magic any longer-” Crow began but Buckman cut him off.

“No, no, son, this isn’t about that. It’s about her,” he gestured to the guesthouse as he pointed a finger, “the girl who looks like my late beloved. You seen it too, Crow, I know you done did,” he glowered. “It’s her, reincarnated or what have you, back to either join me or torment me. She don’t remember who she is, Crow. Is that part of some dark magic?”

Crow looked over at the house and sighed, his mind processing everything. “Get me an audience with her and I can get you the information you need.”

“Bless ya, Crow, always so loyal.” He clasped the man on the shoulder and watched as he walked off, leaving the mayor alone once again with his thoughts.

What could he do but wait?

When Crow returned to him, his expression didn’t give Buckman what he’d been looking for. “What is it, didja find anything for me?” His hands were together, his fingers fidgeting as he looked up, almost desperately.

The man nodded and guided his mayor to a discreet location, away from prying ears so their guests couldn’t interfere. Once Crow looked around, listening for eavesdroppers, and deemed it safe, he looked back down at the mayor and kept a quiet voice.

“Boss, it’s her, no doubt in my mind that’s her. It has to be some form of reincarnation, ain’t no magic in or around her aura.”

Buckman clapped his hands sharply and took a deep breath. “Can we make her remember?”

“No tellin’ what we can do. I got a spell though, a potent one, I can cast it during dinner. Make sure she joins you and the rest, I’ll take it from there.”

That evening, you had been invited to dinner to join the mayor and his family, as Buckman called it, ‘an apology dinner’. He truly sounded sorry and maybe you did look like the woman he used to love, it happened. You chalked it up like that and nothing more, you just needed to survive long enough to make it through their party and get the hell out of there. Lying to yourself wasn’t foreign.

You attended as asked and sat beside your friend Theo and Buckman on the other side of you, his eye wandered over to you rather often, but he asked all of you questions, small talk mostly. When the tall, intimidating man known as Crow came into the room holding the large silver platter with several drinks on it, you watched him with unease until he left the room. After he approached you yesterday, you were much more skeptical of being alone in town, so you begged Connor and Theo to escort you wherever you went, but they figured you were just being paranoid. They agreed to, reluctantly of course, though that promise died quickly once they had been whisked away once again, lured away by the promise of tits and drinks.

Dinner though was more than you thought it would be, so you continued to speak when spoken to, your fork scooting your food across the plate as you did your best to avoid eye contact with the boys, the absence of Granny Boone made you more nervous than anything. After the conversation died down and dinner was removed from the table, Buckman took notice of how withdrawn you had been and nudged your arm gently, his smile warm and almost too kind.

“I know what I unloaded on you, it was a lot, but I hope there are no hard feelings, huh?” His eye landed on your drink, completely untouched and abandoned. His jaw clenched slightly and he would have to try something else without drawing too much attention.

You shifted in your seat and offered a pained smile. “Yeah, sure, I get it. Some people just look similar, and I’m sorry that you lost her, she must have been special.”

He wanted to tell you just how special she was, how special you were, but you didn’t need to be hounded by him even further, which would only push you further away from him to the point you wouldn’t even look at him. He needed to avoid that at all costs, but if he could just get you alone, even for a moment, he wouldn’t need to worry any longer.

Crow walked back into the room with a tray of drinks, holding it out toward you and Buckman, the both of you grabbing a mason jar of it. You thanked him quietly and he lingered only for a second more, though you were painfully aware of it, his eyes on the mayor. “I should probably head to bed, sir, it was very-”

“Please, darlin’, not yet, alright? Lemme share a stroll with ya, please?” He seemed so sincere, he just wanted to talk it out, and you were fair so you’d let him say his piece and hopefully move on. When you nodded in agreement, he looked like the happiest man in the world.

You both agreed upon a time this evening to meet, where you could relax after dinner and change, but you were having second thoughts about the entire thing. When you went to Theo and Connor’s room to talk about it, they never answered, they weren’t there. Annoyed, you went back to your room and sighed, slowly getting ready for your walk.

The Georgia summer heat was gone from the air, replaced with a light, cool breeze as the moon was high above in the sky, the bright light shining down and illuminating your skin. For a moment you had forgotten all about your worries, just enjoying the new surroundings, but once you heard the footsteps approaching you, your eyes widened and you whipped your body around to face them. It was only Buckman, looking as sheepish as ever as he held out a flower to you.

“A peace offerin’, if you’ll accept.”

You reached for it and held it up to your nose, smiling lightly. “Thank you.”

Your walk lasted all for ten minutes, you both were now away from the brightly lit town and standing near a lake where the moon was the most visible, your eyes stuck on it. It comforted you. Buckman was the first to break the silence as he looked around nervously like he was waiting for something -or someone.

“Y/N, I gotta explain to you that you look just like my dearly departed wife, the love of my life. You resemble her so much, it hurts, it pains me. But it also brings me comfort, she was the best thing to happen to me Y/N, and it pains me now to say that I can’t allow you to leave.”

You turned to meet his gaze, your heart pounded wildly as you stood frozen in place, afraid that if you spoke out of hand then he would act rashly. “Mayor, please-” You didn’t even realize that tears were already trailing down your face, the fear you felt well up within you so strong that you froze. You couldn’t think straight; where would you run? How would you get out? Too many obstacles with no real way to get through them. You were stuck.

Buckman pulled a small box from his breast pocket at the same time Crow had suddenly grabbed you from behind, immediately covering your mouth to mute the screams that failed to reach out across the field. The sudden overpowering odor from the cloth was too much and all you remember was seeing Buckman standing before you with that smile.

You awoke later, the moon still in the sky and the air still blowing that relaxing breeze against your skin, but it didn’t matter right now. You were tied to a large stake in the middle of the town, your hands bound in front of you rather than behind. The panic rose as their beloved mayor stepped closer, the entire populace surrounding you with tables lined with copious amounts of food. You were their honored guest after all.

“Sugarplum,” Buckman greeted softly, his hand out, gesturing to you that he wasn’t planning on hurting you, “please…”

You began to cry uncontrollably as he neared you, struggling against your bonds as you moved and wiggled, thrashing as best as you could to escape. “Please, please! I don’t want to die! I didn’t mean… I- I can’t!”

“Honey no, I would never lay a violent hand against you,” Bucky pleaded, his eye filled with remorse, wishing there was another way to get her back, to get you to come back to him. “Pleasant Valley is your home, it always was and always will be.”

Crow, Lester, Rufus, everyone looked up at you expectantly, hoping you would see things their way. You would never stay here, not with these people, you couldn’t ever see yourself loving a man who saw you as someone else. All you wanted was to go home.

“Let me go home, please,” you begged through your tears.

Buckman held your hand that poked through the ropes and slid the beautiful ring onto your finger, another pained smile sitting on his face. “Why sweetheart, you are home, you’re back home and you’re never leavin’ again, I’ll make sure of that.”

#tinalbion writings #slashers x reader #slashers imagine #slashers headcanons #mayor buckman x reader #mayor buckman imagine #mayor buckman headcanons #slashers requests #george w buckman #2001 maniacs

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mrsbarnes107 · 3 years

Text

Secret of the Widow

-part six-

Summary: Post Endgame time period. The team is healing, trying to navigate this new normal they’ve found themselves in when Bucky and Sam bring home a stray with an attitude and a secret. Will the broken team take her in? Or is it too much to bare?

Warnings: language, *eventual* violence and smut, death, fluff, angst

Pairings: Bucky x OC

Disclaimer: this is posted to Wattpad as well and it WILL HAVE PLOT. I’m a Bucky hoe so there will be smut and romancy stuff but this is a series, so plot plot plot.

Forty-five minutes later I walk out of my still steaming bathroom. I wish I could thank Tony for the never ending hot water and place to live, it's a nice change in routine.

I wish I could thank him for a lot of things.

I give myself a little shake. No sappy moments, not right now.

With a lighter step, I throw on some baggy sweatpants and a tank top, leaving my hair to air dry. I'm pretty sure a good first impression was thrown out the window already anyways.

With a final nod in the mirror, I leave the sanctuary of my room and give myself to the wolves.

As I enter the kitchen, the smell of cheeseburgers and salty fries hits me. I'm almost certain I let out a tiny moan, but I'm going to deny it if asked.

"Hey Ali, grab some food and come sit by me sweetie." Wanda yelled from the table, not even glancing at me, unlike the rest of the group.

Banner still seems reserved, like he doesn't know how he's suppose to respond to the news of my existence. Clint on the other hand looks like he has something to talk about, sad curiosity all over his features.

Having not eaten in the last two days, I'm positive I could inhale more of these beautiful beef buns than even Barnes can, who is currently sitting with three burger on his plate and a mountain of fries. Okay well maybe not him, but Wilson for sure. The mans pretty scrawny.

After getting my food, I plop down in the seat between Wanda and Bucky, immediately tearing into my food. Etiquette be damned.

"So where's Petey? He and I have some unfinished business." I'm pretty sure I just heard Barnes try to cover a small chuckle with a cough. I should probably not talk with my mouth full, at least not during my first ever meal with the team.... whoops.

"He's attending MIT, following Tony's footsteps apparently, so he went off somewhere to study his big book of boring." Wilson didn't even bat an eye while answering.

The room settled in silence for a few minutes. It was not a comfortable one at all.

With a loud sigh I set my wonderful, heavenly, beautiful burger down. "Okay. Spit it out. This silence is strangling me and I'm trying to enjoy this God sent meal in peace."

Sam chuckled quietly, wiping his mouth free from the mustard smeared everywhere. "Okay tiny Tony calm down."

That's the second time today I've been compared to Tony. Each time my heart breaks a little. It's nice though, having a part of him so apparent in me that they see it despite meeting me less than five hours ago.

"So you and Stark were close, obviously, Nat is your mom, still weird, and you know Barnes pretty well by the looks of it."

I pop a few fries in my mouth before answering. Mmm fried potatoes doused in salt is a glorious creation. "All of that is very true baby bird."

Barnes hides a smile as Sam glares very unthreateningly across the table at me. My fry hits him right in the nose.

This time Clint joins Bucky in choking down a laugh.

"So how well do you know Barnes here hm? You were eighteen when you met? I wonder-"

Bucky tensed up, jaw ticking away. Wanda just pursed her lips and kept quiet.

I set my hand on his metal arm. "Stand down Sarge, birdys just trying to wind you up." Bucky relaxes, nerves still on edge and eyes throwing daggers at the bird man.

I look to Sam with a raised brow. "I'm a lady Samuel, we don't kiss and tell. Did you have anything productive to ask before you got all pissy?"

He sighed in annoyance, eyes showing slight amusement. "I still want to know how you got those cuffs on us, they have no key or biometric identification. Did you see me enter the code?"

I let out a soft laugh and turned to Wanda. "You should've seen their faces, it was a beautiful sight." With a glance back at Sam I shove another bite of my burger into my mouth, talking around the food. "I worked with Stark for years dude. I have access to, and can override, anything in this building. He gave me full clearance before I could drive."

"But he never let you up here? Even when we were out on a mission?" This time it was Banner who spoke up.

With a small smile I shrugged. "We didn't want to chance me running into any of you, especially after Petey joined. He worked in the lab with me a bit and it made Tony a little wary. Plus Nat worried about Sarge here seeing me."

Buckys head snapped to me, not expecting to be brought into the conversation. "She knew I had no memories though, why would meeting me worry her enough to ban you from the upper levels?"

Our eyes locked for a few seconds before I turned away, glancing at him as I breeze past the question. "Conversation for another time Buck.... so who made dinner? Well complements to the chef Clint, this is some juicy meat."

•••

Dinner continued with light laughter, and small talk. The group introducing themselves and trying to welcome me into the tight knit squad. The atmosphere was kind, but I could see the change caused by the loss of their friends. A year later and the wounds are still barely even scar tissue.

I remember the times I'd be working in the lab and get bored, eventually deciding that the Avengers would be my own little reality show to pass the time. They use to be so care free, at least as much as they could be, laughter filling the halls and pranks pulled on one another. Now it's random bursts of joy until the silence relapses for a bit.

Maybe I can do some good here. At least bring a little more light into the tower, make the darkness fade a little.

Wanda and I decided to have a movie night in the living room while the guys did whatever guys do. She chose some romcom, which we inevitably verbally assaulted as the cheesy plot continued.

"So, Ali, besides Fury is there anyone else in your life?"

"Nah, there's been a few dates, but having to lie about who you are makes things difficult. Although, so does my choice in work and the fact that I'm very rarely interested in anyone enough to put in the effort." I gave her a shrug and just rolled my eyes, keeping the conversation light.

"I'm curious on the team dynamic. Tony and Steve were like the divorced parents that told everyone what to do, is it just a 'go with the flow' situation now?"

Thankfully this made her chuckle. "Apparently this family of ours can't function without parents that hate each other. Bucky and Sam are the exact same way, they've taken the mantle up themselves. But honestly we're still learning our strengths and how we fit without the old pieces."

I gave her a nod, forehead creased while I tried to picture the teams strengths and weaknesses cohesively fitting together.

It wasn't until midnight when we decided to get some sleep, setting plans to go shopping after lunch the next day.

The bed was more comfortable than anything I've ever had the absolute pleasure of laying upon, but I still couldn't pass the hell out.

I just grunted in very extreme annoyance, despite this being a normal occurrence, and rolled out of bed.

After a quick stop to the kitchen to make some tea, I made my way to Tony's lab.

It looked just as it did the last time I was here, seven years ago Thanos time I suppose.

Walking around the large space, knowing that Tony won't be strutting in yelling about his genius breakthrough after his twelfth coffee of the morning, or having him standing over my shoulder as he teaches me the new mechanics of his suit, well it's surreal.

The room doesn't even feel like him anymore. This lab was once a place that brought me a sense of comfort and home, a place where his laugh encompassed the very life of the room, where his sarcasm bounced of the walls in never ending jabs. Now it is just cold and empty. The joy it once held long gone.

I sit in the floor, leaned against his work table. Now realizing that tears are running down my cheeks, a quiet remembrance to a man I cared for like a father.

I don't bother to wipe the tears away, it'd feel like denying him this moment, I just sigh and rest my head against his chair. "Oh Tony, you self sacrificing idiot.. I miss you. So much. I can't believe you left me alone with Nicky, that was just cruel you know. You both did."

With a shiver I set the empty mug beside me, bringing my legs up to curl my arms around.

"Why did you always have to be so hell bent on sacrificing yourself? Everytime this world called, it was always YOU risking it all, YOU flying into a space portal, YOU getting so much hate and blame from the team, even SHIELD, all the time. I just-" a chocked sob surprises me as I realize this is the first time I've talked to him, really talked, in six years.

"You had everything T, a wife, a baby, me and Petey. And they asked you to give it all up, yet this world barely gives you the recognition you deserve. Steve walks out and just leaves, after so much death, so much that needs cleaned up, he makes the most selfish decision i have ever seen, and yet is grieved more than you are. He walked out on his best friend, left the team already broken, and had the audacity to think he was owed that selfishness. A man who gave up everything and asked for nothing in return, overshadowed by the man who had nothing and was handed everything." I let out an angry little chuckle.

"This world is so backwards and cruel. Now I'm left in it alone. What am I suppose to do T? This place, these people, there's no light here anymore. And I just- it's just- it's so hard Tony. My parents are gone and I'm alone and I miss you so much. Being here breaks my heart. Every second I'm within these walls, knowing I'll never hear your laugh, your encouragement or sassy remarks, never walk in to AC/DC blasting while your passed out at your table. Every second I'm here hurts T. I just- I miss you so much dad and I'll never get to tell you how much I love you."

If I hadn't had my eyes closed, or been in the middle of an impressive mental breakdown, I might have heard the footsteps approaching long ago. But my tears brought sleep to me quickly and everything went black.

#avengers #avengers fic #black widow #bucky barnes #bucky barns fanfiction #captain america #endgame #marvel #spiderman #the falcon #enemies to lovers #iron man #bucky x oc

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