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keilemlucent · 4 years

Text

steaming

(r18+)

pro hero! todoroki shouto / reader

ao3

word count: ~3.8k

You and Shouto have been busy as hell and haven't seen each other much, but a 'relaxing' (read: horny) trip to an onsen is sure to remedy any and all lost time

warnings: pro hero shouto, onsen sex (please do not fuck in onsens im begging u please learn etiquette for onsens too), temperature play, a little bit of insecure reader well

this is a piece for the fanfic event yagami yato server i’m apart of! the theme for this month was an onsen getaway so here u go! hope y’all enjoy ;^)

The onsen trip was one that Shouto had been particularly excited about. It was a small place in Akita, far away from the drone of the city that the two of you were both accustomed to.

Both you and Shouto had been working ridiculously hard the past several months, stretching to your physical and mental limits. It had taken a toll in many areas of your shared lives, but a lot of it was on that quality time the two of you were able to spend together.

Shouto wasn’t particularly clingy, but he was definitely starting ache for you. It had been far too long since you’d been able to relax as a couple. A weekend onsen getaway seemed like the perfect opportunity for both of you to unwind and spend some quality time together.

Shouto tended to go... overboard. Mostly due to the fact that though he was perceptive, he was also somewhat dense. You’d gotten fairly flustered when Shouto dropped that he reserved the entire resort for the two of you. It was small and family-run to begin with, but still. It felt a little excessive, but part of you was relieved that no public, prying eyes would disturb the two of you.

When the two of you arrived, the resort was surrounded by pretty autumn leaves, all orange and yellow hues that stretched through the rolling hills.

It was overly relaxing, almost.

By the time the two of you were able to check-in and settle down, the sun had already begun to set low in the sky.

You dropped down on the futon in your somewhat small room. The day of traveling had worn you down, leaving a bit of sleepy haze clouding your mind.

“Baby?” Shouto flopped down beside you, pulling you close and burying his nose in your hair. “Are you feeling alright?”

You hummed, nodding, “Yeah, just a bit tired. Do you want to try out the hot springs tonight or wait until tomorrow and get some rest now?”

Based on the way Shouto let out a rolling, deep chuckle, getting ‘rest’ was unlikely, “Let’s try them tonight, hm? Get some of that stress out of your shoulders.”

As if to emphasize the point, Shouto’s lithe hands went to rub at the stiff muscles. You could only press into his touch, practically purring.

One of the cheekier parts of this trip was that the onsen Shouto specifically rented allowed didn’t have any separation of sex. It was more than acceptable for you and Shouto to share the same pool at the same time. Most of the other exceptions that you and Shouto were sure to need had been... ‘ prepaid for’ (read: Shouto bribed the very nice owners who were sure to be kept up long into the night for several days in a row).

Shouto and you did have to separate for the different lockers room to rinse, but that was hardly an issue. If anything, it was incredibly therapeutic to have a few minutes to yourself before the so-called ‘main event’ of the (long) evening.

Shouto had been remarkably busy with hero work. Being one of the top heroes in Japan had been taking a deep toll on him, even if he was amazing at hiding it. You had been busy as well, far busier than usual. Part of you, a larger part than you wanted to admit, was terrified that you and Shouto’s relationship would fall apart due to sheer lack of contact.

The fact that Shouto had somehow arranged an entire vacation behind your back mostly smoothed that fear over, but one still wondered and worried.

As you rinsed yourself down in the locker room spray, scrubbing your body of any bit of scum and dirt that you could. Perhaps you were taking too long— perhaps it was purposeful.

Because you and Shouto had not done anything sexual in what was, in your book, a considerable length of time.

It wasn’t intentional, the two of you had clarified before leaving, but it still was the cause of a somewhat unbridled wave of anxiety that you couldn’t escape.

Old insecurities gnawed at you, fear, its swirling relative.

This was all magnified by the fact that you’d be very naked with your very attractive partner for the first time in a while.

You gulped, shutting off the spigot and toweling off somewhat. With unsteady legs and a half-covered body, you made your way out to the onsen itself.

As you pulled open the door to the outdoor area, you felt the bite of the wind chill the water droplets still clinging to you.

The unpleasant feeling was washed away rather quickly as you took in the scenery. The area was rocky and mossy, leading to a smaller hot spring, bubbling away with steam rising lazily from its depths. Trees ringed the onsen’s outcrop, obscuring any potential wandering glances. It was all lit by soft, warm, modern-looking stringed-bulbs, wound high above.

The best part, of course, was Shouto looking very smitten with you, as he was already submerged.

“I was wondering where you were,” He laughed so easily, beckoning you by tapping the water.

You could only muster up a half-assed smile, “Would you believe me if I told you I got cold feet?”

You didn’t see his expression as you turned around to walk into the hot spring, incredibly quickly, after removing your towel.

(If you had been looking, you would’ve seen Shouto’s eyes widen with your words, water losing steam as his ice side fired subconsciously.)

Admittedly, the water did feel amazing against your skin. The heat of it curled around your body, seeping in your wound up muscles. You audibly moaned as you fell next to Shouto in the water, leaning your head on his shoulder. His arm wrapped around your waist, squeezing under the rolling water.

A moment of calmness passed, the sounds of flora and fauna echoing off the natural stones and tall trees.

“What do you mean by cold feet?” Shouto asked, eyes flickering down to meet your own. “

“Nothing bad, dear. It’s just...” Your voice trailed off with the anxiety in your chest spinning. You buried your nose in the muscle of his shoulder, a bit embarrassed. “It’s just been a minute, you know?”

Shouto raised an eyebrow, turning to move directly regard you, “I’m not sure I do.”

“Uh,” You stumbled, giving him a wobbly smile. “It’s just been a minute since we’ve, you know—”

“Had sex?” Shouto finished your sentence with his own teasing smile.

Your face erupted in red, very obviously not from the hot water you both were submerged in.

You physically lowered in the water, up to your shoulders, “Yes, had sex, Shouto.”

“Why would that make you anxious?” Shouto asked, mirroring your motion, not to give you guff, but rather comfort.

“You know—” You paused before answering, eyes watching the light churn of the water as opposed to the Shouto’s incredibly focused gaze, “Just like, dumb insecurity stuff. You don’t need to worry about it, I’m just happy to be here with you.”

That made Shouto frown, rough hands grabbing your hips under the water, “I’m glad you’re here with, very glad, but I’d like to help if I can.”

You bit your lip, focusing on the way Shouto’s thumbs pressed and rubbed idle circles on the meat of your hips, “It’s just been a while, and I get scared that you... you know, will feel differently about me than before. In a bad way.”

Shouto was silent, unspeaking, and thumbs stilled on your skin. You knew him well enough to understand that he wasn’t upset, but rather in thought.

Suddenly, you were being dragged through the water onto Shouto’s lap. You yelped, grabbing his shoulders for stability as you ass settled on his strong thighs. With this arrangement, it was difficult to turn away from him as you had been. It was made even more difficult when Shouto gently grabbed your jaw, holding your face level with his own.

You gulped.

“Though I understand your anxiety,” His free hand massaged the bulk of your thigh. “I can thoroughly tell you its unfounded.”

The next moment, his lips pressed into yours. They were petal-soft, but there was force behind it as he moved against you. You couldn’t moaning against his mouth, hands falling against his chest as you moved ever closer.

Shouto seemed to have similar needs in terms of proximity, hand going to palm you ass beneath the water and pull you nearly chest to chest with him.

You broke away with a sharp breath, wetting your lip. Your eyes darted up to meet Shouto’s own, all blown wide in adoration and lust. He chuckled at you sheepishness, pressing kiss after kiss to your face. He dropped them onto the sweat-slicked skin of your cheeks, nose, chin, forehead, and eventually trailed them to your jaw and neck.

“(Y/N), you’ve given me quite the job to do,” Shouto murmured against the soft skin under your ear.

You sucked in a harsh breath, nails digging into his shoulders, “Yeah? And what job is that?”

He hummed, suddenly licking a quick strip from your throat to the shell of your ear, leaving you with a sharp bite as he whispered, “I guess I just have to show you how I feel about you, with our time apart.”

The hand that had been cupping your ass moving slowly towards your sex, teasingly. Your hips shifted and the prospect, your need already dialed up with lost time.

“I do feel differently about you, but it’s only positive, I promise,” Shouto assured you, going back to kissing your neck, going to bite and suck at your collar bones. “I just want you more than before.”

It had been so long since he’d been able to mark you up in the way both of you so enjoyed. One of your hands twisted in his two-toned tresses, crying out as he left a particularly dark mark.

“I missed you so much,” Shouto kissed the words into you, using both hands to half-lift and half-force you higher above the water, still straddling him but lifted up on your knees. Your chest was out of the water, nipples hardening in the autumns chill.

“S-Shouto!” You bit out as he palmed at one of your breasts. “Someone could see us!”

All he did was raise a sly eyebrow at you, blowing frosty breath onto one of your nipples, hardening it, and the droplets of water that clung to your chest. You hissed but quickly were soothed as it melted with the steam of the water below, leaving a tingly numbness dabbled across your chest.

You shuddered as Shouto took in his discovery.

Temperature play was one of your mutual old favorites.

“I’m not too worried about that,” Shouto peppered your chest with kisses as he spoke, leaving a few dark marks on your breasts. They were sure to ache later, and the thought made you wet.

(Could you be wet? You were underwater—)

Any controversial thoughts you had were quickly seized as Shouto’s hand began to massage the inside of your thigh. You keened in the back of your throat, shuddering as his hand was so fucking cold, despite being surrounded by steaming water.

“Do you like it when I touch you like this, baby?” Shouto kissed the words into your chest. He hummed with what could only be satisfied as you trembled in his lap, nodding.

“I do,” You sank lower in the water, recovering your chest in the process. It was an easy sacrifice as you could now, far easier, reach between your two bodies and gently grab Shouto’s cock. You rubbed your thumb of its head, loving the way Shouto’s stunning eyes closed in what was near rapture.

You grinned to yourself, giving your own smattering of kisses to Shouto. Lovebites trailed down his neck, sparing not one of his more sensitive spots. Shaking exhaled breaths and soft grunts fell from his lips so beautifully as his hands trailed up and down your back, fisting in your hair when you found a particularly tender spot.

All the while, you pumped his cock at a somewhat tortuous pace. If he was going to get make you twitch for him every few seconds with his frigid hand, you were only going to give him a bit of satisfaction.

Though, that plan quickly went down the drain when his hand drifted closer to your sex, teasing at the apex of your thighs.

You fizzled out a whine, pressing your slick forehead to Shouto’s, watching the way his eyes opened, dilated pupils regarding you in the same way a man starved would.

“Some options,” Shouto breathed again your lips, dulling the numbing use of his quirk, much to your chagrin. “I can fuck your pretty cunt in this hot spring, or I could fuck you over the side, or I could lay you out on that moss—”

You cut him off with a kiss, loving the small noise that came when his words stuck in his mouth. You drew away with the sweetest smile on your face, “Can I ride you like this?”

Shouto’s matched your grin with his own, kissing the side of your mouth sweetly, “Of course. Once I feel you’re properly prepared. It’s been acknowledged that it has been a while, and I’d hate to hurt you at all.”

“Well, at least on night one,” You smirked, reminding him that you still had several more days to go at one and other.

Shouto rolled his eyes, all affection, before rolling his thumb over your swollen clit. You gasped out a clipped breath as he repeated the motion. You couldn’t help the way your hips rolled in his hands and the way your own tangled in his hair.

The lapse in your sex life truly hadn’t taken away Shouto’s ability to read your physicality. He knew just the right rhythm and speed to take things, having long since committed every inch of your body to his memory.

Like any length of time apart from intimacy would take that away from him. He coveted his knowledge of your body like a god cherishes its domain.

Truly, he worshiped you in all aways and it was a crime that it had been so long that he had been able to show in.

Shouto sank two elegant, long fingers into you, a pretty cry falling from lips. You pressed yourself into his neck, already starting to move your hips against his fingers.

“Eager, are we, baby?” Shouto teased, cursing as your hand was once again around his cock, giving it a rough pump or two.

You snickered against his neck between moans, dropping a few kisses on his pulse point, “Like you aren’t.”

His fingers curled just right, alternating between rubbing against the spongy spot in your cunt and stretching his fingers to ease you to open for him.

You were all lovely, breathy moans for him, idly stroking his cock and dabbling him with slick kisses. You couldn’t do much else, truthfully. The feeling of Shouto’s fingers buried in your heat while being surrounded by heat was something heaven-sent, you were sure of it. It felt especially true as Shouto’s thumb moved back to circle your clit while his other fingers kept at work.

You could feel a rising heat in your gut and all you wanted was more of it.

But not yet.

“S-Shouto, wait,” You cupped his face, eyes pleading. “I want to come with you, while you’re fucking me, please.”

Oh, what an easy request to oblige.

Ravenously, he kissed, drinking you down like you were divine ambrosia. All you could do was fall against him, writhing as he gripped his cock on the surface, lining himself up.

Your nails bit into his shoulder as you bore down on the head of his cock, a little whimper sounding from the back of your throat.

It had been awhile.

Shouto quickly hushed you, thumb going back to your clit as you sank down.

“Fuck, you’re tight,” Shouto breathed, resting his head against your shoulder as he bottomed out.

You could only imagine how it felt for him, cock filling you up so well. For you, it felt like your brain was short-circuiting, the way his cock pressing up against your insides was turning you to mush. It had been far too long for both you, your breath matching in the way it shook.

“Fuck,” You managed to curse, readjusting your knees for more leverage. You truly did want to ride Shouto’s cock with every inch of your life, but based on the bruising grip he had on your hips, he wouldn’t stand for you doing much of the work.

Slowly, you slide up Shouto’s cock, relishing the way how his normally controlled speech devolved into strings of muttered curses. The hand on his ice side kept firing cold on your hip, the odd but pleasant sensation making it all the more difficult to keep your thighs from trembling.

You nearly pulled off him, watching the way Shouto wetted his lips with blown pupils and half-lidded eyes.

You let the tension of your legs go, slamming back down on his cock. Shouto cried out, hands tensing on your hips and you harshly bottomed out.

You raised yourself up again, repeating the motion as sounds left your lips, unrestrained. A smug smirk came to your face as you watched Shouto’s blushing face come undone so beautifully.

You sank down on his cock a few more times, grinding whenever he was fully sheathed inside you. The way how his cock head bruised your cervix with each thrust made your insides feel gooey and warm.

Shouto’s self-control was unmatched, fucking or otherwise. But, you could feel his hands start to twitch around your hips.

“Baby?” He gritted out as you slide down on his cock once more.

Your thighs shook from exertion as you wiped your damp hair from your face, “Yes, dear?”

“May I please fuck you proper? As much as I love watching you fuck yourself on my cock, I’m getting a bit—” He ground up into your cunt, angling his hips just right to hit your g-spot. “Impatient.”

You cried out, letting your forehead fall against him, still holding onto a bit of yourself, “So polite, Shouto.”

He thrust up into you again, drawing another sharp moan from you as your thighs shook around his own, “That’s not an answer, baby.”

“Please,” Your words came out half-broken as Shouto damn near smashed his lips into yours.

Without missing a moment, Shouto’s hands fire both heat and nearly unbearable cold. You jolt, hardly able to move due to the nature and strength of the grip he has on your hips. He fucks up into your cunt, adjusting your hips perfectly to smash in your most sensitive parts with familiar accuracy.

Your cunt clenched down around him, the heat of Shouto’s body combined with the hot spring making your head spin. All you could do was press yourself into Shouto’s neck, muffling your sounds and sucking at his salt-slick skin.

“I missed this,” Shouto groaned, bringing your hips down to grind deep on his cock. You pressed your face into his neck, not used to Shouto speaking so much during sex. “I missed your pussy so much, baby. Can you tell?”

When you didn’t immediately respond, mind approaching a fucked out stupor, Shouto took it out himself to pull out, rapidly repositioning the two of you.

You yelped as Shouto put you on your knees where he had just been sitting in the onsen, guiding your arms to rest out of the pool against the rocks and moss. He pressed down on the small of your back, forcing you into a deep arch. Shouto stood behind you, mostly out of the water, panting.

He pushed into a moment later, hissing the new tightness of your cunt, somehow managing to speak, “Can you tell?”

“Yes!” You sobbed out, voice shattering as Shouto slammed into you.

Shouto (somewhat gently) tangled a hand in your hair, the other stabilizing your hips before fucking you with what could only be called reckless fucking abandon. If your sex hadn’t been submerged, the lewd, wet noises would’ve surely echoed over the nearby trees and rocks.

Not that was really on your mind, nothing really could be except for the overwhelming sensation of Shouto fucking you with every he had.

Your arms scrapped against the rocks below you, but you could hardly care or notice. Your back ached as it was forced into its arch, Shouto slamming you even better the deeper you curved it.

your mind truly turned to mush as Shouto leaned over your form, his chest to your back, reaching a hand around to roll over your clit as he continued to pound into you.

“You’re going to come with me, right, baby?” Shouto gritted out, just next to your ear. You nodded with everything you had, pleasure and sensation making your toes numb.

Shouto’s thrusts became more frantic, panting and grunts joining your whimpers and soft cries. Your entire body felt so fucking hot. Mixing that with your arousal was making your vision black-ringed.

“I-I’m close, please," You begged Shouto, surrendering to your senses as you laid your head on your arms. “Please!”

“Since you asked so nicely—” You could hear the smirk in Shouto’s voice as he bit at your ear, stroking harder at your clit, and somehow fucking you deeper.

You damn near screamed as you came, vision leaving you as you finally were given release.

Shouto gave his own cry as he fucked you through his own orgasm, filling you with stringy cum with each thrust.

Shouto panted as he slowed, staying inside you as he pressed a few gentle kisses to your shoulders.

“Baby? You alright?” Shouto asked way too sweetly for the how filthily he had been plowing into you moments before.

“Very alright, just like...” You nodded, body shaking and sweating, turning to face him.

You had to stop speaking, seeing the way Shouto was just beaming at you, two-toned eyes shining in the low light. He noticed, stifling a pure laugh, “Like?”

“I’m mush right now. Mush for you in general,” You gave your own laugh, cutting yourself off with a gasp as Shouto pulled out, leaving you feeling incredibly empty. You almost whined.

Shouto carefully guided you from the hot spring, mindful of the various aches and abrasions. As you exited, you wrapped yourself in your discarded towel, giggling to yourself.

“Something funny?” Shouto asked, raising an eyebrow as he similarly covered up.

“Nah, not really,” You pulled him with an arm around his neck, planting a wet kiss on his hot, flushed face, just under his scar. “Just thinking about how I have all weekend to show you how much I’ve missed you.”

Shouto just chuckled, wrapping his arms around your waist and smiling, “I can’t wait to find out.”

#salem writes #mha x reader #bnha x reader #todoroki x reader #todoroki shouto x reader #shouto x reader #todoroki shoto x reader #mha smut #reader insert #mha reader insert #todoroki x y/n #todoroki shouto x y/n

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k1rishiki · 3 years

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i am curious, as someone who’s only exposure to arthurania was reading jane yolen’s young merlin as a child, would you mind saying why hnoc is a bad adaptation? i’m super curious but no worries if not <3

this has been sitting in my inbox for months bc i kept telling myself i needed to write a full essay with proof from medieval lit to make myself feel smarter. however, since i’ve recently lost all credibility bc i can’t articulate points to save my life, and since i’ve realized that i could answer this in a just a couple paragraphs, now seems like the right time to answer this ask. sorry for the wait.

under a cut bc length

also warnings for mentions of racism bc this is hnoc we're talking abt and sexual assault bc this is med lit we're also talking abt

the basic problems are pendragon polycule itself, the story beats of the album, the fridging and lack of characterization of morgan le fay, the clear influence of pop culture arthuriana, and whatever the fuck happened with gawain/e.

pendragon polycule is... just not a good take. there’s a bit in the lancelot-grail abt arthur viewing lancelot like a son (and lancelot not giving a shit abt him). also arthur knew his parents for years before lancelot was even born. plus lancelot just Doesn’t care abt him and i can’t stress this part enough. arthur repeatedly tries to have guinnevere killed, mostly in the lancelot-grail, and guinn didn’t really have any say in marrying him bc she was a teenager. lancelot and guinnevere is a lot better but that’s not saying much. guinn doesn’t exactly treat lancelot too well... like at all, BUT it’s not intrinsic to their relationship and is completely caused by medieval misogyny and i’m all in favor of modern retellings saying fuck that. but also lancelot has multiple pseudo-canon boyfriends (this is med lit after all), and one pseudo-canon husband so like... there were better options. (also lancelot’s husband is basically in a lavender marriage with guinnevere’s maybe girlfriend who most authors just eventually forget abt as the story progresses).

this next one is a problem with a lot of modern arthurian works bc the inclusion of elayne of astolat is too much to ask apparently. the grail quest isn’t tied to the fall of camelot, it just happens to be one of the last grand adventures the knights of the round table have. the event that traditionally sets off the fall is the death of the maiden of astolat/the lady of shalott/elayne of escolat/she has a lot of names, her story has a few variations but usually she either is cursed to stay in a tower and weave and only be able to see the outside world through a mirror positioned across from her window, until lancelot rides by and she rushes to see him out of the actual window and her mirror shatters, setting off her death, or she lives with her father and brothers and takes care of lancelot bc he was injured for a time and she gets to go on adventures to find him and she’s friends with gawaine and she dies bc lancelot rejects her and this version’s a lot more fun but also more happens which makes it harder to explain. the way her story ends however, is that she dies after she makes arrangements for a glorious boat to drift from astolat to camelot carrying nothing but her dead body and a letter explaining that she died of love for lancelot du lac and the court mourns the death of such a beautiful and young maiden (her age varies a lot but i’ve always read her as a young teenager at most). but the important thing is, camelot is doomed from the moment she washes up on its shore bc she’s an omen of the end and has symbolic meaning and all that, the maiden of astolat washes up on camelot’s shores, the court mourns the loss of a maiden in her prime and she marks the end of camelot’s prime as well, morgan le fay reappears after being presumed dead and warns arthur of guinnevere and lancelot’s affair, aggravaine and modred conspire to bring lancelot and guinnevere’s affair to light, they succeed but lancelot escapes, guinnevere is to be burnt at the stake and lancelot rescues her, killing aggravaine, gaheris and gareth (gawaine’s brothers) in the process, gawaine drags his uncle and camelot to war bc he was driven mad due to the loss of his brothers, lancelot accidentally kills gawaine, his best friend and maybe boyfriend (i have RECEIPTS), and gawaine forgives him on his detahbed while lancelot and guinn rejoin arthur, meanwhile modred, who practically had the throne handed to him, usurps and invites the saxons in, camlann happens, and camelot is destroyed. no where in there is the grail quest.

morgan le fay is honestly the most questionable part of the album bc there’s not a single text where she dies. like.... at least with eurydice in udad she died in the original... there’s no basis for morgan dying. also she is NOT modred’s mother and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, she interacts with him once in the vulgate bc she had three of her nephews over and that’s IT. it’s a horrible take which originated in the mists of avalon by marion zimmer bradley who is an honest to god monster for reasons i don’t want to trigger tag this post for. also she’s one of the most dynamic and thought-out characters in the entire canon and they just made her a watered down morgause (modred’s actual mother, morgan’s sister, canonical milf)... there was no reason for it to be her apart from the fact that she’s more well known......

pop culture arthuriana is,,, one of my least favorite things. no, morgan wasn’t modred’s mother, no, morgause wasn’t abusive but her husband sure was implied to be, no, aggravaine didn’t kill his mother, that was gaheris, he loved his mother, you’re only saying that bc he has a reputation as the “evil” orkney, no, the once and future king is not a good descriptor for arthur, stop making me read it, no, morgause wasn’t the one to initiate the thing with arthur resulting in modred, no, lancelot and arthur weren’t friends, no, tristan wasn’t a self-centered asshole, tennyson is a fucking liar, no, galahad didn’t have sex or want to, he’s one of the first ever explicitly asexual characters out there, no, galahad’s conception was NOT consensual, lancelot was tricked, and no, elayne of astolat wasn’t galahad’s mother, she’s implied to be younger than him. those are just the big glaring ones, but i swear it’s bc of arthuriana’s reputation as a mythology and the connotations belonging to that word (no one true canon (which is true but there are still things that just AREN’T canon, not completely written down, passed by oral tradition) that causes ppl to see mediocre modern texts and go “oh. well this is abt as close to the original as i’m going to get” and don’t bother to look into so much as malory (who i only name bc he’s one of the most well known medieval authors with the most commonly used storylines, don’t read malory kids, he’s a mediocre-at-best writer even by medieval standards). the big perpetrators of modern arthurian tropes are the books the once and future king by th wh*te, who is a shitty person and lets it bleed into his writing (which isn’t like... nice to read or anything, seriously why do ppl love this book so much it doesn’t have redeeming qualities), and the mists of avalon by marion zimmer bradley (it’s poorly written, the story is a mess, and mzb is honestly a monster and one google search will tell you that), and unfortunately the writings of tennyson, which are mostly good but he clearly didn’t read the povest (a later text that’s also my favorite, known for significantly improving ppl’s opinions on tristan, isolde and co.) before deciding he hated both tristan and isolde and he has HORRIBLE takes on them. high noon over camelot is SEEPED in pop culture arthuriana and i think it would have been so much better if the band had read so much as a SUMMARY of the events of le morte. it’s evident in the song “the once and future king” bc it’s,,,, literally named after one of the worst books in existence. it’s shown in the morgan le fay thing, and it’s shown in the pendragon polycule thing. and hell, i think you can even explain away the lack of elayne of astolat with pop culture arthuriana, bc ppl have had bad takes on her ever since th wh*te combined her character with that of ela*ne of corbenic, and the band probably went “huh, let’s write lancelot’s abuser out of this” and they would’ve been right to do so if that’s who elayne of astolat was.

the final big issue is gawaine, the closest thing the genre has to a protagonist, he’s pretty much canon bi and, in some texts, arospec, he’s a dashing knight of great reknown and he derails every romance to steal hearts, commit murder, and make out with every knight and lady mentioned. and in hnoc he’s... racist. that’s it. it’s,,, almost completely unfounded by the arthurian canon and shows a major misunderstanding of his motivations (like i said earlier, he wants to avenge his brothers bc there’s a reoccuring motif of how much the orkneys value family). i say almost bc in one text it’s his motivations for killing palomydes but i’ve never heard it mentioned by name bc that’s just what it’s known for. most arthuriana fans just look away from it except when critiquing hnoc but that one text is an outlier, shouldn’t be counted, and i highly doubt the mechs made hnoc gawain how he is bc they found this text. it’s just a bad text.

hnoc has,,, quite a few more minor issues, such as villainized ladies of the lake (their ONLY crimes were sealing away merlin bc he tried to assault teenage nimue/ninniane (proto-nimue/vivianne from the vulgate), and that one time vivviane/ninniane kidnapped adopted baby lancelot), assigning brain to merlin (y’know,,, the predator who helped arrange the [redacted] of arthur’s mother and tried to assault a teenager,,,) although merlin is portrayed in a positive light throughout modern arthuriana so i don’t think they knew, giving a song to pellinore, who my perception of has been forever altered bc i was introduced to him through malory and the explanation of torre’s conception, which you can just look up “sir torre arthurian” to find out abt if you can’t just Guess, if they wanted a song abt the questing beast palomydes was Right There AND has been associated with the questing beast for longer, but once again i don’t think they knew.

also namedropping a bunch of knights in the fiction is... it Suggests a bigger world full of all these other stories but they just don’t work bc the world of hnoc wasn’t designed in a way where the appearance of half these characters would make sense. like,, tristan is referenced as dying in the grail quest in the same sentence as bedevere (one of the characters who is known for almost always surviving), but tristan Isn’t one of the knights who dies on the grail quest, his possible deaths (ignoring the potentially happy ending of the povest for a second) are either being murdered by his uncle, king mark (bc mark married tristan’s gf to try and get tristan killed and also to spite him), bc he was driven into a fury bc of tristan and isolde’s affair, or he’s injured and only isolde (the best healer in the world) can save him so he sends for her and if the ship he sent for her is supposed to fly white sails if she’s there, or black sails if she’s not, and the ship flies white sails but his wife (also named isolde) says it’s black sails (the why depends but usually comes down to jealousy), and so he gives up bc he thinks all hope is lost and usually succumbs to his injuries, either way isolde dies of a broken heart over his body. there’s no way for the tristan and isolde story to play out like it’s supposed to in the world of hnoc, just as there’s no way for any story with gawaine (and Oh Boy are there a lot of stories with gawaine) or pretty much anyone else, without severely altering the canon.

of course, there are still parts of hnoc i like a lot, most of the music i adore and i just like the idea of space cowboys and the secret good hnoc that lives in my head. and it has one of my favorite characterizations of galahad, even though galahad hnoc is nothing like galahad arthuriana. it’s not GOOD but i like it and it’s fun to turn my brain off too, and i’ll always value it as my introduction to arthuriana.

also there are modern arthurian tropes i do like such as characters being genre-savvy/knowing they’re fictional/knowing they’ve done this before (which hnoc does wonderfully!) and bedevere-as-the-storyteller (everyone say thank you lord tennyson).

WOW that was longer than expected, i feel very passionately abt this, when i was planning to write a fully sourced essay i meant to include a bit at the bottom with recommendations to get into better arthuriana and i think i’ll keep that in this post.

if you like hnoc for the arthurian music i’d like to suggest heather dale’s arthurian music to you, she does occasionally fall into the trap of modern arthuriana (some parts of lancelot and arthur being close, morgan as modred’s mother), sometimes she’s just wrong (galahad at lancelot’s trial, a lot of tristan and isolde), and her stuff is kinda straightwashed sometimes (sir gawain and the green knight, for example) but i’d be lying if it wasn’t catchy, and it’s not quite as bad as hnoc adaptation-wise. culwch and olwen is pretty accurate (albeit abridged bc culwch and olwen has SO many tangents), as is lily maid (it’s abt elayne of astolat!).

if you liked hnoc for king arthur... in space! then may i recommend to you my own fanfic? it's not posted yet but the second i finish writing the first chapter i'm going to make a Big Deal out of it that'll be impossible to miss!

if you want to learn abt arthuriana through tumblr-osmosis like i did at first, i’d like to recommend the love of my life @acegalahads, first and foremost (it’s me on a sideblog i’m just obsessed with myself), and i can’t recommend my arthuriana mutuals over there, @/gringolet, @/merlinenthusiast, @/jcbookworm, @/elayneofshalott, and @/elaineofascolat (the elayne urls have been popular recently), also i know for a fact that my mutual-in-law, @/itonje makes great arthuriana posts that i look forwards to whenever i open the tag.

here are a few good reference posts, a quick guide to the characters, a guide to characters of color, and a much more comprehensive intro to arthuriana post with even more texts linked to it.

if you want to ease into med lit, i’d like to introduce you to pre-raphaelite poetry, alfred lord tennyson and william morris are my favorites, although tennyson can’t be trusted with tristan and isolde. the poem the lady of shalott is basically a rite of passage for arthuriana fans, although when it comes to tennyson’s writings abt elayne of astolat, i prefer lancelot and elaine, which is part of his much larger story, idylls of the king. for morris, don’t trust what he says abt aggravaine killing his mother, but my favorites of his are sir galahad, a christmas mystery, which sounds like a shitty disney sequel, and palomyde’s quest, which i blame for my love of palomydes (that and the one bit of the povest where he asks tristan to be his greatest enemy and that he wants nothing more, gay ppl,,,,).

if you want to read abt lancelot and his husband, there’s the lancelot-grail cycle, which i believe was taken off of archive dot org and i think i found it on @/tobeisexhausting’s blog but don’t quote me on that.

the povest, which was a religious experience for me and i can’t reccomend enough if you want to like tristan and isolde, is here, i don’t know who scanned it but i think i found it on @/lanzelet’s blog

the dutch texts are just good in general, here’s a link to their section of a(n unfinished) site for hosting various texts by my former mutual @/reynier (who’s no longer on tumblr). i’d like to recommend lancelot and the white hart specifically bc it’s mainly just just gawaine being gay for lancelot.

if you want older works, here’s my scan of the history of the kings of britain, and here’s culwch and olwen and pa gur.

oh wow this is even longer than i thought it would be so i’m going to wrap this up by saying that i always love to talk abt arthuriana more than anything if you have any questions or just are curious!

#med lit on main #asks #hnoc #the mechs #romeo.txt

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josy57 · 4 years

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Philosophy 101

You asked me why I wanted to attend your class. Again. To sit in the back row, silent and watchful The proverbial fly on the wall Only half-welcomed and sourly out of place

I said it was interesting, full of things that could be transferred Transferred yes, but not to what I was implying I have no professional use for my careful observation I am feeding a more private need So, having no plans to lie I added what you must have taken as mere flattery That it was also for my pleasure -The ever-fleeting pleasure of nostalgia Always a receding wave- You nodded, but I don't think you fully understood And I of course couldn't fully explain I loved your class, with all my heart, with all my aching brain As a child, I used to writhe and wrestle with my sheets With my thoughts too I couldn't sleep, so I debated the great questions As though I was the first to ever think of them Why do we use the words we do? Why do certain sounds signify, While others are only noise? Who are we to decide, to categorize, to dissect? And why are we even here? For how long? And since we do die, why does it matter? Does anything matter? And why all those questions? Can one ever reach certainty? Or is this world only quicksand and moving goalposts?

This place, this room, This air filled with your booming voice, your constant pacing That's where I found, not answers, but echoes to all my questioning Where I knew it was not insane to wonder Where I could voice it Argue, point, prod Feel for the nodes and knots of human experience Do all that and hear someone who cared too, Who would engage with those concepts, each wide as a precipice And so thorny it stung on all sides

I found some piece of myself here, I put it together And it's been useful ever since But I've also left something behind Something like youth, or innocence Some years when I was afforded the luxury Of sitting and listening to you for nine hours a week Just pouring knowledge and effort on us all Whether or not we deserved it I hope I did. I tried very hard to I was only one of the many mayflies You nurse for a while and let go, year after year, Usually never to hear from again But I never wanted you to feel I was a waste of your time A disappointment What it is like, looking at me now? Am I not less than what you had wished for? Or are you proud? Comforted that one of your frail paper boats Made it back to your shore Not across to some new territory But safely back on dryland Not wrecked nor wayward, at least from the outside

Perhaps that's what I miss That someone would look at me with pride That someone would talk to me about all those things So deeply important to me So seemingly weightless in our modern lives You spoke and you listened, you valued what I had to say That made a difference in my life More than I could ever express Because that's not a thing people do, right? Not even in philosophy We speak of love and attachment and identity But one must never say “I”

Today the subject was truth and knowledge And while you promised to soon tackle desire I scanned the backs of all those bored faces Do they not know, do they not feel, How vital it all is? Beyond the formal exercise, the pages of clumsy essays, How burning those questions are? "Am I what I am aware of being?" "Does awareness impede or lead to happiness?" "Can any person ever be fully known?"

He alone loved this place as I do Felt its soul settle into his bones Like the dampness seeping from the walls And he too, I know, wondered, questioned, struggled Ached for more than surface can offer Him. That’s another thing you don’t know about me Another thing that even in philosophy, you can’t quite discuss Though it permeated all the pages of my old copybooks Darker and messier than a spilled inkpot Especially at certain points When Plato spoke of humans cut in halves Lost and searching When Stendhal said that desire strews all things with salt crystals I, for one, have certainly jeweled my late adolescence Candied it in a melancholy glaze

Still, my memory is not so short that I have forgotten The thousand little hells, the many small agonies of this age But I do envy it I remember when the world still had a sharp edge When it hurt in earnest, instead of pressing dully, as it does now Piling stones upon stones on my chest Back then, I had hope my life would begin soon There was still time Now I only wonder: Is it really all that comes of potential, of effort -Of all those words grown-ups lecture you with-? I played their games and reaped meager rewards A ticket for another trip round the revolving door This time looking through a thick pane of glass Lingering on the threshold of two phases Both of which I am ill-equipped for

I’ve always had an uneasy concept of chronology My internal clock spinning like a broken compass First too stern, too mature for my years And then, suddenly, unripe and lagging Then and now. It all bleeds into one here. So it is safe, this in-between, this hour out of the hourglass A gasp of air, a break in the slow drowning The constant march towards the void For that’s what it comes down to The passing of time and our human perception of it An enigma that no numbers game can settle

Nowadays, I don’t just peek over my shoulders anymore I walk through this gilded cage holding the keys of the castle I open and close doors, I stand on the wrong side of the dais Of what once was my kingdom Not one I ruled but one I belonged in I was more than a trespasser then I existed in a certain time and place This 'dasein" escapes me now As it escaped me in childhood Then too, I watched the world through a tainted window I was never fully real but for those two years or so That’s why I have no good answer: I came here today in a vain attempt Even in those halls, in this class I can't recapture it I only glance at your present students With the sourness of heartburn like a fist under my ribs

I can't help but look at them haughtily, thinking: "This is not what we were At least not him and I" I bite my tongue, not wanting to say what I feel That ours was a golden age One they could never reproduce, never fully understand Because, of course, it's false, it's myopic This bright mist has settled on my eyes The same milky film that blurs old folks' sight "Back in my days..." As if those days were ever ours You see, Kant was right about one thing, None of us lives in the real world Like tiny planets, prideful little gods We view the whole of existence as revolving around us Dimming as we lose light Dying once we die The truth is 'our' world survives our passing We visit it only as ghosts.

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chick-from-nz · 3 years

Text

Paper, Scissors, Rank (Ch: 9)

CHARACTER/PAIRING: Modern!Carrillo x Army!OC (eventually)

WARNINGS: maybe some swearing, military slang, more military talk, spelling and grammatical errors. Flippy floppy points of view and tenses. Could be very OOC/AU for some. Carrillo may not be narcos accurate as this is an AU. Some OC x OC. awkwardly written moments. Sexual tension. some NSFW content. Mentions of death, child endangerment, TW: car crash.

AUTHORS NOTE: ok so this chapter went a little darkish at the start and then very different at the end. not gonna lie a little bit giddy and proud of this chapter, hope you all enjoy, sorry for the wait between the chapters. would also love to hear any predictions about where the fic may go.

WORD COUNT: 5.5K

CHAPTER: 9 OF ?

TAG LIST (OPEN): @girlpornparadise @1zashreena1 @xxidontwikeitxx @nicke0115 @allalngthewtchtower @lettherebrelight

** **

~15 years ago~

“Ashlyn honey, come on, we don’t want to be late ” her mother, Teressa, yelled out from the bottom of the stairs, laughing softly to herself when she heard the mad rush of footsteps on the wooden floors before seeing her eight year old daughter running towards her with all her might, only to halt army style and stare up at her with wide eyes. There was not a single soul that could deny the resemblance between the two of them, they shared the striking green eyes and red-brown hair of the Sayer family, both had a boisterous take no shit attitude and the same little quirks and tells when they were upset. Which Teressa could tell was the case with her daughter right this minute. She reached down and pulled her young daughter into her embrace, balancing her on her hip as she made haste towards their car, “what's wrong baby? What’s got you thinking, hmm?”

Ash looked up at her mum, teary eyed and mumbled, “I don’t want daddy to get mad at me, I didn’t mean to hit that boy, he just said some mean things about daddy and I got really angry”. Little sniffles were becoming more and more prevalent as she continued talking, try as she might the little girl couldn’t fathom why people would speak bad about her family, they were all so nice!. She clumsily climbed down from her mum's arms and hopped up into her car seat, clipping her belt before pulling on it dramatically to prove that she was actually clipped in. Ash then let out a small gleeful laugh when her mum bopped her on the nose before walking around the car to get into the driver's seat to start on their journey to the principal's office to find out the punishment for the young girls justified behaviour.

The journey to the school would take longer than necessary, unexpected road closures with no concrete explanations from the officers monitoring the road blocks had forced Teressa to take the back roads and add an extra forty minutes to their already long commute for a Saturday morning. Travelling along generally unused and quiet roads was somewhat of an unusual experience for Ash, having been used to seeing cars passing by every other minute and looking at houses rather than vast open fields. As they passed round a corner, entering a tree lined road with dense forest on either side of them, an unsettling feeling overcame the young mother, there was a strange darkness that clung to the air, setting off alarm bells within. She remained calm as possible as to not alert Ashlynn that something was wrong, as the young girl was far too perceptive for her age, a trait that she had inherited from her fathers side of the family. She glanced back at her daughter, noticing that she was rather quiet, but let out a small sigh of relief when she noted that she had dozed off, head slumped against the panel of the door and her hair covering her face, snoring away softly to herself. It was in this brief moment of distraction that Teressa failed to notice the truck approaching rapidly from behind, when she did she increased her speed well beyond the speed limit, keeping an eye on a sleeping Ash to make sure she didn’t wake up and begin to start asking questions like the curious little thing always did.

As her speed increased the blacked out vehicle behind them only got faster until it was a mere meter behind their car, seeing no other option she pushed the car to its limits, approaching the upcoming intersection at speeds that should terrify her beyond means, but in this moment she was focusing on only one thing, protecting her innocent daughter in the back seat. As she passed through the intersection a scream forced its way from her throat, just through the intersection sat a parked truck blocking the road. Teressa knew she wouldn’t be able to stop in time so she swerved sharply to the right, hearing the screaming of the tires as they went from smooth asphalt to the gravely uneven surface that bordered the edge of the road. The steering of the car locked up, Teressa tried with all her might to get it moving again but was forced to endure the inevitable pain from the collision that was about to happen, with what may be her final words to her daughter she turned to look at Ash, tears filling her eyes when she took in the terrified expression on the young girls’ face, and whispered “I love you baby girl”

When Ash woke up she was sprawled on the grass a few feet from the car, rain was pouring down putting a darker spin on the event occurring. There were people standing around her, albeit a few feet away and semi-huddled together, and something warm was running into her left eye. Reaching up and feeling a thick, sticky substance she pulled her hand down to get a better look, a terrified scream leaving her small body when she noticed her hand washed red with blood. Her scream drew the attention of the people huddled together but they dismissed her without some much as a disgruntled look, they weren’t there for her. Ash glanced around, frightened and searching for her mum, who she found in a heap a meter or so to the left of her. With great difficulty she managed to crawl over to her mum, gathering her head and shaking her when she wouldn’t wake up.

“Mummy please! I’m sorry, no mummy please! Please wake up mummy, I need you” Tears poured from the eyes of the young bruised girl, mixing in with the blood as she desperately tried to wake her mum up. Her little body was exhausted from the effort, shivering from the cold seeping into her bones from the rain, and the toll of the crash began to take effect, she was becoming drowsy, a sure sign of a concussion. Ash felt a small wave of relief was over her when the eyes of her mothers’ met her own, the tears never halted, dripping off her face and landing on the face of her mother, mixing in with the blood that was covering the once beautiful face of her mum, now marred by sliced and bruised flesh. Her mum pulled her head towards herself, pressing a short but meaningful kiss to her forehead before her body began to go limp. “Ashy, darling, hold Mumma close for a little while” the broken voice of her mother rang clear in her ears.

Ash pulled her mums’ head as close to her little chest as possible, crying out and trying with all her might to keep her mum with her till help could arrive. With one last shuddering breath her mother passed, she was gone, no matter how tightly Ash held her. Looking down and seeing the closed eyes of her mother, she panicked, screaming out for the group of people to try and get their attention or at least their help. “Please help me, my mummy won’t wake up! I need my mummy, please help me!”

One of the men started towards her, dressed in clothes very similar to that of her father, before coming to a stop before her. He looked over the child thoughtfully, knowing the orders he was given deemed only that the woman be killed and the girl to be delivered to the hospital in a recoverable state, sighing to himself he reached down and hoisted the girl up and made haste towards one of the trucks.

“Put me down! I want my mummy. Don't take me away from her! MUMMY!!!!” the girl cried and screamed and beat at the man that was carrying her. She didn't understand. Why was the man taking her away from the one good thing in her life. Ash watched as the other men made their way towards her mum, before picking her up and beginning to chain her to the tree. One of the men pulled out a large knife which had the young girl screaming at the top of her lungs, “Leave my mummy alone! Just leave her alone you bully! Dont touch her!” the men just laughed at her, mocking her pitiful cries. She was unceremoniously thrown into the backseat of one of the vehicles, effectively cutting off her view of the men outside.

The young man climbed into the driver's seat, this was his first assignment within the force and he was disgusted by the behaviour of the team. His gaze travelled out the side window just in time to watch the team commander behead the young woman they had just killed, his stomach turned even further when the men began taking turns carving something into the body as they chained her up to the tree and left her there for someone to find. With the signal from his commander he started the car and made haste towards the nearest hospital to get the young, tortured girl seen too as fast as possible, her eyes were drooping and she was beyond pale which scared him. He felt for the young girl, having to go through so much at a young age because of the wrongdoings of her father.

~present~

Ash would never forget the sounds of the crash, the shattering of the glass or the painful scream that left her mothers’ lips the moment before both their worlds went dark that day. The final words of her mother were painfully etched into her memory, a grim reminder of that fateful day, and in tribute to her fallen parent the words “A little weakness goes a long way” were tattooed above her heart, words she stuck to as much as possible.

She sucked in a deep breath of air in an attempt to re-center herself with her surroundings and shake off the ghostly shivers of her broken past. She rubbed her hand across her face, wiping away the tears before scoffing out a vacant laugh. “Every damn year, without fail, I get these... these dreams about it ya know?. It’s like I can’t escape my past. I’m constantly thinking ‘what could I have done better, why couldn’t I have been a more grounded child’. If I had just controlled my anger my mum might still be here today”

The broken sob that left the young soldier had the Colonels’ heart clenching in his chest and his hands tightening on the steering wheel, almost uncomfortably so. He knew all too well the effects blaming oneself had on the mind. There were many things he took the blame for or blamed himself for as an inexperienced officer in his younger days, he would not allow the girl beside him to fall into that trap any longer given there was likely a deeply buried explanation to the event, one he would commit to finding. While keeping a close eye on the road ahead he reached over to wrap Ash’s hand tightly beneath one of his own effectively hoping to silence her racing thoughts and give her something more tangible to focus on. She was one of his own now, a team member that needed to be looked after as thoroughly as possible, but also someone that, dare he say it, was slowly becoming more than that.

Ash’s head shot up in surprise when she felt the large warm hand grasp her own, it brought a wave of unexpected comfort to her being, warming her to her core. Turning her attention from the hand over her own to the face of the man beside her she gulped. His shoulders were drawn up tight, hand gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles were white, his jaw was clenched to the point she could have sworn she heard his teeth grinding. His brow has drawn now and his mouth was drawn into a tight line, he was clearly displeased, no, angered by her past she just confessed, the anger that had settled in his deep brown eyes had a chill racing down her spine, it was a look of cold calculation, one she was sure many of has enemies had seen moments before their death. Gathering a small amount of courage she covered his hand with her other and began rubbing small unconscious circles into the side of his thumb, letting a small relieved breath when she saw some of the tension leave his body.

A short time had passed and they had reached the hospital; the tension had now left Ash’s body, with the weight of telling Carrillo about some of her destructive past now off her shoulders she felt like the awkwardness of the previous week had been all but forgotten. Her now unwavering trust in the man beside her somewhat frightened her, coupled in with the ever growing feelings she knew she was in far too deep. There was a silent agreement between the two of them that Ash would go to the medics while Carrillo would head to the archives to try and find files that would be useful to the team, they would reconvene at the car within the next two hours.

Upon entering the hospital and being directed to the outpatient clinic Ash was greeted by a very familiar face, “Captain Lisa Ortiz, my god it has been too long”. The smile that graced her face was pure and genuine, seeing a long lost family friend after so long was a relief and a huge shock to the system, but a good one at that. Ash wasn’t even aware that the Captain had returned from deployment, the last time she’d seen the woman was at her graduation parade when Ash had not long turned eighteen. She had grown up down the road from the amazing woman and as it turned out the Captain was now dating her favourite Lieutenant, Lt. Henry O’Connor.

“My god, little Ashy is that you, come over here girl” Captain Ortiz beckoned her over before wrapping her in a bear hug, she used to babysit the kid when she was a young tot, and furthermore after her mother had passed. Ash’s father, more often than not, would drop her on the Ortiz family doorstep and disappear for weeks on end, she had all but raised this girl and was proud that she had followed her dreams and joined the force. “Right, you, we have some catching up to do, head down to the third room on the right and I’ll be there after I’ve found your files” she had pointed down the corridor signaling the direction she wanted the 2nd Lieutenant to go, a pleased smile gracing her face when she watched the young thing wander off with a new found bounce in her step.

Ash was startled from her thoughts when the Captain entered the room before plonking herself down rather ungracefully into the chair beside her. “I read the report Greys, what the fuck! Have they found who did that to you? That's some messed up shit girl, glad you’re ok though kiddo” She reached over and ruffled Ash’s hair not giving her a moment to answer the questions thrown at her before standing up to grab some gloves and some tools to begin removing the younger officers’ stitches. “Right up on the bed, shirt off, I’m sure by now you’ll be wanting those stitches out”

Ash only nodded, shaking her head with a brief laugh before pulling her shirt over her head and climbing onto the bed like she was asked, she was far to content to do as she was told given how much she trusted the woman before her, she’d admired her since she was a small child and inspired to be like her even now. Lisa began carefully removing the stitches from her side, poking and prodding here and there to make sure she was most definitely healed like she should be, when one particularly hard poke had Ash wincing, she knew the Captain had found the slightly marred skin from where she had pulled those stitches.

“So...” the Captain began, “I heard a dit Greys. About you, a certain LT. Colonel and then a certain international guest. Care to share?”.

The shiteating grin that was currently taking up Lisa’s face told Ash all she needed to know. The Captain already knew everything about the whole ‘Sinclair situation’ so there really wasn’t much to tell there, but from what she remembered about the slightly older woman, she always got the answers she wanted, Ash really couldn’t hide anything from her if she tried. “Damn it Lisa, just spit it out, what do you wanna know” she said with a jeering tone, she knew forgoing rank with the Captain wouldn’t drop her in the shit, the benefits of knowing someone since you were five years old. It was funny watching Lisa try and find the right words to say, the furrowing of her brow and the opening and closing of her mouth like a fish out of water nearly had Ash in tears, it was quite the sight.

“From what I’ve heard the LT. Colonel was a bit of an asshole to you, kid. But I also remember a certain eighteen year old having it bad for him when she attended my graduation parade. I wonder who that could be...” Lisa trailed off with a chuckle. She was sure that by now Ash had all but forgotten about her nagging antics involving the man she no doubt despised nowadays, but it was still a moment of great amusement for the Captain. “Little eighteen year old you just wouldn’t shut up about him. Sinclair this, Sinclair that, honestly kid I'm surprised you never tried to jump that dick near the end of training” Ortiz paused for a moment, considering something before having a light bulb moment, “Unless it's because of a certain Columbian hunk I’ve heard so much about from some of the medics in your intake...” She knew she’d hit the jackpot when Ash blushed beet-red from her hairline to her neck. “Awww, does little Ashy have a crush on the big bad Colonel?”

Ash didn’t know what to say, she had honestly forgotten about how she had crushed on the LT. Colonel before she really even knew him, embarrassingly enough her reactions towards him kind of made sense now. She was going to attempt to deny her ever mounting crush on the Colonel she now lived and worked with but given the reaction Lisa had given, she knew she’d been caught out. “Even after all these years you’re still a gossiping teen” Ash choked out with a laugh, shaking her head with a big smile on her face, “And pffft no, I do not have a crush on anyone. Thank you very much”. Even to her own ears the lie was so evident in her voice, there was definitely no denying she did have a crush on the aforementioned man, but that was despite the point.

“OH yeah, for sure. Definitely. You sound so sure about that Greys. Come on now, between friends, what's it like living with that god of a man? I’ve only seen some pictures but holy damn girl, if you don’t ride that dick that I’m going to get you sent to the block, because denying that man that would be a crime!” The pure childlike glee that passed through the Captains body at witnessing the utter shock of her words became clear to Ash and had her curling over in laughter. Never in her life has she seen someone look so offended yet also curious at the idea.

“Hey put it this way, if that man is cuffing me. I’ll happily go right to horny jail” Ash huffed out between laughs, god it was good to be around someone who thought like her and wasn’t afraid of talking shit at work, it was gold. It felt good to genuinely laugh with someone she knew and cherished, it had been far too long.

“Anyway Greys, better get you all wrapped up and sent on your way back to your mans before he gets grumpy and you get told off. Although secretly I’m sure you’d just love that” She walked over to the desk and gathered up some papers that she needed Ash to give to her new Commanding Officer before writing out some prescriptions for more painkillers and nausea meds that she knew would come in handy in the future. “I need you to give these papers to the Colonel for me” she pointed to the stack tucked into an envelope, “And these ones are for you little lady. Please do keep me posted about that handsome hunk you live with. And don’t let Henry annoy you too much when he gets to the house, I’m sure you’ll have your hands full though. Good luck Greys!” and with one final tight hug she let the young officer go. Watching her plod down the hallway with a dopey smile on her face. Before she could forget she flicked her partner a text:

To: Future Hubbster

~ baby it seems you’ll have the perfect opportunity to have some fun in your new posting. Our little Ashy-bear has a crush on the Colonel, you HAVE to get them together somehow, we need our girl to be happy.

It was barely a minute later that her phone chimed, reading the message she had to shake her head with a laugh.

From: Future Hubbster

~ God I love you. Permission to make a certain Colonel jealous by any means necessary?

She quickly typed out a reply before hitting send and making her way back to the nurses desk to grab the papers for her next patient. She was sure that whatever her partner would do that it would for sure stir up some shit in the team, one of the many reasons she loved that troublemaker.

To: Future Hubbster

~permission granted, boy scout. Just don’t weird out our little Ashy or get kicked off the team. See you tonight baby xx

----------

From that day onwards the energy in the house was no longer awkward. Carrillo and Ash had fallen back into a rhythm of eating meals together and just genuinely enjoying each other's company in the moments when they could relax. Every Night at around twenty hundred hours they’d both find their way into the living room, generally Ash with a book and Carrillo with some kind of file that could potentially be helpful for their missions, reading quietly in comfortable silence had brought a sense of peace to the both of them. With the events from earlier in the week pushed to the side, but definitely not forgotten by either of them, they were back to being a well gelled team, a small team nonetheless but it worked well for them.

Ash had not so subtly started doting on the man. She’d bring him coffee’s to the office during the day because he barely left the room when he got stuck in a rut reading paper after paper, her heart always warmed that extra little bit when he’d happily accept the cup and give her a small grateful smile, she always left the room with a blush on her cheeks and an added skip in her step. Sunday rolled round and Carrillo had seemingly disappeared from the house, and with him nowhere to be found Ash took it upon herself to finally go for a run.

The property definitely seemed larger now she was running around the outside of it, she was becoming exhausted much faster than she would have liked and her side was rather sore from the effort. It was on her third lap of the property, the lap she had named ‘struggle street’ that she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Gapping it towards the house in an attempt to act like she hadn’t just been breaking the rules she made it just in time, rushing round her room and heading to the shower as fast as possible. The both of them had obviously learnt one thing from their moment in the living room nearly a week ago, always take your clothes into the bathroom and come out fully dressed, definitely a less awkward situation. Upon leaving the bathroom, fully clothed, she noticed a fresh set of groceries on the bench, it now made sense as to where the Colonel had disappeared to.

Ash started out putting everything away neatly and into the designated spots, putting her favourite foods into easy to reach spots because while she was average height, some of the cupboards were just that little bit too tall for her to reach up into. Once everything was put away she beelined for the couch and flicked on a random movie on tv, not intending to do much more than nap due to being beyond tired from her run, the dull ache of her muscles was a welcome feeling. Ash skipped dinner that night, still feeling far too tired from her exercise and instead chose to retire to bed early, but not before delivering a fresh cup of coffee to a very busy Carrillo.

Ash was starving when she woke up the next morning, stomach was growling and her body ached more than it had in a very long while, the good kind of overworked ache. Climbing rather ungracefully from her bed and into the kitchen, forgetting to put shorts on under the t-shirt she wore while in a tired state. Growing bored while waiting for the pot of coffee to finish she dug into the cupboard to grab a bowl and spoon in preparation for breakfast, wandering over to the fridge to get the milk before returning to her previous place, just in time for the coffee to be ready. Pouring the cup and taking a quick sip she felt herself begin to wake up, she definitely functioned better after the first cup of coffee in the morning, placing the cup down she reached up to the cupboard she usually kept her cereal in to make herself a bowl, only to find it wasn’t where she had put it yesterday upon unpacking the groceries. Huffing to herself in frustration she began checking the other cupboards, each one she opened came up empty, the frustration growing more and more when all the ones in her line of sight and reach didn’t contain her beloved Creamy Oats. It was then that it occurred to her there was one cupboard left to check, the highest up one that Carrillo usually kept any of his favourite stuff in, reaching up on tippy toes and flicking one of the doors open and she struck gold. From her placement she could see the logo of her cereal staring back at her, now she just had to reach it. Somehow.

Caught up in trying to reach her cereal she failed to notice the Colonel leaning against his bedroom door watching silently from afar. He’d woken to the sound of the kitchen being ransacked only to laugh at what he was seeing. His plan it seemed, had worked, from his vantage point he was granted with quite the sight, long muscled legs, and a well toned ass were revealed as Ash tried to stretch as much as she could onto her tiptoes to reach the box of cereal he had deliberately placed at the back of ‘his’ cupboard. Smirking away to himself he slowly padded over to the kitchen, taking special care to dare not make a sound to alert her of his presence.

Ash jumped when she felt a hand land softly on her side, her body tensed before relaxing all too quickly when she felt the penetrating heat of the man behind her. He reached up over her head, muscles bunching and pressed tightly against her effectively caging her in, grasped the box of cereal she was desperately trying to reach and reached down and placed it in front of her. She expected him to move away instantly but instead he stood there trapping her between the hard wood of the bench and the increasingly harder wood poking her in the lower back. One arm was still gripping her side, the other wrapped around her front with his hand played out on the bench, desperately close to where she needed it most.

Testing the resolve of the officer behind her might not have been her brightest idea but she craved any kind of interaction or touch she could gain from this man. Ash pushed back on him, letting out a small pliant sound of need when she felt him twitch against the curve of her ass, the resulting groan she received from him had her buckling at the knees. His head moved down, mouth hovering against the shell of her ear, she could feel the harsh uneven breaths and when she ground down on him again, harder this time, she was rewarded with yet another deep moan, one that sent a delighted shiver down her spine. She made a move to repeat the action but the hand on her side clamped down impossibly tight, efficiently halting her movements, the last thing she expected was for him to speak.

“Do that again, and you’ll find out how little control I really have” His voice was a mere whisper but it had the desired effect.

Ash froze, processing the words. The sleepy lust filled drawl sent a punch of arousal straight to her core and a moan escaping her throat. She was almost tempted to see how far she could push him, but settled for subtly maneuvering herself to grab for her coffee and bring it closer, her throat was impossibly dry now and he was not helping the situation.

The subtle movement brushed so lightly against him that in any other state it may have been imperceptible but in this highly aroused state it made him want to return the favour. He leaned down slowly, gauging her reaction, before gently and fleetingly brushing his lips behind her ear, smirking softly against her skin when she tilted her head slightly to accommodate him, mouth agape. Never one to turn down an advantage he slowly moved his right hand towards her coffee cup, distracting her further by trailing his lips along the edge of her jaw towards her own lips. He continued his journey towards her lips, stopping only when his hand found purchase on the hot cup of coffee before her, before he retraced his previous path, this time stopping every few centimeters to mouth at underside of her jaw, when he reached his intended target he sealed the deal. He nibbled at the soft skin beneath her ear, sucking lightly to leave the barest of marks but one the both of them would know was there, he blew softly on the skin, lips once again pulling into a smirk when she threw her head back against his bare shoulder. He leant his head against the side of her own, gently nuzzling against her before he growled out lowly, “Thanks for the Coffee Ash” and then as if he wasn’t affected by the current situation, he stepped back, groaning at the loss of pressure against his painfully hard cock.

To say Ash was an undignified mess wouldn’t be far from the truth, but even in her current state of dizzying arousal she wouldn’t let him have the last word. She spun on her heel, briefly stunned while watching the muscles on his back bunch and twist as he made his way back to his room, before she remembered her mission. “Sir..” she tempted in a voice dripping with sin, smirking proudly when she saw his shoulders tense and his head shoot up in a hurry, obviously not expecting her to speak back, “When you start something next time, I expect you to finish it” and with those as her final words she turned around, leaning heavily against the bench for support, barely resisting the urge to get herself off where she stood, Colonel be damned.

Carrillo only just had his door closed and the coffee cup discard before he was desperately pulling himself from his shorts. In less than a dozen strokes and with a barely concealed yell he had spilled into his own hand, moving across the floor he reached down to pick up a discarded t-shirt to clean up his mess. Sitting down on his bed to catch his breath he had to laugh at the situation, he had underestimated the young woman, severely so, and now he’d crossed a line he never had before. He was in deep, far too deep to continue to deny his true feelings for the junior officer. He flopped back onto his bed, staring at the ceiling before growling out a string of curse words in his native tongue. That girl really knew how to get under his skin.

#horacio carrillo #horacio carrillo x reader #horacio Carrillo x oc #paper scissors rank #chapter 9 #narcos fanfic

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jenmcgurn · 3 years

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MODERNISM, FAUVISM, CUBISM

20th century - traditions felt badly out of date. For the first time, TV's allowed artists to talk about their work to a mass audeince. was the need to show movement in paintings creating abstract and rythimic qulaities. Futuristic art brings to mind the city, noise, heat and movement. Predominately uses urban subject matter. ITrejects cubusm, pereceived to be too intellectual and static. They were interested in creating new art which creared shock value. It infleucned art movements sucb as art decom surrealism, dada, and vorticism and more.

a general term used to covered a multiplicity of movements

Different types of isms

1. broad cultural

2. artist defined like fauvism

3. retrospectively applied like post impressionism

New approaches to making art, styles and approaches were defined and redefined throughout the 20th century. their work represented a rejection of accepteed or trafitonal stlyes.

The first truly modern artists were Eduard Manet, Pablo Picasso (introduced cubism), Kandinsky (the real first artist is debated between historians.)

FAUVISM

The fauve painters were the first to break with impressionism as well as with traditional, older methods of perception

Key artists:

Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice De Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy.

It became extremely collectable especially by Russian artists.

Open Window Collioure (Matisse 1905)- the first real fauvist style painting. completely mad, unnatural colours, very vibrant. To maximise the intensity of colour, he organised the palette into a sea of compliments, (complimentary colours). Rectangular shapes, the walls on either side frame the view from the open window. No attempt to create an illusion of depth, no naturalistic perspective, perception of space is actually really compressed.

Promenade among olive trees - broken colour, colour confidence, the bare canvas seeping through. Sense of pattern, blocks of solid colour.

Subjective response to nature, paint straight from tube, unnaturalistic colour, landscapes primarily, intense colours.

Derain worked closely with Matisse, short broken brushstrokes directly link with some of the post-impressionists artists. Very controlled.

Fauvism was a short lived era, a transitional period in a lot of artist's careers. A lot of them went on to favour cubism (Not Matisse, he continued pioneering and developing fauvism)

Massive influence in developing modern influence, especially German post-impressionism.

CUBSIM

Cubism rejected the idea that paintings should depict a single viewpoint. Form and space are broken down into Geometric shapes.

Two distinctive phases developed:

1. analytical cubism 1907-12

2. Synthetic cubism 1913-21

Key artists: Picasso, Braque

Colour wasn't initially a great consideration.

Subject matter- still life, human figure, use of interior space. Rejected idea that art should come from nature and traditional perspective techniques.

Analytical - restricted palette, fragmenteed, multiple viewpoint, geometric forms,

synthetic- more vibrant and colourful, collage introduced, fragments of newspaper, monoprint, tiles, texture, stencilling, more interesting shapes, interlocking of geometric shapes.

Became a major influence on western art, several aspects of the object simultaneously.

FUTURISM

Futurism embraced the machine age and all things modern. It rejected the past and embraced the future. An important aspect of Futurism was the need to show movement in paintings creating abstract and rhythmic qualities. Futuristic art brings to mind the city, noise, heat and movement. Predominately uses urban subject matter. It rejects cubism, perceived to be too intellectual and static. They were interested in creating new art which created shock value. It influenced art movements such as art deco surrealism, dada, vorticism and more.

VORTICISM

All about the transformation of the world by the increasing use of technology and machinery.

Verging on pure abstraction, architectural shapes coming through. Kind of anti-human in terms of style, still see a representation of context like boats, shapes of buildings etc.

After the war, a lot of artists returned to figurative painting instead.

Whyndham Lewis - 1908 moved to London, entranced by its towering buildings, motor cars, mechanical paradise. Attacks England, saying its unartistic. all his figures are dehumanised, turned into little abstract shapes. Prophetic. configures a whole century where individuals were isolated, dehumanised and alienated. Prophetic of a century of destruction. Timeless quality. The war demoralised humans, sense of pessimism.

GREAT ARTISTS IN THEIR OWN WORDS - DOCUMENTARY

20th century - traditions felt badly out of date. For the first time, TV's allowed artists to talk about their work to a mass audience.

World War Artists!

Coal Miner - Anthony Caro became the world's most important sculptor. The horror of war changed the focus of his art. HE was trapped in the bomb shelter underground, so began to draw the things he saw - people lying in the shelters, sleeping, afraid, etc. Trying to show his reaction to the dramatic suspense of the situation, the tension between people, the sense of impending doom. These became known as 'the shelter drawings', which completely changed his career as an artist.

He later became obsessed with the human figure, distorted it and producing large scale sculptures. This created shock value as it was a new, unheard of idea and approach and depiction of the human form. He was the first British international artist because of his new, shocking work. His approach was "it's like god inventing a new animal" Uses candle and draws with wax, then goes on top with white chalk.

Francis Bacon- seeing the victims of war haunted him. strange, beast like features, when it was first seen it was a sensation. no body has ever seen a painting like 3 studies. Became the most controversial painter in Britain. Claimed his dark visions were a natural response to the things he had seen. the violent imagery ran as a dark thread through his work for the next 40 years. He was really uncompromising in the way he addressed the issues in life. Captured the moment in time, to make sense of the darkness that informs everything he creates. Feels at home in chaos. "Art is about trying to make something out of the chaos of existence".

Jackson Pollock - work was renowned for his new unseen approach. Preferred work with the canvas on the floor so he could attack the painting from 4 sides. He preferred unconventional tools like sticks, knives etc as opposed to traditional brushes.

- - - -

America 1950s - people were eager to spend, everyone wanted a piece of the new modern lifestyle. CONSUMER REVOLUTION

Richard Hamilton - important for international changes in art. Hamilton gave art a future. Worked as a designer in London. Fascinated by new cultural technological changes, and opened eyes to new world of possibilities.

POP ART (developed by Hamilton)

Father of English pop art.

Peter Blake - self portrait thrusted him to the public eye. modern take on the traditional self portrait. He filled with work with the objects of the consumerism age. He made modern art accessible. His work was always FUN.

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acourseinmiraclesaudios · 3 years

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A Course In Miracles Revisited

You have probably listened to concerning A Course in Miracles if you have spent much time discovering spirituality. Maybe you have even "done" it. A significant variety of spiritual seekers-New Age, Christian, Buddhist-have read the Course or at least have it remaining on their shelf. It has come to be a familiar component of the landscape. And yet that familiarity masks what a unusual and also one-of-a-kind paper A Course in Miracles is. The Course falls into the category of channeled material, yet most such material seems to ride the waves of preferred currents of idea, telling us more or less what we expect to hear: "You are God." "You develop your own truth." "You can have it all." While the Course echoes numerous styles from the globe's spiritual customs and also from modern-day psychology, what is possibly most striking regarding it is just how initial it is. Just when you believe that you recognize what it is going to claim, it avoids in some completely unknown instructions, one that seems to have no parallel in any various other mentor, old or contemporary. If you desire to listen to the old acquainted facts, A Course in Miracles is not for you. On every web page, it is trying to reverse the taken-for-granted presumptions on which your world is constructed. All of us normally want to identify ourselves through noted accomplishment, capability, and also recognition. We all want to be unique. The Course directs out that you can only be special by being far better than others, and also that attempting to make others worse than you is a strike. It says, "Specialness is triumph, and its success is [one more's] defeat and pity." Trying to beat and shame an additional, it says, just leaves you strained with sense of guilt. All of us attempt to style a positive image of ourselves, by taking on pleasing appearances and accountable behavior. The Course claims that this photo we have so meticulously crafted is truly an idol, an incorrect god that we praise in place of our real identity, which no photo can catch: "You have no picture to be perceived." The Course claims that we do not need a polished picture or unique characteristics, for underneath these surface things lies an ancient identification that coincides as every person else's yet has unlimited worth. We all think that if there is a God, the globe was produced by Him. The Course reminds us of what we all know, that the globe is a place of suffering, illness, death, as well as war. It states, "You however accuse Him of madness, to think He made a world where such points appear to have reality. He is not crazy. Only madness makes a globe like this." If you have ever before presumed that there is something deeply wrong with the globe, that there is an insanity that has actually seeped into everything, including perhaps your very own heart, after that the Course may be for you. For it remains in the midst of this bad news that it provides its excellent information. It promises, "There is a way of living worldwide that is not here, although it seems to be." In this way, the traumatic appearances of life no more regulate our frame of mind, neither dictate our feedback to others. We can find "silent also in the midst of the chaos" of the world. We can respond with open-handed generosity, even when others try to harm us. When its residue lies all around us, we can let go of the past also. We can go through our day with "no cares as well as no problems ... no fear of future as well as no previous remorses" even if we have fallen short to materialize the life of our desires. How do we reach this unsinkable tranquility? We get down to company and set about retraining our minds. We exercise seeing things differently. In this procedure, the Course supplies bountiful help. It includes thousands of workouts aimed at changing us right into a new perception-exercises in mercy, getting in the here and now, seeing ourselves in a different way, and also experiencing God. Yes, the procedure takes effort (just how did effort come to be so out of favor?). And also indeed, it guarantees to turn our inner globe inverted. Possibly we have actually grown tired of our inner world, maybe also a little bit ill of it. Probably we have observed that as mercurial as it is, it is incredibly resistant to real change. Perhaps, then, we are ready to try something brand-new, or to take something off the shelf that we only assumed was familiar. Probably A Course in Miracles is the thing we have been searching for. If you have invested much time discovering spirituality, you have actually probably listened to regarding A Course in Miracles. And also yet that knowledge masks what a special and also unconventional record A Course in Miracles is. The Course claims that we don't require a sleek photo or special characteristics, for below these surface points exists an old identification that is the same as every person else's yet has infinite well worth. The Course advises us of what we all recognize, that the globe is an area of suffering, war, death, and also disease. Probably A Course in Miracles is the point we have been looking for.

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terradisirene · 3 years

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Recently I saw an essay about how Hima’s portrayal of the Italy brothers was racist and xenophobic, in addition to being poor and one dimensional, and I couldn’t agree less.

Link to google docs version

Also although I prefer Romano I honestly think North Italy is a interesting and well developed character although that is easy to miss for some. Both of them are developed and shown wonderfully in canon and I continue to be eager to see more. In this essay I will show why I believe their portrayals are well done and how they are accurate to the situation in Italy as well as to it’s history and culture (That being said if you prefer a different interpretation that’s fine, there can be many different narratives)

North Italy does seem at first glance to be more talented, kind, and politically inclined. However this is not the entire story. Likewise Romano seems more rude and undesirable, but this is not everything in canon regarding him. In one strip Romano is noted to have a good deal of potential by Prussia and Germany, showing that he can be hard working and talented if he makes the effort. In the strip where Romano goes to America he also is quite confident in his cooking talents which America is actually impressed by. In another strip America even calls his cooking the best, and Romano himself is in later decades proud of his cooking, showing that yes he is good at things, and yes he is talented.

The problem is is that Romano does not have to motivation often to use his talents and work ethic. There are many reasons for this that Himaruya both states and alludes to. Firstly Himaruya states that being owned by various powers had a negative effect on Romano and that mismanagement by his rulers lead him to seem lazy since their mismanaged ruling rubbed off on him. Basically political control, corruption , and mismanagement stymied south Italy’s growth, which is true depending on the era and time period and true regarding modern day. Also in one strip after Romano makes an effort to work hard, but all his efforts come to nothing and he eventually grows resigned. I believe this is a reflection of the fact that there is an attitude among some south Italians of resignation towards politicians and things improving for themselves, such as shown in the song La Citta di Pulcinella (translation). Himaruya also touches on this when he notes the harmful affect the Mafia has on south Italy in his notes and even laments that fact.

Basically Romano has the potential to be just as good as north Italy but is unable to be because of historical circumstances and due to the harmful effect of corruption. Romano’s rudeness and lack of evident kindness and cynical worldview is also a result of this as he has been at the mercy of the mafia both in real life and in canon. Hima notes his cynicism is due to the harmful effects of the mafia and how they have hurt him . Romano in my opinion has reason to be rude, he has reason to be unkind, he has reason to be cynical, the mafia continues to be a serious issue and was even worse in the past, and thus his world view has been affected by how he has suffered at their hands. He also has to deal with the fact that he feels he is compared to north Italy, and openly feels and says he is not good enough or talented enough compared to him. This is based in reality. The north is often seen as better than the south and indeed it is more wealthy, does have better infrastructure, x does have more industry and renown and Romano is clearly sour because of this. Himaruya showing someone reacting negatively towards adverse circumstances i think is not a negative stereotype but just showing the harmful effects of the situation of the south. Romano is not totally unkind either. Despite their conflicts he does care about his brother, he often shows a lot concern for Spain and worries about him, he is kind to women generally , and has some nations he is friendly with like Japan Netherlands and Belgium . So in sum hima does not show Romano as unkind, but as a complex being who can be both kind and unkind like many people.

The south is seen as a land of little opportunity, dirty, unclean and full of crime by the north that is true, however sadly that perception has some perception in reality. For example many southerners leave the south to find work up north and stay there. This even happens to one of the protagonists of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and it is seen as escaping Naples to make a better life for herself while the other protagonist stays stuck in Naples, stunted by the lack of opportunity and male oppression that she struggles against all her life. Naples also sadly has a serious trash problem as does Rome, there is even a facebook page titled “Rome is disgusting” in Italian showing the trash problems of Rome. The mafia also dumps toxic waste around Naples, leading to high rates of sickness and cancer in the population compared to other parts of Italy due to the fact that the toxic waste seeps into the ground water and the plants grown around the area.

Romano feels interior to North Italy and seems so at first glance because that is a reflection of the sad situation of the divide between north and south. However again note I said ‘at first glance’, because while many write off the south at first glance there is a richness and beautify behind that with its rich culture and the beauty of it’s people, as there is with Romano, which I note with his hidden and subtle kindness in canon .

Romano’s Arabic blood and darker appearance is due the fact that Arabs from north Africa invaded Sicily, ruled there for about two hundred years, and left a lasting cultural legacy behind there. It makes sense he has Arabic blood, as well as the fact that some, though not all, southern Italians do have a darker complexation (some also have red hair, blonde hair, hazel eyes, or blue eyes, due to Norman influence too). However that doesn’t mean they are poc (in Italy persone di colore is used instead) and even though Romano does have some Arabic blood frankly he would not be seen as non white in Italy. I don’t really think it’s right to bring up a poc argument in regards to him given that. In addition to that Italy also has a problem regarding xenophobia and racism in regards to African immigrants and Romani and many suffer and are marginalized there, something Romano would not experience in that regard. Romano is also noted to have a “Darker” nature, but this is again because of the mafia. He is affected and blighted by them, it’s not a reference to his coloring but to his cynicism and how they have drained him and his people of the prosperity they could have had otherwise. He is also noted to be “dirtier” not in the sense of being messy or unclean but in how his image looks, and the expressions he makes, this is a reference to the south’s rougher and more intense nature. It’s often said that the more south you go, the more intense and more of the nature of Italy you get and indeed the south of Italy is often said to be a love it or hate it place.

There is also additional canon reasons for Romano’s bitterness and darker personality like how he feels Rome favored north Italy (There may be historical reasons for this but I am limiting this essay to what is stated openly or alluded to more obviously in canon) and how he seems to feel haunted by his legacy. And as for other nations favoring North Italy over him, some do not like Spain and Belgium, and the the fact that some seem to is also sadly reflective of reality as many people only pay attention to or visit the north of Italy, neglecting or avoiding the south and only looking at the cities of Venice, Florence and Milan and not Palermo, Naples, or Caligari.

While the two brothers did not meet in Rome’s lifetime there is no indication this lasted until the Italian wars during the 1500′s portrayed in the canon strips . In fact during Spain’s rule of south Italy shortly after Romano is shown mentioning he is going to travel to visit his brother so they clearly had met by this point. Due to the nature of canon himaruya jumps across time periods often and so we do not always see everything that occurs within or before a certain time period. Sometimes he returns later, and sometimes he does not, though he could in the future. As for North Italy’s reactions to his struggles people have different reactions to hard situations, and that is not wrong, not everyone will struggle in the same way. It’s not something that indicates a lack of character but just a personality facet. Not everything has to contribute to development and that doesn’t mean a uninteresting or uncomplex character. Some people are simply affected differently by traumatic events. That being said I find it interesting he seems to hold a deep fear of angering others as well as some fear of abandonment .

We will turn to North Italy again. Yes he is cute, but that is not all his character is. He is far more than that. He is kind , he is intelligent , he is noted to be good at business, he is also fashionable and knows how to get what he wants out of people, he also can be a bit vulgar sometimes. He also was good at warfare when he was a child, and if one looks into the time period of the strips it seems he lessens in his ability the longer he is under Austria’s domain. He is also good at art, he is good at cooking, and he is even also not exactly the nicest person .

I have noticed that many people miss this but sometimes he is actually a little sneaky and mean . This is most evident with Romano actually. In one of their first appearances together when Romano asks Italy to complement him Italy outright refuses, backs away, and as a result makes Romano cry more than he had before and he flies off. In another comic Italy goes up to Romano, seems surprised he is working, and Romano is visibly hurt by this, he also seems to even doubt Romano’s ability to even do so, offering to do work for him which Romano is bothered by . Finally Italy has been shown to get outright angry at Romano at times, in one drawing he is yelling at Romano over the Venice independence referendum, saying Romano doesn’t want him around anyways . While North Italy does love his brother he clearly is not the nicest person to him at times which does little to motivate Romano to do much of anything, and sadly North Italy does not treat him as a equal really given how condescending he can sometimes be. He also is a little rude to Japan at times, like when they are in the bath, sort of hinting he thinks Japan has a small dick. In addition to this he is pretty sneaky and sometimes even flirty in regards to Germany and is able to really get Germany to do whatever he wants, though this is more evident in World Stars .

As for everyone liking him in the past he and Turkey were antagonistic, with Turkey stating he hated kids as a result of him (And Greece), and Austria was often angry and frustrated with him. In modern times Belarus has shown aggression to him when he tried to feel her chest and was visibly angry with good reason to be. The other girls didn’t allow him to do so either, but all had various reactions. From Monaco and Belgium not taking him seriously and gloating over their superior gambling and waffles respectively to Wy giving him rather done look and telling him to buzz off, to Taiwan being upset and telling him off, Vietnam having none of it and glaring at him, to the most surprising of them all, Ukraine openly flirting with him and giving him a seductive gaze he is a little intimidated by . His relationships are clearly not predictable but are interesting and fun to see and clearly not everyone thinks he is cute or is willing to put up with him especially the girls ironically. Switzerland too shows little tolerance for Italy’s antics, but is willing to spend time him civilly as long as he behaves himself , Russia too has gotten impatient with him at times, and so has Japan. And as for France he’s a interesting case, since at times he can be brotherly towards Italy but at the same time is also willing to tell him off, like when he actually hit him for asking for the Mona Lisa back. People like Italy, but not everyone does and even those who like him don’t like him all the time.

Frankly I think their characters make perfect sense. Romano’s anger and resentment is rooted in many things. In how people compare him and his brother, on his brother’s lackluster treatment of him, in the oppressions of the mafia, the years of being ruled over by other nations, and by poverty, neglect, and corrupt politics. North Italy for his part is frustrated by Romano and often doesn’t understand him and thinks his brother his weighing him down, though he fails to see how he is also contributing to his brother’s resignation and lack of self worth. He instead tries to work hard and do his best, while sucking up to others and making himself seem charming and pleasing to get what he wants and not make others angry at him. In fact he seems to have a deep and pressing fear of others being angry at him.

In sum I think canon does a good job with both of their characters. It shows them in a humorous nature in accordance with the genre of the strips while still leaving room for character complexity along with historical and cultural references and allusions, as well as reflecting both aspects of the historical and modern situation of north and south Italy depending on what time period the strip is set. Romano is shown to be rude, difficult, sometimes violent, and darker, however these are only traits that come as a result of the abandonment of Rome, the poverty and corruption of his land, and the malign influence and harm of the mafia affecting him. In addition to this he is also sometimes kind, fun loving, emotional, sensitive, a hard worker when he tries to be, is shown to be a talented cook, someone with a good deal of potential, and someone who has people who like him like Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Japan. On the other hand Italy is shown to yes, be kind and cute, but canon also shows him to be flirty, sneaky, angry, resentful, intelligent, and even a little rude at times. Many people like him, but not all do, for example Belarus, or many do not like him all the time and show impatience with him like Wy, France, Romano, and Switzerland. The difficulties he has experienced have not affected him in the same way they have Romano but that’s to be expected, for the two did not go though the same things and it’s only normal for people to have different reactions to trauma, some handling it better than others. This does not denote a lack of character complexity or development but just a different kind of person and temperament. I think that this shows that both Italy and Romano are interesting and complex characters and that himaruya in my opinion has done his work and research in trying to develop them and do strips for them. He does not indulge in colorism or xenophobia but merely seeks to show the good and bad of both sides of Italy and the complex reality of the south today and in history which has it’s bad and good points.

As a side note in Valentino strip is unfinished and Germany and Italy never discuss their respective feelings or misunderstandings and Italy is less uncomfortable and more confused and worried that Germany is angry at him.

#hetalia #aph romano #aph south italy #hws romano #hws south italy #(i'll be back soon btw just revamping some blogs)

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lacielre · 4 years

Text

circles over circles, 1 (m)

SUMMARY Your life has been pretty stable from any university task to your social life and love life, everything has been set perfectly like a plate to a dining table. but that changes when you encounter the one person you remember to feel indifferent the most—Jungkook.

PAIRING jimin/reader, jungkook/reader

RATING mature

GENRE college au | smut, romance, heavy angst, friends to “enemies” to lovers, childhood friends, established relationship

WARNINGS fingering, lots of dwelling in the past

WORD COUNT 6.2k

PARTS 1, 2

PRESENT-DAY AUTUMN…

These past few days, you’ve always spent extended hours inside the twenty-four-seven-open campus library. Sometimes, you would even feel that the night skipped a few hours advanced into morning because you’ve drifted off to sleep. A few times. Only a few but more than thrice. But it’s difficult not to when it’s purely quiet, only a number of flickered lights to brighten up the tables and shelves, and most importantly, just at the right temperature amid this tiptoeing winter that’s only a few steps away.

Tonight, making use of the nap you had from the noon of yesterday, you exit the library around 5AM. You have some hours to jog back to your dorm then take a short snooze before your classes start.

On the march home, you take a stop at a small independent coffee shop a few blocks away from your building to take-out breakfast for you and your roommate, Seulgi, whose classes are always at 7:30 in the morning. A torture for the nursing student you share your space with.

Twenty-minute walks to the dorm are beneficial; they stand as your exercise, you convince yourself. If someone asks if you ever do anything to become fit, you can just say you “jog” daily when all you do is lazily drag your feet across the damp asphalt through the fog thickly peppered on the air.

With hands full of two paper bags, one barely clipped on your elbow and a drink carrier of two cups of hot coffee hanging from your left hand, opening the glass door of your building is a test indeed. As you struggle to pull the metal bar attached to it, someone pushes it from the inside for you.

“Thank you so—” you start but have to cut when you see who it is, “much.”

“Welcome,” Jungkook says succinctly. He sniffles as he opens the door wide and ticks his head to the side, signalling you to get inside quickly before the breeze starts seeping in.

“Oh. Oh yeah, right. Thanks,” you say again. “Thanks. It’s kinda freezing out.”

He brushes a finger under his nose and nods while his other hand is kept busy as he removes his airpods from his ears. “Yeah,” he agrees. “You’re out early. Sun’s not even out yet. You shouldn’t be outside this dark.”

“Yeah, well, I—uh—had to study. Exams are coming up,” you explain. And you’re thinking, how and why the fuck are you talking to him right now?

“Need help with that?” Jungkook nods at your stuff with both hands tucked inside his black sweatpants.

“No? No. No, thanks.”

He only looks at you.

“Yes. I do. I do, actually. Um, could you just click the elevator floor for me?” you request with fumbled thoughts and heart that’s beating fast.

“Sure.” He shrugs.

“Thanks.”

He chuckles at that.

You note to yourself: stop saying “thanks” all the time.

You lead the way to the opened elevator and Jungkook only follows as he brushes a hand through his long, curly hair, which you have only noticed. How the hell is he allowed to walk around this campus looking like that?

A step closer to you, you then notice how much about Jungkook has changed since you two kind of fell off, not that you two were ever involved romantically, but you two were best—good friends. Sort of. You were with each other throughout high school anyway, and not being able to be his friend in college made you think that it’s probably supposed to be this way.

And it broke you.

But some friendships fall apart.

Many people who are older than you – your cousins, aunts, summer job colleagues – have told you a lot of the friendships you’ve made along the way during high school don’t necessarily last. You agreed with that.

You just didn’t think it’d be the one with him.

“Which floor?” Jungkook asks.

“Oh!” You jump a bit. “Eighth.”

“Alright,” he says, and right when he’s about to get off the lift, he turns around and takes care of an imaginary itch on his forehead. “You know what, I’ll help you with that ‘til you get to your room. That looks expensive.”

It’s not.

“It’s not,” you say aloud. You go red. “It’s just from the small shop three blocks away, the one beside the bookstore, across the post office. It’s not that known but food and drinks are delicious there. Plus very, very cheap.”

Jungkook exhales with a smile as the elevator closes. “I see.”

No one talks and you aren’t sure if you’re thankful for the elevator music filling the air enveloping the both of you. If anything, it probably makes the situation worse, awkward. And you hate that no one’s speaking.

“You’re up early,” you comment finally after a few dreaded seconds.

“Training,” he answers quickly.

“Ah, right.” You nod. “The game’s around the corner?”

“Uh-huh.” This time, he nods. “Your boyfriend playing?”

You glow red at that and you swallow. “Yes. H-He will.”

“What’s his name again?”

“Jimin. Park Jimin.”

“Right.”

You’re not sure how two conflicting temperatures are playing with your body at the same time. Right this moment, you are completely frozen on your spot and your cold hands are sweating. On the other hand, your breath is hitched and warmth has its fashion to conquer you. You feel hot. It wouldn’t take long for bullets of sweat to appear on your forehead.

It’s not difficult to find a reason why he knows you’re dating Jimin, an athlete from another university that will be playing against your university’s team in the coming weeks. Because Jimin, like all good-looking athletes in campuses, is popular. Sort of—well, it’s college.

Jungkook takes the beverage carrier and one of the wrinkled paper bags from you as soon as the metallic gold doors part ways. He gives you a small smile, one that barely looks like one but the sparks in his eyes make up for it.

“Lead the way,” he says, motioning you to.

“Right. Okay,” you say, walking forward then left.

As you sweat to the fabrics of your jacket, your feet shuffle rapidly through the unclean, patterned tiles of the hallway. Doors rush past your vision until you’re finally in front of your own—your home in this stressing universe of a university.

“This is me.” You turn to smile at him only to catch him looking intently at the golden plate of numbers plastered on your black-painted wooden door. You take your stuff from his arms gently. “Thank you so, so much.”

Would it be wrong to tell him you missed him, talking to him?

It must be.

“You’re welcome, _____.”

It’s the first time anyone of you mentioned the other’s name. You didn’t think it would be him who would recall that he actually knows the name of the figure he’s talking to. And the same thing could be said to you.

“See you around,” you mutter and you couldn’t help but give in to the stretch of a tight-lipped smile across your mouth as you add, “Jungkook.”

“Don’t walk around… when… uh, it’s dark,” he manages to say.

Silently, you say, “Okay,” in feathered breaths.

With that, he finally turns around while you twist your toes to face your door instead, not bothering to watch him walk away until he finds his way to the elevator. You fish for your keys inside your pocket. And of course, it takes you a minute or two to finally get inside your room and find your roommate with her hands covering her mouth.

“Were you just outside with Jungkook?” Suelgi asks through her palms.

“Thanks for helping me open the door, by the way,” you say satirically as you sigh. “And yep, that’s him alright.”

“Did you just sigh?” she asks in disbelief.

“It’s Jungkook.”

“Oh, right… history.” She wiggles her brows. “Oh, to have such a not-boring high school life!”

“Boring is fine,” you state. “Also, I-uh, brought some breakfast.”

“Yay! OMG,” she squeals. “Thank you! I was starving last night but I had to sleep it off because there was no food in the fridge.”

Your forehead creases. “You could’ve ordered.”

“I know that. I just chose to sleep instead.” She approaches you and kisses your head as she snatches the paper bags from your hand. “You see, this is why Jimin loves you so much, _____.”

“You got what you wanted. No need to flatter me.”

“Were you out again studying?” Her voice floats farther from your auditory perception as she strides away to unpack the brown bags on the kitchen counter. “These smell good!”

You take off your shoes. “Yup,” you say as you let gravity pull your body to the surrender of the couch. “I’m just gonna nap.”

“Hey, eat with me first,” she requests then giggles. “We’re gonna talk about Jeon.”

“Not funny!”

AUTUMN, FOUR YEARS AGO…

Even amid the tormenting coldness brought by the icy wind, you needed to go to tutorial lessons to prepare for the upcoming exams. This would determine your future, they told you and you held onto that idea. The lessons were held every 7PM until 11PM at the building about five streets behind your apartment. It was one from the many commercial modern-styled buildings lined by the highway tracks.

By the time the tutorial ended, you already had your things rammed into your backpack so you could go home before it could even get darker. You didn’t know anyone in the room and it wasn’t like everyone had the energy to still be friendly, to ask you for some carton drinks on the way home, or to relish on a three-dollar-meal dinner at some twenty-four-seven fast-food chain.

The soles of your rubber shoes were on the frosty cement in no time.

“_____!”

You turned around quickly, trying to find Jungkook’s voice. That was his for sure. It didn’t take long for your eyes to locate him. He was at a convenience store at the corner, across where you stood.

“Kook!” you shouted back.

He rushed to you quickly with white breath mimicking the way his lips exhaled air. “There shouldn’t be a reason you’re out this late.”

“Right,” you remarked sarcastically, kicking lightly at his ankle. “Like you have any business to be out this late.”

“I was craving for some noodles,” he rebutted so simply. “You still attending prep class?”

“Of course, I am. Not everyone’s a star athlete like you.”

He glared at you. “You’re pushing yourself too hard,” Jungkook managed to say silently.

“Come again. Is this concern I hear?” you teased, dramatically putting a hand on your chest.

“Forget it.”

You huffed at him. “I’m trying to get into the university that’s recruiting you. I’m not pushing myself to get in for you, though—well, not entirely. It’s—”

“Your first choice. Your dream university or whatever, I know,” he finished.

“Exactly. That’s why you should be supporting me. I’m doing just fine. See?” You put your open palms by your shoulders. “No stress.”

“I can’t take you seriously with those bags under your eyes, _____.” He narrowed his eyes.

“I naturally have those, Jungkook. Stop insulting me.”

“Accidentally insulting you,” he corrected.

“Okay. Well, stop accidentally insulting me, Jungkook.”

He gave up with a sigh. “Okay, I’m gonna ask you something but you’re only allowed to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to my questions, okay?”

“What’s this f—”

“You like ice cream?”

You gave in. “Yes.”

“You like winter?”

“Yes.”

“You want to learn piano?”

“Yes.”

“You’re tired?”

“Yes—” you gasped loudly. “Okay, that’s just unfair! My brain was trained to say ‘yes’ as an answer to every question. It was instinct.”

While you were busy trying to lecture him, all he had as a reply to you was a smirk as he shook his head in dismissal. It was to say that enough, I already won. And maybe, it was right for him to win this. It was true you were tired anyway. Only, you found it hard to admit it to yourself until he made you so.

“I’m hungry.” You looked up to him. “Weren’t you craving for noodles? Let’s eat.”

Jungkook smiled at you, a damn perfect one. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing for you to grab his hand because you were about to cross the street.

“There are no cars, Jungkook,” you stated.

“Fine.” He retracted his hand.

At mid-passage, two trucks were on their way to cross paths with you and Jungkook, and Jungkook wasn’t planning to stop walking and it was scaring you.

You didn’t know how to cross streets when there were no street lights tucked on the bends of the roads to guide you. You always found trouble finding purchase as to when to cross, so you always had to wait for every upcoming vehicle to pass before you moved your limbs frontward.

So you clutched Jungkook’s hand.

“See, I told you,” he succinctly said, not looking at you.

He held onto yours tightly.

There was no assurance as to whose heart was beating fast at that moment.

Even then, it was quiet.

“What if you don’t get to the university I’ll be in?” Jungkook asked casually.

“You don’t believe I can?” you teased, trying to sound offended.

He paused. “No—it’s not that! Of course, I do! It’s j—”

That was your queue to laugh and you did.

“Asshole,” was his sheer comment.

“If I don’t get in, it’s no big deal. There’s always a plan B, even a C, to G,” you explained. “I have lots of backups, you know.”

“Where’s the plan B university?”

“The one near yours,” you muttered as you grazed your chopsticks on the floor of the hot paper bowl caged in your palm, trying to clasp short bits of noodles. “It’s just as good but it doesn’t have the program I want.”

He nodded at that. “Do your best.”

You lifted your head to look at him but he wasn’t looking at you. So instead of coming up with a serious response to that, you decided to go on a different direction. “Aww,” you cooed, “can’t go through college without me now, Kook?”

“You wish.”

“Rude.”

“I, um, what do you think about sharing a dorm?” he asked, and when you failed to respond quickly, “my mom wants us to,” he added.

“Ahh.” It was clearer for you now. “That won’t be fair to me because then, I’ll have to clean up your mess. You’d make a terrible roommate, Jungkook.”

“Hey!” He put down the water bottle he had been holding. “I’m not that bad.”

“You’d think,” you provoked more.

Jungkook only huffed, doing his best not to be annoyed while he waited for you to finish your meal. He had been over his for about 20 minutes now. You were a slow eater and Jungkook always took note of that which was why every time he finished his meals, he would always find you something to drink afterwards. So he wouldn’t just be waiting there, watching you eat.

“Thanks for this,” you said as you opened the lid of your drink.

“That’d be two dollars.”

You glared at him. “No way. Let’s just head home. It’s getting late.”

“Right. Like an hour before midnight wasn’t late enough.”

“Okay, genius. It’s getting late late.”

“That makes it better,” he mocked.

Instead of replying, you got up abruptly, carrying the weight of your backpack on the span of your back. Jungkook arranged the disposable materials you both ate on and threw them to the mouth of the nearest garbage bin next to the counter.

And then you were outside the store.

“What are you doing?” you asked, looking at Jungkook’s fingers twined with yours.

Jungkook swallowed. “There might be cars,” he explained shortly but slowly as he let go of your hand and tucked his own inside the warm, joined pockets of his hoodie.

It didn’t take long for the two of you to reach your rent-controlled apartment, especially when throughout the tread home, you two bickered over the littlest of things. And for a moment, it felt like you were brought back to being first-year highschoolers again, when you two had just met and eventually became friends after finding out that you shared the same path home.

“Tenth floor, right?” Jungkook asked as you both waited for the elevator to come down.

You nodded. “Why’d you have to ask, you practically live here.”

He entered the crane as soon as it arrived and you followed, stopping right by his side.

You look at him.

He looked at you and sighed. “Next time, after your prep class, call me. You really shouldn’t be out this dark,” and before your witty remark, “I’m serious.”

PRESENT-DAY AUTUMN…

You have no idea why you still have a small picture of Jungkook stuck into your wallet behind asymmetrically folded trivial receipts. If anything, you should have thrown it away as soon as college started. You must be hanging onto this false hope that maybe, somehow, at some point in the future, there’s still a chance things would go back.

That maybe there’s a reason he suddenly pushed you away.

“Where are you eating dinner? Wanna take-out?” Seulgi asks silently as you’re both in the library.

Her voice makes you close your wallet abruptly, and you hope she doesn’t think too much of it. Or else, she would tease you to no end.

“Ah, I’m going out with Jimin tonight,” you say with a wide smile, packing your items.

“Oh, to have a boyfriend who’d ditch training just to have dinner with me,” your roommate theatrically teases. “Say hi to him for me.”

“Sure.”

“Tell your boyfriend too that, that one time he sent food to our dorm, he can still do that,” Seulgi adds with little to no pause in between words. “Tell him not to be shy.”

“Okay. You,” you sigh, inserting your notebook into your bag, “need a boyfriend.”

“_____, I have classes from 7:30AM to 5PM, Mondays to Fridays, half-days on Saturdays. You can’t possibly think I’ve got time for that.” She ponders over the idea for a second, though. “You know what, maybe a fuck buddy will do.”

“Oh, yeah, no fucking way,” you quickly say, shaking your head. “You’ve gone through that already.”

“So protective,” she coos. “You’re for real the big sister I never had.”

You are a year older than her and you’ve shared your dorm with her for about two semesters now. On your freshman year, you didn’t have a roommate and it was so tough living alone to pay all the bills so you opened a slot before first semester officially ended. And there, she entered your life. You’re glad it was her.

“I’m going!” you scream-whisper. “Don’t sleep with an empty stomach, okay? I think there’s still some leftovers in the fridge. If anything—”

“Comes up, just call me,” she continues, mimicking your voice and tone – hardly. “Okay, okay. You sound like my mom now. Go and get laid.”

If there’s something you love most about Jimin, it would be his determination to make time with the people he loves, one of them being you luckily.

“You sure you don’t wanna take-out?” you ask for the nth time.

“I’m sure. Besides, I’m almost done.” He gives you a peck on the lips, his being the smoothest, softest pair even with the chilly season. “And babe, you can’t live off take-outs. It’s not healthy.”

“You’re the expert.” You shrug. “You sure you’re not tired?” you say, worried.

“I’m definitely sure.” He shakes his head. “If anything, all I feel is that I miss you.”

“Cheesy,” you say, smirking and narrowing your eyes.

You instantly wrap your hands around his waist as you lean your body on his back. Being shorter than him, it’s difficult to put your chin on his shoulder and watch him cook. Giving up, you set your cheek on the span of his back, feeling the vibrations as he hums. You sigh and he notices that.

“I think you’re the tired one here,” Jimin utters, concern laced in his tone. “I don’t think studying at dawn is healthy for you, babe.”

“It’s not healthy for anyone; you’re right,” you yield. “But I already had my body clock adjusted to this.”

“You have 9AM classes, _____.” He creases his forehead. “There’s no way you’re getting full eight hours of sleep. Stop with this already and listen to me this time.”

“Sorry.” You nod. “You’re right,” you repeat. “Just two more days for exams then I’ll go back to my uninterrupted sleeps. All my exams are done by Friday anyway.”

With that, you unfasten your hands to let go of him and walk towards the empty kitchen counter beside him, lift your body, and sit on it.

And just like that, leaning your side on the wall, you watch until he turns off the stove.

“Let’s eat,” he says.

And he catches you merely staring at him.

“Something wrong?” Jimin asks, turning to face you and ending up at a position where he stands between your legs. He slides his hands up and down on your bare thighs, getting close to your ass then back to your thighs.

You shake your head. “Just missed you,” you sigh, “a lot.”

“Missed you too,” he replies, leaning in for a kiss.

The kiss, shallow at first but with a hand crept up your nape, he pulls you in deeper. And the reply you could muster is a throaty moan as you lock your ankles around him. You play with his hair softly, much different from the kiss you share.

Softly, you sigh as he pulls away.

He lets go to place his lips on the crook of your neck, hot breath on sensitive skin but all you could do is throw your head backwards to give him more access.

“Hmm, smell so good,” Jimin mumbles, inhaling your scent, licking and kissing small spots on your neck.

His hands travel to your waist inside your (his) shirt with his thumb gently circling a skin of your stomach. One goes upwards to your ribs and just so, so close to your mound.

“Knew you weren’t wearing one when you hugged me,” he breathes out on the shell of your ear. “Such a good girl for me.”

He goes over the curve of your breast and catches your nipple between his fingers, making you whimper in small sounds as you arch your back. “So, so sensitive too.” He nips at your neck, just lightly grazing his teeth.

Jimin withdraws from sucking spots on your neck. While his hand is busy with your breast, his other cups your cheek, making you look at him with dilated eyes. He pushes your chin to open your mouth and he licks at your lips making you hitch a breath.

Before you could even do anything, he sucks at your bottom lip.

With the gesture, you couldn’t help but to fist his shirt in your hands, scared you would faint if continues to play with you like this. He chuckles at that before finally attaching his lips to yours, entering his tongue into your mouth. And you suckle his tongue, trying to level with the intensity he’s giving you.

He moans at that and he flicks your nipple to receive a moan from you.

“F-Fuck,” you mutter, and you already feel the immense wetness pooling on your panties.

His fingers dangerously dance along the ends of your pajama shorts. And when they enter the fabric, they only stay on your inner thigh, tapping lightly at your skin.

“Jimin, please…” you exhale. “J-Just—just do—do something.”

“You want my fingers?”

And he gets so fucking close, staying on your panties but he retrieves to palm your inner thigh instead. “Answer me, babe. Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you,” Jimin says, looking into your eyes.

You hate how he’s able to maintain such demeanor when you’re already this fucked out over a kiss.

“C’mon, baby…”

“I-I want your fingers inside of me,” you say, shyly.

He nods at you as his fingers rub you over your panties and he could feel how wet you are. He rubs your clit over the fabric and you couldn’t help but fist his shirt even more.

“Inside me—please, please,” you beg with a tiny voice, spreading your legs apart.

“So impatient,” he comments and he finally enters a digit. “Fuck, you’re tight. Could barely move around here, baby.” He starts thrusting it into your core slowly in a torturous pace.

You clench at his words and even when you don’t speak, he knows you like it when he talks to you like this. Your small whimpers and short moans tell him enough. And there’s something about you and your submissiveness that he couldn’t get enough of.

“Can you take one more, princess?” he says, stilling his hand.

You don’t answer, squeezing your eyes shut. You sigh at the loss of movement so you hold onto his wrist and try to move him but he doesn’t budge. He only shakes his head.

“Take one more for me?” he repeats, thrusting his hand again slow but hard.

You nod quickly with eyes shut as you feel him add another finger and curl them inside you.

“Can you hear that?” Jimin whispers as he thrusts his hand fast. “Fuck. You’re so wet.”

The sounds of your juices squelching are the only thing you could hear along the fast beating of your heart in your chest and the quick high-pitched whimpers you exhale. But you are too embarrassed to even answer his question.

You grow even wetter by second and that makes you redder than ever.

“Answer me,” he says, slowing his pace.

You gulp. “Yesyes. I can hear it.” You bury your face on his shoulder, muffling your words as you’re not able to take it anymore. “Fuck—nnghh—!”

Jimin knows you’re so close to falling apart on his fingers—way too close. It might be the fastest he’s made you come undone on his fingers. You are clenching on his fingers too tightly and his blood is already rushing down to his cock.

His thumb presses on your folds until he finds your clit and rubs over it in circular motion. It has you breathing even faster. You couldn’t help but to bite his collarbone to ease the pleasure you’re feeling.

“O-Oh, my God!” you scream, although the sounds are muffled. “Jimin!”

Then he has your legs trembling.

Just a bit more. A little bit more.

“Come,” he sternly commands.

And with rapid moans, you do. Slowly, you let go of his shirt and lick a stripe of his neck and nibbling at some parts. He pulls his fingers and raises them to you. Without letting a second pass, you hold his wrist and you let your tongue clean his fingers, and his hairs raise at that.

You hear his small “fuck” as you taste yourself off him.

Just when you’re about to wrap his fingers with your mouth, his hands reach the back of your knees, pulling you closer to him. Your heat is placed just above his abdomen and he could feel you pulsing.

His face is incredibly close to you and none of you are doing anything about it. You let his hot breath fan your pinkish cheeks, and he lets you rub your hands on the span of his arms.

“Tired?” he asks, leaning his forehead onto yours.

“Just need a minute,” you answer.

Then a smirk forms on his lips. “We were supposed to be here to eat dinner.”

“Mhm” – you loll your head to the side and kiss the corner of his mouth – “I like you better.”

Jimin chuckles at that. “Stay over tonight?” he cautiously asks, testing the waters and afraid you’ll turn him down to do something else (e.g. studying).

You nod at his request. “Definitely,” and you add, “I’ll be troubled finding a reason to leave after—well, that.”

If there’s something you love most about Jimin, it would be his determination to make time with the people he loves, one of them being you luckily and his cock.

“Will you attend the game on Saturday?” Jimin asks slowly.

The contrast of his personality is adorable to you. Just an hour ago, he’s ready to take the life out of you with his fingers. But now, he’s warily asking you if you could make it to one of his games on a weekend.

You smile wickedly at him. “I’ll be there for sure!”

“Great,” he says excitedly. “Who are you supporting?”

Your eyes turn into slits at him. “You! Who else?”

“Well, you’re friends with lots from your team. You know, Namjoon, Seokjin, and well—uh, and they’re playing, too,” he explains.

“Yeah, well, I’m friends with Taehyung from your team, too,” you say, refuting his theory. “I miss Tae.”

“Really, now,” Jimin grunts. “He’s my friend and all but ever since the story you told me before, I just can’t help but picture it, then I get mad—no, frustrated. Just a little but still—”

“We fooled around once, Jimin. Nothing even happened,” you quickly defend. “Once. And we were on our last year of high school. That’s like three years ago! That’s before you even dared to ask me out. And I had to kiss you for you to ask me out.”

“Yeah, I-I know. I know,” he says. “I can’t help it.”

“Don’t picture it!” you tell him, laughing.

“This is not funny,” he complains. “Like, whenever I’m with Tae, it’s all good. It’s fine. When I’m with you, it’s all good too. But when you two happen to be in the same space, I can’t help it. Or whenever someone mentions it.”

“Just so you know though, you’re the only one I’ve ever loved,” you confess, solemnly.

You close the gap between the two of you to press your lips on his jaw, not that it’s far considering that you two are literally cuddling up on the couch with a playing movie that none of you pays attention to.

He looks down at you.

“I’ve had flings. You had yours too! And I’m probably not aware of it, but you’ve probably messed with some of my friends in high school—but you know, I don’t think about it,” you add, shaking your head.

Jimin only kisses your crown. “It’s hard for me because there’s a face. I know who Taehyung is, and he’s my friend. You have a feeling I’ve fooled around with some of your friends, but you don’t know who. That’s the difference.”

“Are you jealous?”

“Is it—that’s what you get from all that?”

“Well?” you raise a question. “There’s nothing else to get from that.”

“Okay—okay, you’re right,” he says, halting as he realizes.

“Hey, hey,” you say, making him lock eyes with you. “I love you.”

Jimin couldn’t help but smile at that. “Love you too,” before he cages your body and kiss you with the right amount of passion and intensity.

“I gotta say, jealousy is a good look on you,” you tease.

“Don’t make me deliberately jealous please.”

“Won’t ever do that,” you assure.

When the sun burned your thighs through Jimin’s bedroom curtains, he’s no longer beside you. But there’s a note he left on his nightstand that says he had to go out early because he ditched training last night for you. You smile at the simple gesture which turned grand by the breakfast he’s cooked for you. As though the leftovers from dinner last night aren’t enough.

Treating his home as yours, you do your morning routine with an incomplete skincare regimen and leave the apartment locked. You even have to double-check it, afraid that you accidentally abandon it open.

Getting back in track with your usual mornings, you head to the coffee shop you always stop by for of course, coffee. The shop owner’s daughter, Joohyun, whom you’ve known and been friends with since high school (who currently attends classes at Jimin’s university), serves you your usual – precise teaspoons of sugar, precise part of milk, and precise hotness of beverage.

“Jungkook was here,” Joohyun starts.

Instead of standing behind the counter, she shares a table with you while munching on some peanuts.

“And I should know this, why?” you ask, narrowing your eyes at her.

“We had a small talk, the typical ‘how are you’ all that, then he mentioned you is why,” she points out with a smirk. She chomps her snack.

That makes you stop a little but you don’t show it – hopefully. To hide your surprise, you take a small sip of your drink, not bothering to play with the temperature as you trust Joohyun and her ability to warm up a drink just right.

“What—what did he say?” you say, needing to pause in between as you swallow the remnants of your coffee’s bitterness soaking on the buds of your tongue.

“That you mentioned this place to him,” Joohyun states, smiling now. “Since when did you two start talking again, huh? It’s like we opened a door to seven years ago, damn.”

“We talked yesterday for a while and that’s probably the only time we’ll talk until we graduate,” you dismiss.

Joohyun shrugs. “Whatever you say,” she utters, unconvinced.

“At least, sound like you believe me, Joohyun.”

She giggles instead, not bothering to rephrase her words. “Anyway, how are you and Jimin?”

“It’s been great!” you exclaim. “But you know, he’s a bit—uh, how do I say this?” You pause to find the right words, snapping your fingers, and Joohyun’s just waiting for you.

“I do not have all the time in the world, _____.”

“He’s a bit, um, insecure—no, that’s not right.”

“What do you mean ‘insecure’? Like, ‘doesn’t-feel-confident-with-himself-because-the-game-is-close’ insecure?”

You shake your head. “You know that part of the relationship where you talk about exes and stuff like that?”

“Ooh, that.” Joohyun nods, finally seeing where you’re going. “But you two have been together for two years now; I’m surprised you haven’t had this talk earlier.”

“No. No, we had, but it keeps resurfacing. Then we talked about the people we’ve been with, and you know I’ve fooled around with Taehyung right?”

Joohyun nods again.

“Well, he feels weird about it because they’re close and all. I don’t know.” You exhale a sigh. “And there’s more. I told him there’s probably a huge chance he’s fooled around with at least one of my friends.” You lift a finger.

Her eyes widen at that then she nods her head very slowly – again. “And… what did he say?”

“He said that’s what I think,” you utter and Joohyun only nods and nods at you, so you go ahead and continue. “But it’s not like it’s far-fetched, right? Our high schools weren’t that far from each other. He’s just so weirded-out by me and Tae, but it’s been so, so long. Why are you so quiet? Say something! Also! I wouldn’t be bothered if he tells me he had done it with my frie—oh, my God, you have?”

You almost shout your last words.

“What gave it away?” Joohyun whisper-shouts, covering her mouth. “Was it the nods?”

“Could you be a little more obvious?” you shout back. “You and Jimin? Oh, my God. And you never told me!”

“I didn’t think it was important! Why didn’t he tell you?” she defends.

“He probably doesn’t even know we’re friends, Joohyun!” you say quickly.

“Well, he should! And in my defense though, _____, I had the hardest time trying to find a way to tell you. I knew you were talking about some Jimin to me before but I didn’t know it was that Jimin.”

You wiggle on your seat, your mind making up the image of Joohyun and Jimin together intimately without your cue. And Jimin was right; it’s weird. You put your hands into fists, cringing at the idea.

“Oh, my God, are you mad at me?” Joohyun asks, not able to decipher your reactions.

“No?” you say, unsure, and then calmly and more certainly this time, “no. It was high school, before we were even together.”

“Jimin and I—we only did it onc—”

“Stopstopstop! Can we talk about something else?” you beg.

“Okay, okay. Yeah. Of course, sure,” she agrees frantically. “So, um—Jungkook! How did you two start talking again?”

You summarize everything into a simpler situation. “Shared the elevator ride.” Your shoulders slump back. “Can we not make it a bigger deal than it is—not!—it is not a big deal,” you correct midway. “I stand by what I said, you know, we’re never gonna talk again. I just know it.”

“And you know better because you’re a what? A fucking psychic?” she scoffs.

“Rude.”

“I’m just saying, _____,” Joohyun states. “I’m not saying that your relationship with him should have the same depth as the one you had with him in high school. Inseparable and just you know, so… young.”

You wait for her to continue, not being able to reply to that because you think she might be making a point. So far, she has.

“All I’m saying is that this is a burden you never lifted off your shoulders,” she says seriously as she shakes her head. “And things like that – they come full circle,” she rotates a finger in the air, “naturally.”

#f: circles over circles #bts smut #jungkook smut #jungkook x oc #by:lacielre

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weirdponytail · 4 years

Text

Modern Inheritance: Peony (Pt 3 of Torin’s Story)

(A/N: Some injury description this time, so fair warning. Also, I’m going to start putting the flower meaning in the tags. Cheers mates! Oh, and for an explanation of how Arya manages what she does in her condition, we’re just going to say adrenaline and someone waking you up from your first nap in a good long while. :3 )

Part 1 // Part 2 // PART 3 // TBC

Two weeks passed.

Torin paced down the length of the High Risk Ward for the eighty seventh time, mind floating aimlessly as he drifted from thought to thought. Only four days into his solitary post on the ward and the youth had settled into his routine. Down the empty side of the block first. Up the other side. Stop at the elf’s cell to see if she had moved. Keep walking. Rinse, repeat.

The solitude and silence had bothered him at first. Gil’ead wasn’t the most comforting of places. It was all smooth concrete flooring, grey painted cinderblock and metal plated oak doors. There was no semblance of warmth anywhere, just grey, grey and more grey.

But as the hours melted together, Torin found a certain peace in it all. It was a break from the rabble of the mess hall and the barracks, the blissful quiet he longed for every night in the group home for years. Somehow he had found that elusive quiet in the very place he hated, walking the halls of a prison for people who had no founded rhyme or reason to be there besides the word of a Shade, a tyrant King, and the blood they had no choice in having.

The thought made his steps stutter, breaking the monotony of his boots thudding the bare concrete floor. On a base where the commander could read minds, such thoughts were dangerous indeed.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to worry about that at the moment. The General was to be gone for three days.

In the days before the General’s departure, the veteran guards split up their shifts and passed off most of their hours to the younger greenhorns in favor of spending their days in the mess hall and common rooms playing cards. The fewer rookies a ward had, the more that fell to them, and the more hours they would spend on shift apiece. Some of them loved it, raking in a modest extra pay bonus and gaining more experience on their assigned blocks. Others hated the extra load and would fake sick or push the more enthusiastic men to take on their share as well.

Torin...was not so fond of the situation. He was the only rookie on the High Risk Ward, and thus had no wiggle room to negotiate. Granted, there were only about a dozen and a half men assigned as permanent in the High Risk rotation, and only one prisoner to boot, but it was still three days of twelve hour shifts. The Captain was the only thing stopping the rest of the section from forcing Torin to work the night shift as well. Lucky bastards only had to walk the halls for two hours each and had the rest of the three days off.

So there he was, just two hours into his first shift of the three. Making endless loops of a quiet hall to guard a single prisoner. All alone. And already becoming bored out of his mind.

The youth slowed as he approached the elf’s door, a thought occurring to him that refocused his wayward mind.

The General had spent the night interrogating her again, dumping the woman in her cell a mere hour before he departed and Torin began his rounds. As always, she was unconscious, unresponsive to the world around her. Which opened

Torin stopped at the door, fiddling with the keys on his belt.

His anxiety and his curiosity were waging war in his mind. He had only ever seen the woman at a distance or through the barred window into her darkened cell. Sure, Himel had said she was an elf, and some of the other guards said she was too, but it wouldn’t be the first time they had lied about a prisoner to haze him. Hell, the first couple weeks he was on duty they had convinced him that there was a serial killer that frequently escaped in one of the cells that was boarded up. It took a month before the Captain told him it was simply boarded because there was a crack in the wall that no one wanted to fix. Just saying the woman was an elf had to be confirmed with his own eyes before he would believe it.

Torin’s hands twitched. Curiosity won.

The cell door glided inward, light from the corridor spilling across the concrete floor. Torin took one last look around to double check that the hall was clear before he cautiously stepped into the darkened room.

The first thing he noticed was that the woman was sprawled not far from the back wall, one arm folded awkwardly under her body. It looked as if the General had literally thrown her into the cell.

Torin waited, feeling tingles of unease fizzle in his ribs as he watched the prisoner. He was sure she would be unconscious, but now that he was inside with her, his exit blocked until he could fumble his keys out and get them in the lock, a voice in his mind told him to tread carefully. A chained, injured wolf was still a wolf, and all the more likely to lash out in any way possible.

He took another step inside and clicked the light at his shoulder on at the lowest intensity. She didn’t stir, still out cold from the treatment she received earlier.

More sure of his safety now, Torin crept to the woman’s side. His father, before everything happened, had told him stories about elves and Riders. To actually see one in real life was an experience he never even dreamed of. Growing up it seemed that everyone else viewed the Fair Folk as monsters and terrorists that should be exterminated, but to Torin and his sister….

No. Even with the General gone from the base, Torin didn’t dare follow that train of thought.

Torin knelt and, as gently as he could, reached out with two fingers to move aside the wild shock of hair that had loosened from the woman’s braid.

And he froze, heart juddering into the next beat. He didn’t know how– or when –she had moved, but there was no mistaking it as pain radiated up his arm.

A tawny hand was clamped, vicelike, on his wrist. From between fallen strands of dark hair, caught alight by the beam of his torch and blazing with molten malice, a dark emerald eye glowered out at him.

Once, as a young child, Torin had blundered upon a mountain lion. He had emerged from the thick woods not two meters from the creature, and in the split second that he had to realize just what he was witnessing, both lion and boy had locked eyes.

Now, years later, the same mix of surprise and terrified awe he felt in that moment reared its head again.

For a long moment, Torin just stared at the woman. The determination and venom in her glance rooted him in place. Buried deep inside his mind, something told him that staying still was the best course of action. Let her size him up, determine if he was worth the trouble of breaking his arm or not. He did his best to look as nonthreatening as possible beyond the involuntary shaking of his limbs, saucer wide eyes and the frantic pace of his pulse she no doubt could feel at his wrist.

The woman’s grip tightened.

Panic surged into Torin’s throat. While the woman’s strength had been bruising before, now it felt as though the ward’s heavy doors were closing on his arm and slowly crushing his bones. As the force increased, he realized in a state of blind fear that he couldn’t stay silent any longer.

“WAIT! Wait, please I-I’m not here to hurt you!” The youth stumbled on his words, trying desperately to explain himself as he realized what she likely assumed of his intent. “I’m not trying to hurt you, I just want– I wanted to see if– I-I’m not even into women, I just– I’m just on patrol and I wanted to know if you were really–”

He was almost crying now, shaking like mad. When he tried to speak again, tried to tell her that he only wanted to see if she was an elf, if the stories were true, something else tumbled out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry. I don’t even want to be here.”

The deathgrip on his wrist did not loosen. But it did stop the grim increase in pressure.

Torin’s chest shuddered and heaved as the woman pushed herself up onto her elbow, never once taking her smoldering eyes off him. She seemed to be reading him, right down to his core.

Then she shoved him. Hard.

The young man let out a grunt of pain as he landed and slid on his rear two meters back from the elf. And she was an elf. He was certain now, what with the disturbing strength and the pointed tips of her ears that the act of pushing him had revealed. Torin cradled the wrist she had grabbed, trying to make sure nothing was broken before snapping his head up to ensure he wasn’t about to be kicked in the face.

The elf was still glaring at him, but otherwise hadn’t moved.

Torin swallowed. The pain in his forearm and hand was fading from sharp needles of interrupted blood flow to the throbbing ache of deep bruises. Ignoring all common sense and training he had received on the ward about disengaging with aggressive prisoners, he gave the woman a shaky nod of gratitude and a tiny hopeful smile as he gestured with his injured limb. “Th-thanks. It’s not broken.”

The elf let out a soft ‘tch’ of what could have been annoyed anger at her failure to crush his bones or a snarky reminder that if she had wanted it broken then it would be. There was a tightness to her jawline as she gave him one last once over...before stiffly turning onto her opposite side and laying down with her back to him in obvious dismissal.

Torin suppressed a sigh of relief. He made to stand, shifting his weight. The sound of his boot scraping the floor made the woman twitch, drawing his attention again.

That’s when he noticed the black that seeped through the dark grey of the elf’s prison uniform. Her sides gave minute shivers that were only perceptible when she breathed in, as if struggling to hide them. He could just barely see marks on the back of her neck before they disappeared beneath her shirt, dark and splotched with the ragged texture of cracked clay.

Torin’s wary grin faded. He reached for his shoulder light and ticked the intensity up a notch. As he ran its beam down the woman’s back and then over the cell floor, walls and tiny wall mounted bunk, a mass of abject horror crept up his throat.

Everything was splashed with blood.

There were rust colored stains and smeared palm prints streaked across the cinderblocks where the elf had tried to steady herself. Shoulder-shaped swathes edged with passive lines that ended with hardened droplets where she had rested in the corner, leaned against a wall. Long stilled droplets that trailed down the sides of the hard metal bunk and hovered above dusky pools of near black.

The evidence of brutality made Torin’s stomach knot. This was…

He turned back from his survey of the room at the sound of a soft scuff and hiss in the elf’s direction just in time to see her jerk her knees up towards her chest, curling up on reflex. The youth shined his light down towards the pinpointed source of the noise– a wobbling prison issue shoe, haphazardly discarded on its side –and suddenly jerked back, face twisted in sympathetic pain.

In the beam of his torch Torin could see the soles of the woman’s feet had been stripped of anything resembling healthy skin and now revealed spongy white and angry red flesh. Sour bile threatened to overwhelm the back of his throat at the rough char marks scattered among the burns, spotted blisters and shiny exposed dermis encircling the worst of the damage.

Torin felt his body moving back of its own accord, numb to the world as his mind raced in a stream of shock. If this was the extent of the wounds he could see, what did the rest of her injuries look like? The entire back of her issued shirt was blotched and thick with blood, hinting just enough for the boy’s mind to imagine it in sickening detail. Gods above, how was she still moving? How was she still conscious, never mind not endlessly screaming in agony.

He simply couldn’t comprehend it. How could anyone do that to another creature? Inhumane didn’t come remotely close to the word he was looking for, nor did egregious, monstrous or abhorrent. Even sadistic felt a stretch too short. The General was a Shade, that was true, but never had Torin imagined the brutality the man could inflict.

With that thought came a surge of indignation at the elf’s treatment. Not just by the General, but by the other guards. The human guards.

Torin shoved himself to his feet, the usual tingle of trepidation in his hands turned to hot needles of anger as he dug his nails into his palms. How could they stand by like that? How could they just shrug their shoulders each time they brought the elf back to her cell and ignore the state she was in? How could some of them brag about joining in on beating this woman senseless day after day, after the General had already hurt her this badly? Even enemies did not deserve to be treated this way, same race or not! He would confront them, tell them that they were wrong and that what they were letting happen and doing was horrific and they should be disgusted and feel shame to call themselves living creatures to stand by and watch and–

And....

Torin shook, feeling his breathing quickened with rage and the scrunched discomfort of his shoulders hunched up around his ears. The piling of his emotions had hit all wall, a leagues high wall of the reality of the situation that nothing could surpass. It all drained away, the righteous fury and horrified clarity replaced by a welling of hopelessness and emotional exhaustion.

What could he, Torin Aldsson, rookie guard pressed into service to repay the Broddring Empire’s costs of raising him, not yet twenty years old and prone to anxious breakdowns, do? Leave the elf’s cell door open? Start a riot and attempt a heroic rescue with no exit plan or place to go? Get branded a traitor to the Crown, tortured to death and have what was left of his body hung at the base gates as a reminder to any other foolish, idealist boys who came here?

His shoulders slumped, hands falling numb and open at his sides. He couldn’t do anything. He would have to do exactly as the others did. Stand by, silent and unfeeling, and watch as another being was mercilessly tortured for not just the path she had chosen but for what she was as well.

Torin switched his shoulder light down to low again with trembling fingers. That was it then. There was...there was nothing he could do.

He turned back to the door slowly. Every fiber of his being was screaming for him to apologize to the elf for the treatment she was receiving, to do his best to dress her wounds as he learned in his secondary school nursing track and comfort her. To treat her with dignity, respect, compassion, treat her like any other sentient being as his mother and father had taught him to.

The youth swallowed hard. Each step to the door felt like a betrayal to his true self, to the ideals and tenants his family had instilled in him and the only things that he had left of his kin.

And then Torin’s eyes snagged on the tray tucked against the wall by the door.

“...I’m coming up behind you. I’m not going to do anything, I promise.” The elf tensed at Torin’s words, muscles coiling up their remaining strength to lash out. The youth kept well to the side and leaned far over, trusting his sense of balance to keep upright as he tentatively set the tray down. “Figured you wouldn’t be able to get to it over there. Here.”

He slid the tray into place beside the elf with a fingertip and yanked his arm back when she raised her head. She looked down at the tray then back up to Torin’s face, expressionless save for the fire that the boy had seen in her eyes before.

The look he had was nervous, the same unsure posture and uneasy twitching at his hands as when he had entered her cell.

There was something different this time, though. Torin couldn’t see it, but the elf could. Not that she would let on. Silent but satisfied he meant no harm, she lowered her head back down to the floor and resumed staring at the wall, refusing to acknowledge the youth’s presence any further.

The pressure in Torin’s chest eased. That she hadn’t tried to break his finger was all he needed to confirm that he was doing the right thing. He slipped out of the cell and locked the door behind him, a tiny thrill of warmth running through his mind.

Years ago, as a young child, Torin had blundered upon a young mountain lion.

It lay in a clearing deep in the woods, sides thin with starvation and the tawny fur of its leg matted with blood that oozed around the teeth of the hunter’s trap. Its eyes blazed with the icy fire of a defiant spirit contrary to its physical state. The large cat growled low as the boy had approached, but even though claws sliced parallel gouges across his shoulder Torin did not stop. He stayed, and after hours of work at the rusted mechanism and buffeting countless blows with only a discarded plank of wood for protection, the trap opened with a screeching clang.

Arm bloodied, body bruised, and knowing there would be hell to pay that spring for releasing a hunter’s catch, Torin had still smiled wide as could be as the mountain lion sprang to its feet. The creature’s burning eyes as it gave him one last glance before limping away into the gathering darkness were burned into his memory.

Torin was not someone that could stand by and do nothing. Not then, and not now. If he could not spring the elf from her prison, then he would help her in other ways.

The small rebellions had begun.

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eskewcity · 4 years

Text

Cornfield

I listened to Dreamland by Glass Animals on repeat while writing this.

(minor CW for alcoholism and drug addiction)

submitted by @bird-in-tennis-shoes

----------

Statement of Herbert Pope, regarding a visit to his parent’s farm.

I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t know what I’ve become. I don’t know when this will stop. I can only hope that whatever madness controls me will one day have had its fill. One day I will be allowed to sleep. Whenever I even try to comprehend what I’ve seen and done; just the magnitude of it makes me want to shut down. Or throw up. Or lock myself in the house and spread all of my belongings out on the floor so I can see and differentiate every part of the room. I tried to resist it at first, but there’s only so long you can go without sleeping. There’s only so long you can go without the temptation of another human being in your proximity.

I wasn’t always like this. You’ve got to understand I didn’t choose any of this. But before I get into what happened to begin with, I want to make it absolutely clear that I was sober when all of this took place. I don’t want this written off as drunken ramblings or a bad trip. I’m done with that. I’ve got myself a bit of a reputation, I know. But I’ve been sober for three years, and it was a hell of a journey to get that far. I’m not about to have my experience dismissed out of hand because your institute dug up some of the many bad decisions I made when I was younger. I was sober before I visited my parents last summer, I was sober the entire time I was there, and I’ve been sober since.

That’s always been a point of contention between us, actually. I’ve never had the greatest relationship with my parents. They were quite strict growing up, and when I got to uni I just wanted to be free. I guess that’s why I got really into the local party scene my first year there. By the time I was starting my second term, I was already addicted to just about everything I had access to. I even ended up dropping out. Naturally, this wasn’t something my parents were exactly thrilled about, and after a few bad arguments over the phone, I just stopped calling.

I know this isn’t really related. But I just want you to understand how I’ve turned my life around since. After a few months of sleeping on my friend’s couch and going to support groups, I was able to get a job and an apartment. It was several years after that before I felt like I could try to reconnect with my parents. They were happy to hear from me, and especially happy to hear that I had my life together again. I was definitely shocked to hear that they were moving out of the country, to America.

It had always been my mother’s dream to start a farm. We had a small garden when I was a kid, but that was never really enough. They’re both getting up in the years, and had decided that if they were going to do it, they might as well do it before they got too old to do the work of planting and harvesting. They’ve always been do-it-yourself types. I think the hustle and bustle of modern life was getting to them a bit. They’d been doing some research online, even joined a few forum pages to meet people. They’d been planning this for quite some time. Apparently my father has land in Gambier, Ohio that I never knew about. I don’t know all the details, but I think a friend of his, Samuel Fairchild, gave him some property with a farmhouse on it. It was quite a strange situation, from what I can gather. Sam only lived in the house for a few years before just giving it away. I never met the man, but my father once told me that he suspected Sam was in a cult. I don’t hazard a guess as to how they met.

Regardless, it was a nice house in a secluded spot. My father has been paying upkeep costs ever since he got the place, but never did anything with it. Might as well put it to use, I suppose. I made plans to visit them as soon as they got settled and I could take some time off work. When summer rolled around, I made arrangements and booked a flight to Columbus.

The house was about an hour’s drive from the airport, and once I really got out into the countryside, it struck me just how big everything was. Everything’s a lot more compact in the UK. Less space. Here, fields of corn and soybeans stretched out for acres. I would drive for a kilometer and never see a mailbox. Farm houses were tiny pinpricks in the distance. Sometimes barely visible behind a hill. Some farms seemed pristine and well taken care of. Others seemed to be only dilapidated, ramshackle piles of rusted machinery and half burnt out barns. I passed through a town on the way. Well, I say town, but it was little more than a few convenience stores and a post office with peeling paint. The few houses I passed were just as crumbly. Half finished renovations and wrap around porches that looked to be in danger of collapse. Termite eaten posts held up a gazebo roof, like Atlas’ arms folding under the weight of the earth.

The house my parents had moved into was a bit better. It looked homey enough, although the lines of the support beams curved and slanted in strange ways. It looked stable, but almost… impossible. I assumed it was either my imagination or a stylistic choice and didn’t give it another thought. The land surrounding the house was vast and impressive. The only way in and out was a little dirt road leading up to the garage. I noticed the fenced in corn fields and realized that they must have already started planting. In fact, it looked like it was nearly ready to be harvested. I parked in the driveway and went up to knock on the door. It swung inward immediately, and I was met with a massive hug. My mother smelled like cinnamon sugar, just as I remembered her. That evening was fairly uneventful. I told them about what I’d been doing for work, and they told me about the farm and how Sam had left them everything they needed to get started. There was even a chicken coop and a stable in case they ever wanted to get animals. My mother cooked dinner, and before I knew it, it was getting late and my parents were going off to bed. I got settled in the guest bedroom and tried to sleep.

An hour later, and I still couldn’t sleep. I kept tossing and turning. Everything felt sort of… wrong. The moonlight seeping through the curtains gave the place a strange feeling. The room felt different, somehow. Like I was suddenly in a completely different house that was identical to the one I entered last night. I decided I should go take a walk outside. To sort of reset my brain, you know? Maybe I’d be okay if I got some fresh air. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep anytime soon.

Outside, it felt even stranger. I don’t know how, but it didn’t even feel like I was on the same plane of existence anymore. I know for certain I had only stepped off the porch, but when I glanced behind me, the house was now barely visible in the distance. There was no way I had walked that far in an instant. I glanced up at the sky and nearly fell over. It was… bigger somehow. Now, I know the night sky is obviously endless, but it doesn’t usually feel that way. It’s usually more like a thin blanket of black, stretched over the world. The stars are just moth holes and missing threads. It didn’t look like that now. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was like a gaping hole in the fabric had opened over me, and when I looked up, I could see every atom of the infinite universe at once. Like I had put on 3D goggles, and suddenly the pictures on the movie screen popped out and moved around me. The moon suddenly seemed so close in comparison to the stars. Like it was in danger of smashing into the earth.

It was… unsettling to say the least. My head was spinning, and I felt unstable on my feet. The sheer mass of the space around me loomed, like it was threatening to consume me. I had somehow ended up in the middle of the cornfield, the house nowhere to be seen. The world swayed, catching me up in whatever it was. I felt huge and tiny at the same time, the air around me threatening to crush inward, my foot poised, threatening to crush it first.

And then it stopped. Whatever force was manipulating my perceptions was gone. The ground felt sturdy again, and my head was suddenly clearer. It was dead quiet. The moon was still close, illuminating every inch of the surrounding field. I could see infinitely in every direction, and there was nothing but corn. Even the curvature of the earth seemed to have gone; millions of kilometers rolled flat to form this endless plane I had found myself in. When I looked up, I noticed the stars had disappeared as well. The entire universe stretched out before me and there was nothing in it.

The only movement was my own feet as I began to walk. The sound of crunching dirt reverberated through every corner of the cosmos. I must have walked for hours, but nothing changed. It was just corn, corn, dirt, corn, empty black sky, and that awful, bulbous moon. My hands felt… wrong. My entire body felt wrong. I was big enough to hold all of existence in the palm of my hand and still have enough room left over for another universe. But the second I concentrated on any one thing, the feeling slipped away like sand through my fingers, and I felt tiny enough to be crushed by the molecules of air around me. Like I was shrinking forever. Like all of this empty world was expanding around me and I was in the exact center, the edges pressing in on me as it got bigger.

I started running. My feet snapping corn stalks in half, Punching them with my fists as I went. I grabbed a handful of leaves and pulled, ripping several out by the roots and dragging them. Causing as much destruction as I could. If this world was going to go on forever and never change, then by god I was going to change it myself. I ran as far as I could, leaving a path of destruction behind me. I ran until I got so tired that I nearly fell over, but nothing changed. It was still the same corn, the same moon. The whole world was just an endless sheet of repeating wallpaper. I ripped holes in the ground like a crazed gopher until my fingers were raw. Eventually, I sat down among the debris and started crying. I’m not ashamed to admit it; I was hopeless and trapped. There was nothing I could do, because there wasn’t anything at all.

I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I awoke to sunlight and the distant sound of my parents calling my name. I was still in the field, but not a single one of the corn stalks around me had been knocked down. My limbs were wound around the plants like string, not disturbing any. I knocked down a few trying to get up, but I was still too disoriented to care.

I took the first flight I could back to London. My parents were disappointed and understandably quite worried about me, but there was no way I was going to stay there another day. I’ve become a more cautious person as I’ve gotten older, and I was not going to take any chances with… whatever that was. Still, after a few weeks I had written it off as an especially strange dream. I had taken a walk at night and fallen asleep suddenly. That was it. It’s funny how our brains rationalize these things.

As I found out soon, that really wasn’t it. Because I had that dream again. And again. And again. First, it was only a few times a month. Then once a week. Then I began waking up every night in a cold sweat after running in that endless cornfield for eight hours straight. I was terrified to go to sleep, knowing exactly where I’d end up. Every night I would count and categorize everything I could see. My hat on the chair in the corner of the room; my coat hanging up on the wall. I could see the edges where the rug began and ended. The room was not endless. The room had walls and a ceiling. But as soon as I let my guard drop just a bit, or my vision blur slightly with fatigue, everything stretched and distorted and changed, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it. I would suddenly be standing, running, the world silent and impossibly large. I couldn’t rest, because every hour I spent sleeping was an hour I spent awake somewhere else.

I fell asleep at work nearly every day. And even then, I was not free. That damn cornfield, with its horrific sky and endless wasteland of leering barbed javelins haunted me. I was so tired I thought I would die. I started hallucinating while I was awake. Every time my eyes closed I was there, the looming sky and bloated moon mocking me as I ran. I stopped going in to work. I was too tired even to write an email to my boss. The only energy I ever had was when I was running. My friends must have been worried about me, but I didn’t have the energy to talk to any of them. How could I explain what was happening?

Everything reached a crescendo about a week into this, while I was walking to the corner store. I was holed up in my house, tormented by visions of an infinite hellscape, but I still needed to eat. The ground felt more uneven than usual, most likely due to fatigue, but I felt constantly on the verge of tripping. I concentrated hard on the ground in front of me. It was difficult to keep from falling into the cornfield. Part of me was always there, waiting, constantly running.

My concentration slipped for only a second, and I went sprawling directly into the stranger walking in front of me. He shouted at me, but I was already asleep before I hit the ground. In that single lapse I had slipped into the hungry other world. I was vaguely aware of the events happening around me, but I was somewhere else, running. I… Something happened then, when the man bent down to wake me.

I don’t know what I did. I reached out somehow, manipulated the air around me. Manipulated the hungry other world and directed its endless appetite towards this man. I’m not sure. There’s really no possible way to describe what I did. Whatever explanation I can give won’t do the action justice. There’s no excusing it either. I did it because it felt right. I can’t even muster the consciousness to regret it. That man is gone now. Or, not gone, somewhere else. Running. The cornfield was satiated for a while after that. I was rested. I was allowed to sleep.

I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t even know what I am. That man was only the first of many. It’s the only way I can rest. It’s the only way the cornfield will leave me alone, at least for a little while. I always make sure it’s someone I don’t know, not that it matters to the cornfield. They’re all just souls for it to hold as they run about like rats in a never ending maze. They’re all in there together, but they will never meet. There is an infinity between every molecule of dirt in that place. Maybe someday everyone will be in that cornfield. I wonder if it would finally let me have peace then.

#THIS FUCKS AHHH i read this twice it was so good #the last paragraph especially was so good ahhh ty you for sending this 💖💖#also i hope it’s okay i added your name at the top to make sure you get credit!#submission

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cherryrogers · 4 years

Text

Falling For You.

— Chapter 12

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Fem!Reader

(Modern High School AU)

Warnings: lowkey angst?? mostly fluff.

Synopsis: Unlike most teenagers, you had your life completely mapped out. You’d graduate high school, go off to the university of your dreams, and live the life that your parents always wanted you to. That was always the plan. Falling for Bucky Barnes, however, was never part of the plan.

A/N: it’s been a month since i’ve updated this omf, i’m sorry i’m the slowest writer ever🤧 we are gradually coming to an end w this fic guys,,, i think there’ll be maybe 3 or 4 more and their story will more or less be complete :) thank you to everyone that has been reading this fic so far!!💓

Series Masterlist

It wasn’t long before the university application deadline came around. When you were younger, you’d pictured yourself applying in junior year and having a complete map out of which college you’d go to, what you’d major in, all the extra-curricular you’d take part in - you were sure that you were ready for college. Completely sure.

But since then, things had changed drastically.

Your ‘no dating until college graduation’ rule had gone straight out of the window, your parents were planning to disown you if you didn’t follow the life plan they made for you, and while you wanted to remain in New York and let your parents cut you off if that’s really what they wanted, you just weren’t sure that you’d be okay if they did.

Because they were your parents. Maybe they had it all wrong, and maybe they were being completely unreasonable. But they weren’t doing it to be mean or spiteful; they wanted you to succeed. They didn’t want to see you fail, failing was never going to be an option for you in their eyes.

You felt terrible, in all honesty. You felt terrible when your mother hung up on you and you let yourself cry it out as soon as you got home. You felt terrible for telling Bucky that everything was fine with your parents, not wanting to tell him the truth because you could barely accept it yourself.

And you felt terrible when you sent your application off on the day of the application deadline to not only Colombia, but Harvard too.

Three days later and it was still consuming your every thought. You had a while before you found out if you were even accepted, but there was still a chance that you could possibly be leaving to be a student at Harvard in the upcoming month of September. A chance that you could be leaving your friends, Brooklyn, Bucky.

He needed to know that you were considering it, he deserved at least that. Perhaps he’d hate you for it, for giving in to your parents’ desires of having you live a life you didn’t necessarily want to live.

Soon, you’d tell him soon. Not when you were in the school cafeteria, watching as the boy paced over to your table where you were sat with Wanda, a slight bounce in his step. Well, at least someone was having a good day.

It wasn’t often you even saw Bucky during lunch; he usually hung around the bleachers outside with Steve and Sam, eating a Snickers bar with a bottle of Pepsi and calling it an adequate meal.

Wanda was too occupied with her phone to notice Bucky striding over the table, but didn’t miss how close the boy sat next to you.

“Hey, Buck. What-”

Before you could even ask why he wasn’t with his usual group of friends, he’d already opened his backpack and pulled out a sheet of paper, placing it in front of you on the table.

You crinkled your brows for a moment, skimming your eyes over the paper, noticing that it was the chemistry test you’d taken before Christmas. Bucky hadn’t passed it originally, so Mr. Pym had offered him to retake it once the new term started.

At the top of the page, C+ was scribbled in red pen.

“I passed a chemistry test!” Bucky stated proudly. “A C fucking plus, sweets. I didn’t think it was even possible.”

His joy was infectious; you couldn’t help your own smile forming on your lips. “Of course it was possible, you don’t give yourself enough credit, Bucky. Plus, you had a pretty awesome tutor.”

“Hm, I guess I did.” He smirked, leaning over to press a gentle kiss to your cheek.

“Oh... my god.” Wanda almost choked, eyes darting between you and Bucky. “Did I just- did you just- you guys are-”

You ignored the heat rushing to your cheeks as you turned to your friend. “Yes, Wanda, we’re... together.”

Her blue eyes wide, she remained speechless for a second or two, While she was your best friend, you had been hesitant to let her know about your new relationship with Bucky, considering Pietro still hadn’t spoken to you since New Years.

However, a weight suddenly lifted from your shoulders as a warm grin spread across her lips. “I just... I can’t believe it finally happened. Obviously, it was bound to happen eventually, but at the rate you two were going, I thought it would be when you were grey and old...”

You scoffed, though you couldn’t exactly tell her she was being ridiculous, because if you had a dollar for every time you told Wanda that you and Bucky were never going to happen... well, you could probably buy the house back before you parents sold it off in the summer.

And now that issue was back in your head. Not to be dramatic, but it would be really fucking nice if the universe could let you catch a break, just for a moment. First, it was your parents, then it was your feelings for Bucky, then it was school, and your current problem involved all damn three of them.

“This can’t become a regular thing, by the way.” The girl pointed at the two of you sitting opposite her. “Vis is using lunch hours to tutor some kids in his classes, and I can’t look like a third wheel every day.”

“Wanda, I’ve been third-wheeling you and Vis for the past two years.” You chuckled, pushing college out of your mind for the time being.

“Well, where’s Pietro? He usually...” Her words trailed off as she realized a little too late what she was saying.

You shook your head, however, plastering a tight smile on your lips. “He still won’t talk to me.”

“He will, I know he will.” Wanda gave you a sympathetic smile, before flicking her eyes over to Bucky hesitantly. “I don’t know how he’ll feel about you two, though.”

Speaking of...

Your eyes were drawn to a figure standing not so far from your lunch table, signature white hoodie fitting his muscular form snugly, hands clasping the straps of his bag tight enough to make his knuckles go white. Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Pietro Maximoff clearly wasn’t listening to a word Clint was uttering to him as his bright eyes trained on you, and Bucky’s arm which had snaked around your waist. He didn’t miss how the boy’s eyes gleamed when he looked at you, how his side was pressed right against yours, how you leaned into him so comfortably. Nobody had to tell him that you and Bucky were no longer just friends; it was pretty obvious to him.

When you caught his gaze for only a short moment, he snatched it away, motioning for Clint to follow him out of the lunch hall.

Both Wanda and Bucky followed your eyes to Pietro, feeling the guilt practically seeping from your skin.

“Well,” You sighed, mouth curling into a small frown. “I guess we do now.”

You hated feeling like this. Like you were causing problems left and right. Pietro was mad at you still, your parents were mad, Bucky would probably be mad once you told him about applying to Harvard; all you wanted to do was the right thing and make everyone else happy, yet every choice you could make regarding your future would end in someone being upset at you.

That was exactly what you were afraid of. That’s why you ignored your feelings for Bucky for so long, because you knew you’d inevitably hurt him. It was the last thing you wanted to do; you don’t think you’d ever forgive yourself for being the cause of a deep frown on his lips. But everything was just so confusing, and it was happening so fast that you didn’t have time to simply breathe.

Wanda must’ve noticed you getting lost in your head, as she gently knocked her foot against yours under the table and called your name to bring you back to reality. “Please don’t worry about my brother. He’ll talk to you when he’s ready, I promise.”

You forced a smile, wishing that you hadn’t had several other things on your plate to deal with as well as amending your friendship with Pietro. Wasn’t senior year supposed to be the year? Maybe watching too many corny high school movies when you were younger shaped your perception of senior year a lot different to how it was in reality, but it was your final year of high school. Wasn’t it supposed to be a year you’d cherish in the future?

In some ways, it was. It was the year you fought the urge to push Bucky away and let yourself give into him. He became more than just your best friend and you couldn’t be happier with that. But now, it seemed like that moment was the peak of the mountain, and everything else was just going down from there.

* * *

Winifred Barnes was practically the mother you never had.

The sweet scent of rich chocolate filled your nose as soon as you stepped through the front door of the Barnes residence. His house was considerably smaller than yours, but the homely, warm feeling of the place alone proved it to be more valuable than the house you lived in alone would ever be. It was a true family home, built for a loving family like the Barnes’ - one you couldn’t help but envy.

The small number of times you’d met her, she’d never failed to make you feel at home. A pastel blue apron always wrapped around her frame, in the midst of baking something that was bound to be delicious. Nothing like your own mother, and it was frankly mad to you that parents could be so... caring. When you first met the woman and she enveloped you into a tight hug, it almost brought tears to your eyes. As sad as it was, you couldn’t remember the last time your parents even touched you.

You didn’t often go to Bucky’s house. The two of you almost always hung out at yours since there almost never anyone home. Well, except for the one unfortunate time he encountered your mother - you tried to keep that memory as far back in your mind as possible.

Stepping into the cozy kitchen, you couldn’t help but smile as you saw Winifred stood at the counter, brows crinkled, tongue caught between her teeth as she carefully applied white icing to the freshly baked chocolate cake in front of her. Bucky could tell at school that you’d been thrown off by your conversation Wanda at lunch. Whether you were only upset about Pietro or if there was something else going on, the boy knew that his mother had a way of drawing a smile out of anyone. So when he invited you to go round to his after school, you couldn’t help but feel a little excited.

As soon as her kind eyes fell on you, the woman abandoned her cake, pacing straight past her own son and coming to throw her arms around you, nearly knocking you off your feet. “(Y/N), darlin’, it’s been too long!”

Her slim hands placed themselves gently on the sides of your face. “Oh my, you just keep gettin’ more beautiful with each time I see you.”

Your face grew hot, and you resisted the urge to roll your eyes, hearing Bucky chuckling as he kicked off his shoes at the front door. “It’s good to see you too, Mrs. Barnes.”

She waved you off, finally letting you go as she turned to tend to her cake again. “Always so formal, one of these days you’ll just call me Winnie.”

Letting out a laugh, you sat down on a wooden stool at the counter opposite her. “So, how are you, honey? How’re your parents?”

Winifred knew your parents were barely ever around, though she wasn’t aware of everything that’d happened recently. You internally thanked Bucky for keeping it to himself, because if his mother found out, she’d probably never let you go back home again. She worried about you as if you were her own, and if your own mother wasn’t going to do that for you, at least Bucky’s could.

“We’re doing okay.” You answered vaguely, considering neither you or your parents were remotely okay. “How about you? How’re you and Mr. Barnes?”

She tutted at the formality, still working on the last bit of icing on the cake. “We’re good; George can’t wait for our boy to finally get outta school. When James can work full-time at the shop, it’ll really help him out.”

You nodded fondly, thinking about Bucky working properly at the auto-shop. Working in an undershirt and his classic black jeans, sweat glistening above his brow, jaw locked as he narrowed his eyes in concentration... his mother was right in front of you, stop.

“And you,” She pointed towards you, icing bag in hand. “I’m assuming you’re off to college after graduation? James says you’re super smart, always have been.”

It’s like the universe was taunting you, having someone bring up the topic of college at every opportunity. However, before you could begin to struggle to come up with an answer, Bucky came striding back into the kitchen, eyes set on the now-competed cake.

His mother was quick to shoot him a warning look. “Don’t even think about it, son. You can have a slice after dinner.”

“But Ma,” He groaned, plopping down on the seat next to you. Suddenly, his eyes lit up. “You know, I got a C plus on my chemistry test. Doesn’t that deserve a slice now?”

“He did work really hard for it, Mrs. Barnes.” You nudged the boy’s elbow with yours.

Winifred looked between her son’s pleading expression and your hopeful grin and eventually sighed. “One slice, alright? And cut your girl a slice too, James.”

The dark-haired woman turned around, beginning to put away the ingredients scattering the counters, before excusing herself to get some washing up liquid from the closet in the hall. You looked up at Bucky, who was busy cutting two slices out of the chocolate sponge.

“Did you tell her that I’m your girl?” You asked quietly, pretending that words didn’t erupt butterflies in your stomach.

Bucky smirked as he handed you a dessert fork, along with a small china plate with a piece of cake on it. “Honestly, I think she thinks we’ve been dating this whole time.”

You paused your movements, the cake on the edge of your fork just hitting your lips. “And you didn’t think to tell her that we weren’t?”

“I tried to, I swear. She was convinced I was lying, though.” He spoke amusedly. “The first time you came over, she said ‘James, you’ve got yourself a real lovely girl’, then I told her we were only friends, and she laughed in my face.”

Well, that was understandable, since anyone you’d ever told that you and Bucky were just friends had the exact same reaction.

Slowly, his expression fell, an unsure look in his blue eyes. “Uh, do your... do your parents know about us?”

The mention of your parents made your eyes snap up to his. It was a reasonable question. Though your relationship with your parents was... rocky at the moment, shouldn’t they know that you’d gotten into your first relationship? There was a part of you that wanted them to know, because they were your parents, for crying out loud, you should’ve been able to tell them things like that. However, you were already on thin ice with them over your future, and if they knew you were balancing a relationship along with college? They’d have your head on a stick for certain.

Shaking your head, you poked at your slice of cake with your fork. “I don’t know how they’d react, Buck. In an ideal world, they’d want to get to know you and... and they’d treat you the way that your parents treat me.”

“But they won’t?” Bucky shot you a sad smile.

“They’d sooner come back to Brooklyn and lock my ass in my room until I turn thirty.” You let out a laugh, though there wasn’t much humour in your voice.

Bucky didn’t laugh, however. He’d always known your parents were... the way that they were. Strict, stubborn, even selfish. But he felt terrible, because it hadn’t truly occurred to him until now how distant they actually were. The boy talked to his parents every day. When he got home from school, his mother already had dinner in the oven, and was asking about his day as she laid out the dinner table to eat along with his father, as a family. Bucky was sure there wasn’t a day when you didn’t come up in a conversation with his mom, and she didn’t mind in the slightest when he’d fondly ramble about how smart you were or how you’d ridden on his bike with him again despite claiming to hate it so much.

But here you were, nervous to even consider telling your own parents about him because you’re certain that they won’t support you. It hurt Bucky to even think about his parents being that way, and it possibly hurt him more that it was your reality.

It wasn’t hard to notice the sympathy washing over his features, so you sighed and grabbed one of his hands. “Please don’t feel bad, Buck. It’s just how they are, and I’ve gotten pretty used to it.”

“You deserve more, though.”

The words made your heart stop momentarily. “You think?”

Bucky smiled softly, playing with your hand that was in his grasp. “Sweets, you’re like... the best fuckin’ person I’ve ever known. You deserve, well, the best.”

Though the boy didn’t necessarily have a way with words, you couldn’t help but try to bite back wide grin. You’d never known any other way of how parents should be growing up, only the way that your parents acted. If the universe thought you deserved better, then you thought it’d make your parents nicer, less bitter. But maybe instead of changing your parents, the universe gave you Bucky.

Without a second thought, you leaned forward and pressed your lips to his, intertwining his and your fingers together. Bucky reacted immediately, kissing you back with slight immediacy, and the same sense of warmth washed over you as it did every time he kissed you. Suddenly, the fact you were sat in his mother’s kitchen was forgotten, as he ran his tongue along your bottom lip-

“Goodness, I’m gone for less than five minutes and you’re already lockin’ lips.” Winifred shook her head in fake disappointment, causing the two of you to pull back, Bucky’s cheeks flushing instantly.

“Sorry, Ma.” He apologized sheepishly, giving your hand a squeeze as you chuckled lightly.

His mother didn’t need an apology, however. Her son being happy was something she’d never want an apology for.

Winifred had seen it initially over two years ago, when Bucky introduced her to his first ever girlfriend, Natasha. She’d liked the redhead, though, was it even possible for anyone to not like her? Natasha was gorgeous, obviously. Clever, outgoing, could make anyone laugh within minutes of her meeting them. Bucky was clearly happy with her after first getting into the relationship, and for a while, Winifred thought that she was it for her son. That was until she’d be downstairs in the living room, and the woman could hear Bucky on the phone, arguing with the girl over who knows what. Natasha began coming over less and less, and when his mother would ask him about it, Bucky would only shrug and head up to his room for the night.

When it came to them breaking up, Winifred worries for Bucky. While she was glad he’d gotten out of what was becoming an unhealthy relationship, she wasn’t blind to the toll it’d taken on him. Natasha was his first girlfriend, perhaps even his first love - the break up was going to hit him hard, which it did, and she was concerned that he’d shut himself off to anything in the future because of what happened with her.

She wasn’t going to compare you to Natasha; you were both wonderful in your own ways, and she still cared for the girl entirely despite her son being heartbroken for a little while. But after meeting you and observing how you interacted with Bucky, she just knew that you’d be sticking with him for the long run. There was no way that you could make him smile so adoringly and genuinely and not want to make him that happy for maybe the rest of your life.

Once you’d finished your cake, you thanked Winifred and offered to do the rest of the washing up in return, but judging by the longing in her son’s eyes for you two to have some alone time, the woman dismissed your offer, shaking her head as Bucky clasped your hand and began tugging you up to his bedroom.

“No funny business, you two! You hear me?” She called from the kitchen, causing Bucky to reply with a ‘course not, Ma’ and an eye roll.

Bucky’s bedroom was rather different to yours. For one, he didn’t have revision covering every inch of his walls. But it was also a lot neater, more organized. Not like a stereotypical teenage boy’ room at all. It brought you a sense of calmness in a way. When there are too many things going on at once, everything just gets foggy. The simplicity of his cream painted walls and dark brown furniture caused your lips to curl up slightly.

What caught your eye though, was the corkboard placed on the wall above his set of drawers. While it wasn’t that big, it managed to fit a pretty large collection of messily pinned photos. Some of them were recent; one of him and Natasha all dressed up before heading of to the Winter Formal, one of Sam and him wearing thick black sunglasses, posing dramatically on his then-new motorcycle, even one of him photobombing what was meant to be a cute couples photo of Steve and Peggy.

And when your eyes raked over the photographs from the summer before the start of senior year, you felt your heart clench, because the majority of them included you.

You and Bucky in the photo booth before going on every single ride at Coney Island. You and Bucky attempting to replicate one Winifred’s specialty muffin recipes in your kitchen, though failing miserably. You and Sam posing outside of the Empire Hotel when you spent the day roaming Manhattan, laughing at Bucky taking the picture as he couldn’t understand why the hotel was so important, which lead to Sam claiming that Bucky was uncultured for never watching an episode of Gossip Girl in his life.

Come to think of it, he shared an eerily strong resemblance with Carter Baizen, who you admittedly did have a bit of a crush on.

Your eyes lingered on one photo in particular, however. This one wasn’t from the summer, but from the night of your junior prom. The set up of the school gym was similar to that of the Winter Formal, but with warmer tones of lighting and decor. Wanda had yet again came through and applied your makeup to perfection, gold glitter shimmering in the light on your eyelids, contrasting to your dark lashes. Highlight glimmering on your cheekbones, your skin looking almost airbrushed. The makeup coordinated with your dress, a long, golden gown that accentuated your figure beautifully.

In the photograph, you’re looking straight ahead at the camera, smiling as if you’d never been happier. And Bucky, as cheesy as it was, only had his eyes on you. You remember the photo being taken, you remembered getting goosebumps as Bucky’s arm wrapped around your waist. But you’d never seen it, not until now.

“That’s my favourite one.” The boy suddenly spoke, eyeing the photo you’d been staring at. “Other than the one of Steve at Coney Island just before he threw up, obviously.”

“Right, obviously,” You responded, a soft smile gracing your lips. “I didn’t realize that you were looking at me, you know, when that photo was taken.”

Bucky laughed lightly, cheeks tinting pink. “I mean, I was lookin’ at you the whole night. How could I not when you looked so... wow.”

It was still a weird thought to you, that after all of this time, Bucky still had feelings for you. You thought they were long gone, fading after you stupidly rejected him last year.

He could tell something was on your mind. “What is it, sweets?”

Your eyes flickered up to his. “Just... thank you.”

“Uh, you’re welcome? For what exactly?” Bucky furrowed his brows, making you chuckle.

“For, I don’t know... staying with me. You still wanted to be my friend last year, and you still want to be with me now. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you have a bit of a crush on me.”

Scoffing, the boy elbowed your arm gently. “Christ, I thought we were havin’ a moment there.”

“Sorry, couldn’t resist.” You shrugged, smirking as you slowly wrapped your arms around his middle, your sight falling back to the prom photo that made you heart melt. “Seriously though, I...” Love you. “I’m glad I have you.”

You hoped he couldn’t feel your heart pounding against your ribs as he ran a hand through your hair, pressing a lingering kiss to the crown of your head. “Good, cause I think you’re gonna be stuck with me for a while.”

Though his tone was laced with humour, you still exhaled contently, speaking quietly against his chest. “That’s alright, Buck. More than alright.”

You wondered if he’d still be saying that if he knew you’d applied to Harvard, if he knew there was a chance of you willingly leaving him next year. He needed to know, he deserved that honesty from you. But... you loved him. You loved him and that was stopping you from telling the truth, because you didn’t want to be the one to hurt him.

Your mind was taken back to when you met Bucky at Carter’s. When he admitted his feelings for you, when you denied yours for him.

“We’re both just gonna get hurt in the end, and I care about you too much to do that to you.”

That was the reason you gave for not wanting to be with him, yet here you were, arms around his waist and your head against his chest because you could do that now; because you were with him. But maybe you should’ve listened to yourself back then, because looking forward, you couldn’t picture an ending to your final year of high school where everything was going to work out.

Perhaps it was selfish to let him get so close to you. You’d grown up with parents hadn’t ever uttered the word love around you, with ‘friends’ in middle school that didn’t know you well enough to say it in a friendly way. Wanda has said it to you a number of times, but the way she said it to Vis was different, unmatched. How could you claim to love Bucky when you didn’t even know what love was? What if you didn’t know how to love someone?

By loving him, you were only hurting him. He’d had his heart broken before, how could you possibly let him go through that a second time? If you left Brooklyn, you’d be breaking his heart all over again. If you stayed, the burden of your parent's disappointment would be weighing too heavy on your shoulders to even try to love him how he deserved.

You were right, and you wished you known it then how right you were; the two of you were only going to get hurt in the end. Maybe now, your only choice now was to enjoy what you had while it lasted.

* * *

Taglist:

@americas-ass-assins @itz-kira @broco8 @bxrnsfeyson @peterparkerbabyyy @stevieboyharrington @lovvliies @irespostthingsiwanttoseelater

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #bucky x you #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes au #bucky

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oosteven-universe · 4 years

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Ghosts #101

Ghosts number #101 DC Comics 1981 Written by Paul Kupperberg Illustrated by Howard Bender and Rodan Rodriguez Coloured by Jerry Serpe Lettered by John Costanza Back-Up Feature Written by George Kashdan Illustrated by Ken Landgraf & Vince Colleta Coloured by Rachelson Lettered by Shelly Leferrman I loved this series! DC had been largest line of horror comics on stands back in the day. It’s a shame that we don’t have or see this kind of Storytelling any longer because one of the things these books made you do aside from getting chills being a little creeped out and the occasional gasp is that it actually made you think. You thought you were engaged you figured scenarios you tried to come up with you no answers there was so much more to genre then just trying to scare someone. I think as a modern society horror has taken on a new Direction where people see Gore as horror and it’s not really horror it’s just body parts. I really do believe that we need to go back to storytelling that engages the reader’s mind makes them think puts them in in an uncomfortable position maybe as a voyeur or the victim but one that makes them unable to look away knowing something frightening could be about to happen. Doctor 13 was a character that was created long before his time. Today he’d have his own TV show just like the ghost hunters where he tries to debunk evidence claims and everything else of the Paranormal. Doctor 13 with definitely one of the most underrated characters to have ever been created in comics. Now we see his kind of people we see his stereotype in life people plastered all over television and he was doing this way back when so you know in the sixties seventies when he was in his highest popularity so I think a lot of people need to give him his due. The way this is written it’s phenomenal I love that this issue has to complete stories in it each one wheat we follow the plot and story development through how the sequence of events unfold through how the characters learn information and by extension reader. We got to see genius at work and they find those Clues and those things that we as a reader mess and then wonder how we missed it. The character development is utterly amazing and the more we see the more we learn how they is adversity or the circumstances and situations they find themselves in really help Define who they are. And then of course the pacing the pacing is essential because what it does it keeps the story moving smoothly. Be short stories which I would never have thought you could complete in that amount of space seem to be done in a way that feels natural. The interior artwork here blows my mind. The line work and the way we see so many different techniques and varying wait inside Line work really helped to bring out and showcase this gorgeous attention to detail. You don’t realize how much we’ve lost over the years of people of tried to streamline what they do because the base is the facial expressions and all the line that we see that makeup you know musculature and body structure we take for granted these days and hear the way we see it this is a masterclass illustration and real life illustration not photographic reality but this is pretty damn close to realism. The utilization of the page layout and how we see the Angles and perspective in the panel show a masterful I for storytelling. I am a huge fan of the way backgrounds are utilized here and how they work within the composition of the panel’s bringing us this Rich depth perception expensive scale and that overall sense of size and scope of the story at hand. Then there’s the color work to consider I mean they might not have had the same palette of colors that we have today but what they did do with what they had and the tricks that they used make this as vibrant colorful and interesting as you can possibly imagine. The Interiors are so Dynamic so beautiful that it’s no wonder as a medium Comics started a love Affair with so many people. I want this back I want a line a Comics you know whether it be ghosts the witching hour or House of mystery where the attention is upon the story the story that gives us in a palpable tension in our shoulders or on the putting us on the verge of jumping. We need storytelling that seeps into the soul that isn’t sensationalized but is actually authored by a writer. I miss stories that feel like they sent her around the everyman regardless if he’s a cult Specialist or not we need stories that engage the mind and make us feel like any of this could happen to us at any given moment not to mention scare the bejesus out of us as well. I miss these days and I really hope that somehow, we can get them back we have the talent we have the skill we have the outlet we can rebuild it we can make it better stronger than it was before.

#Comic Books #comics reviews #DC comics

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lobselvith8 · 4 years

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The Outer Worlds OC Questionnaire: Javier Ramirez (Supernova)

I decided to answer The Outer Worlds questionnaire that I read here. It’s a bit lengthy, but it gave me the opportunity to put pen to paper about the character I created for TOW.

Also, to clarify a misunderstanding going around: flaws are not automatically assigned to you in Supernova. You have a choice as to whether or not you’ll accept an offered flaw like you do in the other difficulties.

👨‍🚀 - What colors/songs/words do you associate with your character?

Colors: Yellow (due to the color of Javier’s eyes, an aesthetic choice based on Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles).

Words: Latino. Aquarius. Mars. Science. Freedom.

Songs:

Sounds From Another Planet by Japanese Breakfast. 🎶

youtube

Nobody by Mitski. 🎶

youtube

Animus Vox by The Glitch Mob. 🎶

youtube

💼 - Were they ever affiliated with any of the corporations prior to coming on the HOPE? If so, how did their opinion of them change once coming to Halcyon?

Ramirez had experience with the Corporations before, but not specifically with Halcyon until the mission with the Hope. He did not have a positive view of the Corporations before becoming one of the Colonists on the Hope, and that view didn’t improve after landing on Terra II.

🌎 - How was their life on Earth like? Who did they leave behind? Are there any aspects of their old life that they miss?

Javier was not born on Earth; he was born on Mars and he grew up there.

Like the Martians of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Ramirez has distinctive yellow eyes. A number of minute things that he took for granted separate him from the Earth-born Colonists of the Hope. Two moons, Phobos and Deimos, were a natural sight for Ramirez, while the singular, unnamed moon of Earth seemed peculiar.

Javier cared about Mars, but he felt it was in a subservient position to Earth, one which seemed impossible for him to change. There was no modern Agüeybaná II or Ramón Emeterio Betances for him to rally towards.

🚀 - Why did they sign up to be a colonist on the HOPE? Did they know anyone aboard the ship?

Ramirez wanted a fresh start for himself, and he saw this as the best choice out of limited options that he could pursue. Ramirez would have preferred to be an explorer like his Taino ancestors from Puerto Rico, but he was instead in a precarious position where he was under the thumb of Halcyon.

There were no friends of his among the Colonists of the Hope.

🌟 - What are their highest attributes & skills? Aptitude? Did these attributes influence Phineas’ decision in entrusting them to save the colony?

Javier has very high intelligence; Phineas pondered that if he had Ramirez’s brain 30 years ago, Halcyon might not be in the mess that it’s in now.

Phineas noted Ramirez’s high perception, something that was gifted to the Colonist through the advances of modern science correcting his near-sighted vision; he observed that Ramirez’s sharp eyes seemed sharper than a pteroray.

Javier had moderate charisma. He had grown up as a shy and introverted child, and slowly came into his own as he found his place in the field of science, which gave him a confidence that he lacked in his younger years.

However, Phineas hoped that Ramirez was good with a gun due to his lack of muscular athleticism.

Upon Phineas making his decision, he noted Javier’s file read that he was adept with mag-locks, and he had been a Level A Scientist Assistant, a rather lowly position. Phineas also recognized Javier as a fellow tinkerer.

👽 - Do they have any phobias? What are they?

Flaws? At the moment (with the Captain having recently landed on Monarch after receiving two keys for the moon), he has Plasma Weakness (which one could construe as an issue that resulted from his physical weakness) and he is Far Sighted (which means he is not adept with melee weapons).

⚖️ - Do they believe they’re doing the right thing? How often do their morals conflict with the tasks they’re given?

Ramirez initially contemplated leaving Halcyon until Phineas pointed out that there were no systems in the vicinity that he could make it to given the finite flight capabilities of the Unreliable, so he has been unwittingly thrown into a situation between a fellow scientist and The Board.

Javier’s views certainly dictated how he handled the crisis of the Vale, and he found the initial anti-corporate speech by Graham appealing (when the Unreliable reached the atmosphere). It’s what he wanted for Mars - autonomy from the corporations that seem to have seeped into every aspect of societal life for Martians. However, Graham’s prioritization of his Philosophism over human lives has soured Javier’s view on him.

Ramirez is morally flexible - now that he’s on his own, he’s interested in his survival, so he is willing to steal or work for the morally dubious folks who comprise Sublight, but he’s not looking to do it at the cost of genuinely helping the Corporations (although he’s willing to make them think that he’s on their side to gather intel and avoid making himself a target).

💥 - When conflict arises, how do they handle it?

Javier attempts to resolve certain conflicts without violence when he can - he spared Jeremy despite the order from Ludwig to terminate the mechanical, he talked down Reed so that he didn’t have to kill the Edgewater guards, he was able to convince MacRedd to hand over his lighter rather than assassinating him, and he spared Rachel Lockwood instead of killing her as Sophia Akande commanded.

He also avoided killing Herbert through stealth and disabling the machines via the nearby terminal.

🌌 - How did they adjust to life in Halcyon? Did they assume Alex Hawthorne’s identity, or did they maintain their own?

Ramirez didn’t assume Alex Hawthrone’s identity; he consistently identified himself by his real name when he met people.

🏭 - Are they pro-board or anti-board? Why?

Javier is anti-Board. Aside from his upbringing on Mars that shaped a lot of his political views (as well as growing up learning about the Taíno Rebellion of 1511 and the Grito de Lares), he was abhorred with the extreme capitalism and corporate conformity during his visit to Edgewater, where he saw the horror of Spacer’s Choice and how the denizens were basically dehumanized and valued only by how much they produced for Spacer’s Choice. Discovering that Spacer’s Choice wiped out an entire facility of people to cut costs and make a profit only cemented how he felt, and his discoveries later on (particularly in Byzantium) have only further fueled how he felt.

However, he does use his knowledge about Phineas to act as a double-agent, feigning allegiance to Akande to get intel about the motives of the Board.

🤝 - Which factions did they align with?

Ramirez aligned with the Deserters in the Vale who wanted autonomy from Spacer’s Choice. He assisted the crew of the Groundbreaker who wanted to keep their independence from the Board.

The Captain provided help to Udom Bedford, although he had no true loyalty to the Board.

While Javier mostly provided the intel to Gladys, he assisted fellow scientist Orson Shaw, who rewarded him (at great risk) with the Ulti-Nature when Auntie Cleo shunned Shaw’s proposed weapon due to market saturation.

🌝 - Which corporate jingle gets stuck in their head the most? Any favorites?

Admittedly, C&P sometimes gets stuck in his head.

🛰️ - What do they like to do in their downtime?

Writes in his notebook (including charting the stars that he sees), plays the board game in his room, and watching noir aetherwave dramas.

🍭 - What’s their favorite Halcyon food? Are they a picky eater?

Upon landing on Terra II, it was a basic diet of bread and water to stay alive in an unfamiliar world. Purpleberry Crunch, Purpleberry Punch, and Knock You Out Bar would be his favorites at the moment. Ramirez also has Deep Fried Cysty-Bits from time to time.

🔫 - Favorite weapon?

At the moment? Plasma rifle, modded with Extend-O-Sight and Mag-Num.

💧 - Do they regret any of the decisions they had to make? What do they regret the most?

The decision in the Vale was difficult, but the Captain felt he made the right choice: giving the denizens a chance to build a society where they wouldn’t be beholden to the Corporations.

Working for Sublight has been lucrative so far, and he hasn’t felt that he has had to cross any serious moral lines yet (against innocent people); he recently confronted Clive Lumbergh for Catherine, who he set up by altering his financial records after finding out that Clive was using human bodies.

🛸 - How do they feel about being tasked with reviving the other colonists? Of being Halcyon’s ‘only hope’ for salvation?

Javier finds the task daunting, but he slowly came around to the idea that helping Phineas is the best course of action.

❤️ - What is their relationship with the other crew members? Who do they get along with the most?

Ramirez has a good relationship with the members of his crew, although the nature of his ties with each one varies.

Javier treats Ada well, and is curious about her inception as well as the nature of the changes that Hawthorne implemented; he has noted that she seems to miss Hawthorne despite her claims about lacking sapience.

Ramirez looks after Parvati and Felix, who are younger than him, while he feels like he’s more on equal footing with Max, Ellie and Nyoka.

Sam simply seems content to clean.

🤡 - Do they have a romantic interest? How does that relationship begin?

Javier does not have a romantic interest at this time. He has a friendly rapport with his crew, however.

🔮 - Random Fact.

Ramirez is right-handed.

#the stranger #oc character #the outer worlds #tow #science fiction #the outer worlds spoilers #tow spoilers

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