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my313 · 9 days

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spring cleaning ˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀ choi beomgyu

now playing 𝄞₊⊹ sukidakara - beomgyu (og: yuika)

⋆ pairing: high school sweetheart!beomgyu x gn!reader

⋆ summary: in an attempt to declutter your home for the spring, you find an old camcorder filled with beautiful memories of your first love.

⋆ warnings: fluff, mentioned past heeseung (enhypen) x reader, jealous beomgyu, established relationship, italics are flashbacks, beomgyu is a musician? so technically kind of an au, insinuated that beomgyu and reader were high schoolers in the 2000s

⋆ word count: 2k

a/n: LISTEN TO HIS COVER NEOOOWWW!!! god i love him so bad...... this is also not proofread sry i wrote this out of pure delusion LOL. stuff might sound bad omg i just wanted to write fluff 😭 banner by @/saradika <3

it's nearly midnight when you decided to rummage through your drawers, cabinets, and now, your closet. while dipping your head into the various sets of clothes, you reach for a heart-shaped box with a matching pink ribbon sitting on the lid.

inside, you find an assortment of trinkets from your days in high school. lilac envelopes with silly faces drawn on the seal, addressed to you; postcards from your distant relatives; your university acceptance letter; even a nasty tube of your favourite (expired) strawberry lip balm.

what really distracts you from your spring cleaning antics is the silver camcorder that sits in the very middle of the box.

the clunky piece of technology is covered in dust and mismatched stickers, obvious once you bring it out of the black hole that is your closet and into the warm light of your bedroom.

you don't expect it to start up with the way it's been abandoned for years, but the familiar jingle fills the silence and you're met with a pixelated view of your carpeting. you habitually click on the gallery, immediately flustered with the thumbnail that greets you.

a fond smile makes its way to your lips as the video plays. it's shit quality, as expected, but even with all the pixels distorting the boy's face, you recognise him. it comes easy, with beomgyu's round eyes nervously shifting from the falling cherry blossoms and onto the lens.

you recall this specific spring. the one right before you were set to graduate. you remember how odd beomgyu seemed the entire walk back to his house until he clumsily led the way to the little park a few minutes away from his childhood home. your impromptu shoot now becoming a memory to savour.

beomgyu keeps his distance from you as you take the longer, more scenic route to his house. he had it all planned out. today would be the day he'd tell you that he liked you. the first week of spring, the cherry blossoms falling perfectly; it was as if the universe and the gods of romance were aligning everything to his favour. he even got your favourite strawberry yogurt drink on-hand, poking the straw through the film and handing it to you proudly when you gasp and proclaim your gratefulness to him.

unfortunately, that didn't play out the way he fantasised the night before, sprawled out on his futon with a dopey grin on his face until morning came. even so, he didn't let his sleep deprived self peek through for a minute since you exited the school gates.

that was until you mentioned lee heeseung.

"heeseung asked me to the internet cafe this weekend," you begin, harmlessly conversing about your day like you usually do. you take a sip of your drink, then extend it to beomgyu, offering a taste.

he leans down to catch the straw between his lips, heart fluttering ever-so-slightly at the thought of your lips just being on that flimsy plastic a few moments ago. clearly, that gesture wasn't enough to keep his mind distracted from the mention of lee heeseung.

beomgyu tries to remain calm. internet cafe? surely, a thing friends do. you've tagged along with him and soobin a few times.

"he said it was a date."

which explains your current predicament. it's obvious that beomgyu is upset, lips jutted into a pout and brows furrowed. his hands stay stuck in his pockets as if they'd been glued there, so unlike his usual behaviour. on days like this, beomgyu typically links arms with you, or tugs on the top hook of your backpack to ease the weight off you, or even sling his arms around you with a mischievous grin. right now, you're sure this is the farthest beomgyu has been from you.

the silence drapes over you two like a stuffy blanket. you're thankful for the loud honks and bicycle bells in the background, even appreciating the yelling of the street vendors as your typically boisterous peer is quiet.

a bike chaotically speeds through your side, the rider repeatedly hitting the bell as they make their way to you. beomgyu quickly grabs your arm and trades places with you before the bike catches up, him on the road-side and you by the fences. once the bike passes with a hurried apology, beomgyu lets go of your arm and maintains the former distance.

"...sounds like a shit date, to be honest." the silence shatters. he mutters, huffing out a breath as he walks just an inch closer to you, as if trying to be a barrier between you and the road.

you blink at him, lips flat and eyes unassuming. just relieved he's talking to you. "you think?"

"yeah, why would you wanna be inside when the streets look like this.." he motions towards the cherry blossom trees surrounding you both. "..right now. d'you even like him enough to say yes?"

"i dunno. he's cool, i guess. isn't he your friend?"

"just played a few games together."

his responses are straight to the point. none of his beomgyu bullshit spinning your conversations through circles, which you admittedly did enjoy.

"is something... wrong? did you guys fight? i can beat him up for you if i go." you try to joke, your eyes never leaving beomgyu's face to catch his reaction.

he winces, "uh, no, not really. that- that's not the problem..."

your silence prompts beomgyu to keep talking, but his eyes don't meet yours. instead, he's staring at the pavement, picking up the creases on his shoes he'd never seen before, distracting himself by counting the petals he comes across. none of it calms his heart or clears the lump in his throat though.

he abruptly lifts his head and stares back at you. a pleasant surprise that causes you to blush at how his eyes sparkle so brightly. he sighs defeatedly, not wanting to be upset any longer. with one look at you, beomgyu's stubbornness weakens, a small smile on his lips as he closes the distance between you both.

his shoulder purposely clashes into yours, "it's really pretty at the park near my house right now. wanna see?"

you pause the video upon hearing the doorbell ring. with a knowing grin, you take the camcorder with you to the door. once you pull it open, the comforting sight of your boyfriend floods your vision.

"m'home~" he greets in a sing-song tone, arms spread wide awaiting your welcome home hug that he always craves after hours at the studio.

beomgyu's eyes travel from your sunken but excited eyes to the familiar thing in your hold. he blinks repeatedly, craning his neck up stiffly to look up at you again. comically, he brings an accusatory finger to the front with a nervous chuckle.

"is that...?"

"yup!" you beam enthusiastically, like you had waited for him to step foot into your shared apartment to eat him up.

knowing what was inside the camcorder, beomgyu could say it was similar. his face feels warmer despite the late night breeze still whisking him away from behind. you tug at his outstretched arm and pull him inside, shutting the door.

usually, you'd ask how work was, or pester him to let you listen to a new song he worked on. tonight though, none of that.

beomgyu sits next to you on the sofa, cheek nuzzled against your head. his downward gaze is alert to every button you press on the camcorder, cringing slightly at the memory of his partly successful confession.

beomgyu leans in closer to have a better look at the viewfinder. he chooses to focus on something else entirely even as you're sucked into the pretty pinks of the sakura flowers and the shaky footage of his round head.

the wind was just slightly unforgiving that day, petals swirling around the park. you're a few steps behind beomgyu. he's biting the inside of his cheek, stare stuck to the pavement, desperately wishing you'd speed up and start walking beside him.

impatient as ever, beomgyu decides he'll just slow down for you. he's not very subtle about it though, opting to halt entirely and turn his head in your direction. beomgyu wants to see the surprise in your face; eyes wide and cheeks pink. instead, what greets him is the lens of your camcorder, a hand-me-down from your relatives that you couldn't stop talking about over text just the other week.

beomgyu strides forward and you stay still in your spot, tightly gripping the camcorder. "beomgyu, say hi to the camera!"

your voice echoes with excitement, beomgyu doesn't have to peer beyond the camcorder to know that your lashes are kissing the apples of your cheeks with the way you're smiling widely. he wants to be the one to keep you beaming like this for years and years on end.

you're about to back away as beomgyu gets too close for the camcorder to film him and the view. then, you feel beomgyu's lithe fingers over your own, tugging on the camera, extending your arm by result, and raising it to his eye-level. beomgyu makes sure you're looking at him through the viewfinder. with a lopsided smile and head cocked to the side, beomgyu braces himself for what's to come, "hey, i like you."

your arm falls limp as he releases his grip on you, shocked by his confession. he doesn't let you process it, though, running towards the opposite direction. it takes you a moment to run after him, camera long forgotten. "choi beomgyu..! you!"

"why are you running away from someone you like, huh?!" you huff out, catching your breath.

when you look up, you can't help but point the camera at beomgyu again. with plenty of cherry blossom trees in the background, beomgyu center in the frame, wind trying to pull his necktie away, how could you not? the boy you like, the one that just confessed to you on one spring day, looked too beautiful.

the camcorder manages to pick up your words amidst the scratchy noises of the wind. in a whisper, one can hear your voice, "i like you too, beomgyu."

"wow, i was really handsome since birth, huh?" he poses confidently, his lips and warm breath kissing your hair as he speaks.

you roll your eyes with a smile, and you don't disagree. you never do and it makes beomgyu blush and grin. if he wasn't too comfortable in your warmth, he would be laying down on his stomach with a coquettish smile and his feet kicking up and down.

"yeah, s'why i'm engaged to you, no?" you blow a raspberry at him.

an exaggerated gasp paired with a dramatic drop of his jaw has your stomach hurting from laughing too hard. "i thought you loved me!"

"i do!" you giggle, biting down your lips to stop more fits of laughter spilling out. you squish beomgyu's cheeks together, lips pursed and begging to be kissed. so you do. "you and your pretty face, baby."

your laughs settle down into echoes of contentment, beomgyu's palm rubbing against your belly as if soothing your self-inflicted ache. plus, beomgyu would stick his limbs to your body if he could.

he presses his cheek against your head, "did you know i liked you even before that spring?"

you hum in thought, resting your hand atop the one on your tummy and filling in the gaps between his fingers with your own. you smile even harder upon feeling the cold metal band of your engagement rings. "nah. i thought it was impossible, honestly,"

"didn't even really think you thought of me like that until then, bomu." you admit shyly, playing with your interlocked fingers. beomgyu's lips purse in thought, "i thought i was pretty obvious though,"

"was buying you strawberry milk everyday and carrying your backpack home even if we lived in opposite directions not obvious enough for you, honey?"

"well... it's obvious now!"

"yeah," he beams that sweet, silly, sly beomgyu half-smirk that you've always loved. he releases your hands momentarily to raise his fingers to the light, showing off his ring. "we're so locked in now."

#from.313 #313.softhours #313.beomgyu #beomgyu fluff #choi beomgyu x reader #beomgyu x reader #txt x reader #txt fluff #beomgyu soft thoughts #beomgyu soft hours #txt soft thoughts #txt soft hours #txt scenarios #txt imagines #txt x you #beomgyu scenarios #beomgyu x you

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markantonys · 10 months

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previously i'd speculated all 4 polycule members will meet at falme at the end of s2, but the more i think about it, the more i suspect min won't go to falme in the show.

a) no sign of her in any of the images/shots from falme we have so far, or in the pic of the 3 wondergirls preparing for a trip. of course, i can't base an argument that she won't be in falme only on the fact that we don't have proof that she will be, but at the very least, we don't have proof that she will be.

b) unless they plan to significantly change her one non-rand-centric canon storyline, she needs to be at the white tower in season 3. no one else who will end s2 in falme will be headed for tar valon in s3 (no, for the love of god, egwene and elayne are NOT going to make a detour there in s3 just so they can take the accepted tests their stories don't actually need them to take), so it feels unlikely to me that min would travel halfway across the continent back to the white tower all by herself rather than joining one of the other roadtrips or being asked to join by someone who wants her viewings to help them out (for example, elayne and nynaeve would surely be eager for her help with black ajah hunting). not impossible, but just kinda clunky to have her go from tar valon to falme back to tar valon in quick succession rather than simply staying in tar valon the whole time.

c) the only things we know for certain about min in s2 are that her aunts have been cast and that at some point she is standing in front of a window that looks like the window in what appears to be rand's inn room in cairhien in the trailer (this is a quick post so i'm not digging up screenshots, but i did a window comparison the other day and confirmed that min's window defs is similar to/the same as the window in that shot of rand channeling fire alone at night). we also know for certain from s1 that her hometown is tar valon in the showverse, and we can predict with decent confidence that siuan makes a trip to cairhien in s2 while rand is there. now let's pull all this together into a prediction.

after losing her livelihood in fal dara, min heads home to her aunts in tar valon, and tar valon is where we first see her in season 2. maybe we start with a taste of her home life (so that she can actually have a backstory and relationships outside of rand), and then she winds up in the white tower (maybe because moiraine suspects she'd go to tar valon after leaving fal dara and has gotten word to siuan to keep an eye out for her). she spends an episode or two or three forming connections with siuan, the wondergirls, and possibly mat, and maybe having her powers studied by aes sedai or trying to research them herself. siuan gets wind (probably from moiraine) that rand is the dragon reborn and is currently in cairhien, so around mid/mid-late season, she travels there with logain (whom she hopes can teach rand to channel) and min (whom she hopes might have useful viewings about rand) in tow. the three of them spend one episode there and all return to tar valon at the end of it so they'll be in place for their s3 storyline. this is the last we see of min, siuan, and logain in s2.

i'll also add a very flimsy d) i read some random person on the internet claim that kae alexander isn't a regular in s2, so if true, that would likely mean she doesn't appear in all 8 episodes, which could in turn mean she'll be absent from the late season if my speculation that she'll be present in the early and middle season is correct.

so, what are the story implications of min not going to falme? honestly..........not much. the fact that she was kidnapped by the seanchan and witnessed their abuse of egwene firsthand had so little effect on her in subsequent books that i had genuinely completely forgotten it had happened by about book 4. i remember thinking later in the series "huh, i remember min was at falme, but how the hell did she even get there?" and drawing a total blank! her involvement in that storyline was literally never referenced again after TDR-ish. so i could imagine that rafe & co might have taken a look at her long-term book arc (lmao at the idea that min even has a long-term book arc to look at!) and decided to jettison her falme stuff because it never plays a role in her story again, especially if the restructuring of other characters' timelines means that min being in falme would make it difficult for her to make it to her much-more-important tower storyline in s3.

what does this mean for polycule development? again, not much. it would be a small bummer to lose the chance of min and aviendha meeting before either gets involved with rand, but that's not a big deal because i'm still confident the show will make much more of an effort to develop their relationship in later seasons than the books did. i do worry that we might lose out on some TGH min-elayne bonding (more because of min's potential cairhien trip than her potential falme absence), but as long as they have some hangout time in an early episode(s) of s2 and get to spend more time together later on than they do in the books, that's okay.

min would lose the TGH confrontation with lanfear over rand, but a) she would instead get more bonding time with an Actually Conscious rand during their cairhien episode, and that would be much more meaningful & believable relationship development than her telling lanfear she's got a claim on this rando she talked to one time, and b) i really am frothing at the mouth for that confrontation to go to egwene instead, with lanfear taunting her for choosing the tower over rand and that turning into a sort of "we may not be right for each other as romantic partners but i'll always love him in one way or another, so fuck off, lanfear" moment of closure for egwene like rand got in 1x08. and i for one would much prefer a natural, gradual relationship development for the polycule over the show broadcasting "Rand Is Fated To Have 3 Girlfriends, And Here's Who They Are" before anyone's remotely close to getting together, like the books did, and it would be all too easy for that broadcasting to happen if all 4 of them crossed paths at falme and if min had the confrontation with lanfear.

#wot #wot book spoilers #it does feel silly to be doing too much s2 speculation at this point when we'll know for sure so soon but i can't help it!

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nine-fingered-entity · 6 days

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one piece live action episode 1 thoughts:

yeah, i'm months late. who cares?

also. full disclaimer: i have both a huge sentimental connection to one piece (first ever manga, first read when i was like. 8.) and am an enjoyer of it current day (have read the whole thing 3 times. can and will bitch about it at length but genuinely do love it. have posted like. 45k worth of one piece fic.) so absolutely biased as hell.

anyways

show is silly goofy which is correct. one piece is silly goofy first and foremost. just relax, enjoy the ride, accept the cartoon shonen logic. once i did that i had a good time.

i 'm actually a fan of the changes made to pacing. breaking up the first chapter with all the luffy flashback lore makes a ton of sense for live action and makes more space for present-day stuff. we don't need to know all that right away. we'll get to it. episode was still a bit rushed but tbh the manga had that issue too with the early chapters (had a lot to do and oda did not yet have free rein to bloat)

along the same lines, introducing nami and zoro at the same time makes a lot of sense. gives us more time with both of them. get to see nami in her element a bit more-very cool. also the map gives them all more of a reason to be in shell town causing havoc.

i especially like the reworking of how zoro and luffy meet and how zoro teams up with him (not a crew! yet!). it always kind of bothered me that luffy somewhat coerced him into joining in the OG - thematically that was a cognitive dissonance, so luffy freeing him without expectation felt a) more luffy and b) will make zoro eventually joining more meaningful imo

do sort of wish that they'd somehow managed to keep zoro stubbornly hanging there starving for like. days. because i think that's a really good intro to his character and what's important to him but at least he still managed to eat the floor rice. like overall i think the changes were a good idea but they do give a different spin on him. (i think he accepted being freed too easily in this one. but. oh well.)

big fan of the alabasta foreshadowing. and zoro's opening scene. kind of ate ngl. cool to see things only offhandedly mentioned in the manga.

acting/writing. hm. i think some of the serious dialogue was a bit clunky and some bits the acting felt a bit...self conscious? sometimes luffy seemed a bit Too Self Aware/and not relaxed enough. during the sillier bits though i thought he did better and loosened up. same with zoro. no notes for nami though.

i was expecting to hate the rubber CGI but. did not mind it. fight scenes felt a bit silly but that's okay they are silly. (it is a plot point in the early manga that luffy fighting looks bizarre.)

fight scenes pretty decent, considering the medium change. three-sword style does just look flimsy live, unfortunately.

why is Garp here????????????????????

surprisingly faithful to all the important bits, honestly. we'll see where this goes. interested to see what they do with orange town now that the set-up has changed.

fun thoughts:

was that crocodile in the execution crowd? oda was apparently pretty involved in all this, so if that Was crocodile then that counts as evidence for my favorite One Piece theory. crocomom real?

spotted Foxy and Bellamy bounty posters, which imply both of them have been to the East Blue. interesting but probably inconsequential set-building. curious on what posters i missed.

my instagram ads keep showing me a one-hole zoro earring set (all three dangles but you only need one piercing) and i've never been more tempted. damn the algorithm.

huge fan of koby's hair

was jumpscared multiple times by british accents. which is on me and my USAmerican-ness.

unfounded guess but i bet they're going to change how kuina dies. please.

#one piece live action

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hazshit-hotel-hater · 23 days

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A small critique of your designs is that save for nifty, husk, and charlie, their legs are way too long and it makes them look like they're going to topple over. I love the way you use colors though and i especially love your husk disign the most! Keep up the fantastic work :^)

TYSMM! I promise theyre not usually drawn so flimsy looking (I know Alastor looks… a bit troubled with his legs.) I drew Angel after staring at these guys for 10 hours and Ive just never drawn Alastor’s legs so maybe in the future I’ll fix their leg problems. Angel and Alastor have unguligrade legs (technically charlie does too but shes not super tall) which I am trying to work on more. Angel is very tricky to work out cause he’s insanely tall and for my reference artstyle im still not the best at showing depth with the legs which I think is Alastors biggest issue. Though I guess this kind of makes sense why I’ve had Angel fall down the stairs on multiple occasions/j

I really loved drawing Husk though he’s so .. ougughgjghohugughhh. When I draw Angel he’s got those weird little hoof things and you can’t really tell he has ankles at all which makes it look a bit clunky (I am obsessed with it though im so sorry) but for Husk he has more defined joints. I love seeing where the leg ands and his big cat stompers begin. I am a freak about human and cat anatomy and I hope to become a better freak with deer and clunky spider leg anatomy.

I really want to do a few bonus characters like Lucifer and Cherri Bomb, maybe the Vee’s, so there will probably a much more normal legs. SORRY FOR TALKING ABOUT LEGS SO MUCH BTW. Anyone mentions legs or body parts in my ask box and its all I think about for like 2 hours.

Anyway last thing before I go back into my nap, I love Husk so bad I need to draw him again

#raimble #hazbin hotel #hazbin critical #hazbin hotel criticism #hazbin hotel critical

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hbcsource · 1 year

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Helena Bonham Carter’s Harper’s Bazaar UK interview | February 2023

A WOMAN SCORNED Helena Bonham Carter tells Lydia Slater why her latest role, exploring the life of the 1970s soapstar Noele Gordon, feels like restorative justice Those of a certain vintage may remember the ponderous sequence of nine guitar notes that were the signal to cluster around the television for Crossroads. Set in a Midlands motel, the soap was much derided for its flimsy sets, implausible storylines and clunky dialogue; nevertheless, in the mid-Seventies, the series was attracting 15 million viewers, and battling Coronation Street for ratings supremacy. The unquestioned star of the show was Noele Gordon, known to the nation as Nolly, who played the matriarchal, auburn-haired motel owner Meg Richardson (later Mortimer). The role had been created with Gordon in mind, and she remained Crossroads’ most popular character from the show’s launch in 1964 until 1981, when she was suddenly sacked. Her defenestration, and the reasons behind it, are the premise on which Russell T Davies has based his new three-part series, Nolly. ‘One of my very first jobs in TV was a trial script for Crossroads, and I’ve wanted to write the story of behind the scenes on that show for 40 years,’ he said. ‘Russell has always been a real supporter of the underdog,’ says Helena Bonham Carter, who portrays Gordon, complete with coiffure and carefully modulated accent. ‘He thought Nolly was really badly treated, and I think he wanted to give her the send-off and the recognition she deserved.’ Bonham Carter was ‘very aware’ of the soap as a child. ‘It was part of the perma-wallpaper, and I knew all the characters.’ She was immediately drawn to the complexity of the woman in Davies’ screenplay. ‘Nolly was a highly complicated character and a mix of many things – and not an easy mix,’ she says. ‘But I love playing people who are complex.’ Gordon was a child stage star who came from a modest background. She trained at Rada and went on to work both behind and in front of the television camera, becoming Britain’s first female TV executive; she helped Ned Sherrin and Reg Watson launch ATV Midlands in 1956, and was the first woman to interview a British prime minister when Harold Macmillan appeared on her chat show. Steeped in the workings of daytime television, Gordon was unafraid to voice her opinions on how things should be done on Crossroads. ‘She was outspoken, she was herself, she was utterly authentic,’ says Bonham Carter. ‘I think, frankly, she terrified the people who ran the show. And she was punished for that. It’s not new, is it, that women aren’t allowed to have a strong voice?’ Certainly, the first episode presents the ‘Queen of the Midlands’ as a daunting figure, swanning to the studios in mink coat and Rolls-Royce, changing a new character’s accent from Brummie to RP (in the teeth of the producer’s protests), and then playing an on-screen practical joke on the same rookie performer, after she dared to cast doubt on Gordon’s assertions of the programme’s popularity. But the series also shows how Gordon was greatly loved and respected by (most of) the people she worked with – particularly the actor Tony Adams. He played the motel’s suave, moustachioed accountant, Adam Chance, and in reality not only rented a flat from Nolly but was her closest ally – for, having been jilted by her fiancé, she never married or had children. ‘The show gave her a real sense of identity, belonging and purpose,’ says Bonham Carter. ‘She said she had two lives, as Meg Mortimer and Noele Gordon. And whenever she went to a hotel or a restaurant, inevitably they would take her to inspect the kitchen… the line was very smudged.’ As a result, Gordon lost far more than just her job when Charles Denton, the incoming controller of programmes at ATV, informed her agent that ‘all good things must come to an end’, a decision that this series lays squarely at the door of misogyny and ageism. ‘I think Nolly is quite right when she says, “You wouldn’t have sacked me if I’d been a man”,’ says Bonham Carter. ‘Men are allowed to be difficult and dictatorial. It really feels like Greek tragedy – she’s cut off in her prime.’ Gordon refused to take the decision lying down and complained to the press, resulting in national headlines, and sackfuls of irate letters sent to ATV from her devoted fans, while the series shows how producers retaliated by declining to tell Gordon how she would be written out and going to the extent of staging her fake funeral. Bonham Carter herself has never joined a long-running franchise. ‘Even after just two seasons with The Crown, by the end, with the best will in the world, you’re beginning to get a bit automatic – and if you’re faintly bored, it’s time to move on.’ Fortunately, at 56, her own career is as busy and diverse as ever. ‘We might have less collagen, but we’re much more interesting when we’re over 50,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘Life makes you more interesting, you’ve got more depth, the map of the soul is so much bigger if you’ve survived.’ Sadly, Gordon did not. She died of cancer in 1985, just four years after her sacking, while Crossroads itself only limped on until 1988. This charming series, and Bonham Carter’s portrayal, are a worthy tribute to a national treasure, and an overdue acknowledgment of the unjust treatment meted out to her.

#helena bonham carter #interviews #2023 #interviews: 2023 #harper's bazaar uk 2023 #noele gordon #nolly

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cigaretterry · 2 years

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okay im really high right now so um rambling but...

i dont mean to sound like an ungrateful brat, but my brother just gave me my birthday present (3 weeks late, mind you) and im upset because i dont like it. he gave me 2 pairs of LED light up chopsticks. theyre super big and clunky and flimsy, like not even good quality... im just bothered because i got him a really nice birthday gift this year... i got him a decently nice bong with a percolator and a bottle of woodford reserve. for christmas i also got him a nice pair of whiskey drinking glasses and he got me nothing... i feel like i put in effort and money to get him nice gifts that he will like and use so im just upset that he'd give me this kinda crappy gift. he didnt even bother to wrap it or actually give it to me in person. he left it on the railing by my room in the package it was delivered in the mail in and texted me while we were both home and said my present was on the railing. like... i sound like such a bitch and i feel bad and mean for being bothered by his gift but im just like bitch 😭 the best you could really do is LED chopsticks... like i understand maybe if he couldnt think of something to get me or that he thought i would really like, but once again LED chopsticks were your best idea? he knows i like to drank, he knows i like to smoke, and he knows i love harry styles. 3 easy present themes. like it just feels very low effort lmfao.... anyway 🙄. for his next birthday hes getting socks...

#and not the nice lulu lemon kind i got him a couple christmases ago either!#i just feel like the gift someone gives you says a lot abt how they view you and how much they understand you #i think im a really fantastic and thoughtful gift giver. like i put so much thought and effort into presents for ppl i care abt #and to me getting a shitty gift it just feels like... do u not care about or understand me?#personal #high thots

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srusjust · 2 years

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Red kite travel systems

RED KITE TRAVEL SYSTEMS PLUS

It mounts kerbs just fine but it felt quite stiff with little flexibility – not ideal when you’re trying not to wake a sleeping baby. Add in a bump, a cobble or a stone and my baby seemed to feel every single impact. Give this buggy a relatively flat, smooth road and it rides like a dream. I enjoyed pushing it immensely! It’s nifty and light and that was heavenly for me! Being able to push it one-handed is also a big bonus as I have a dog that I sometimes walk with the baby. How easy is the Red Kite Push Me Fusion to push? I get quite tired from pushing our other buggy because it’s on the heavier side but I didn’t have that problem with the Red Kite Push Me Fusion. It is beautifully lightweight and easy to bump up and down kerbs too. How lightweight is the Red Kite Push Me Fusion? These buttons are on the handlebar, but fear not, there’s no way you’ll accidentally press them and collapse it! You do have to remove the seat element to collapse it, but that comes off with a slide up button on either side of the seat. The steps are simple though: you press a small button and then a big button and then fold. It feels awkward to collapse down, and when folded it isn’t the easiest thing to transport either as it’s quite heavy and cumbersome. You need two hands, no matter how deft you are. How does the Red Kite Push Me Fusion fold?Ī big downside of this buggy is that you can’t fold it one-handed. Yes, very comfortable –Vivienne looked really happy in it, as it’s super plush and cosy. Does the carrycot seem comfortable for babies? You can also add a foot rest for your child by pushing the two big buttons on either side of the chassis. You can also use the button to tilt it more or less, depending on the baby’s preference. To convert the seat to a carrycot and vice versa, you simply pull up a button at the head of the seat, and tilt it – it’s that simple. Once you’ve done it a few times it’s super easy and it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. This process is relatively simple, despite the lack of instructions. How easy is it to convert the seat to the carrycot and back again? Of course, this would be fine for an older baby or toddler. I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable putting a newborn in it – it simply feels far too big and roomy, and unsafe. Does the seat unit seem comfortable for a new baby?įor me, the seat unit felt far too big for my 4-week old daughter Vivienne, who admittedly is on the smaller scale. The Red Kite Push Me Fusion is suitable from birth to 15kg, so around 3 years. What age is the Red Kite Push Me Fusion suitable for? It also seemed quite flimsy in comparison. How does the Red Kite Push Me Fusion compare to other travel systems you have tried?Īs a first-time mum I’ve got limited experience of other travel systems but compared to our other pushchair (the Graco Evo, bought second hand) it unfortunately felt quite clunky, despite looking a lot more sleek. I really liked that the carrycot converted into the seat, rather than being a separate unit, which is very handy when you have limited space (something that seems to happen however big your house is when you have a baby!). It also appeared comfortable, with a plush carrycot, car seat and seat unit that I was sure my baby was going to love. The quality looked top notch and the whole system seemed pretty sleek. When I first got it out the box, I thought it looked really nifty and stylish. What were your first impressions of the travel system? They tested it out in their town, in the supermarket and for walks with the dog as well as on trips on the train and a few car journeys. She tested the Red Kit Push Me Fusion in Onyx with her 4-week old daughter Vivienne. Tested by:Ĭarla is a first-time mum from Hertfordshire. I’d never heard of Red Kite but was keen to try out a travel system that wasn’t going to cost the earth, especially if it could be used for quite a few years.

RED KITE TRAVEL SYSTEMS PLUS

The travel system holds its own against some of the market’s biggest names, who offer options of their own at much higher price tags, such as the Mamas & Papas Ocarro pushchair, the Bugaboo Bee5 stroller, the Joie Mytrax and the Cosatto Wow Travel System.Ī big plus point is that while other brands don’t always include all of the parts in their standard bundle, the Red Kite Push Me Fusion system includes a carrycot (that converts into a seat unit) and a car seat plus the chassis.

#Red kite travel systems

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jayoctodot · 3 years

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The Silent Patient vs The Maidens

I will start by saying that I understand the appeal of these novels as page-turners. They are easy to read and if you want a twisty reveal at the end, you will probably be entertained and satisfied. That being said, I am SO CONFUSED by the near-universal adoration of The Silent Patient and the reasonably positive reception of The Maidens. The weaknesses of the two are strikingly similar, as well, which doesn’t give me much hope of seeing improvement from this guy, though I am intrigued to see whether he keeps repeating the same (apparently successful!!) patterns. These books were at least super fun to hate.

(For context, I read The Maidens for a bookclub I'm in, because several of the members had read and loved The Silent Patient, and one of them gave me a copy of the latter to read on my own time. I loathed The Maidens and then read The SP for comparative purposes. And because I'm a masochist, apparently.)

SPOILER WARNING! Do not read on unless you've finished both books (or unless you care not for spoilers). Sorry if it gets a bit shouty.

Here are the similar weaknesses I noticed in both:

PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGY

-> Weirdly similar “group therapy” scenes early on where a cartoonishly unstable patient arrives late, disrupts the meeting by throwing something into the middle of the circle, and is asked to join the group after the therapist(s) speechify on the importance of boundaries (HA! None of these therapists would know an appropriate boundary if it kicked them in the ass) and debate whether to “allow” the patient to join. Both scenes are so transparent in their design to establish the credibility/legitimacy of the narrators as therapists, but instead both Theo and Mariana come off as super patronizing. The protagonists are less and less believable as therapists at the stories progress (though at least Theo’s incompetence is explained away by the “twist” at the end; Mariana, on the other hand, is confronted in the opening pages of the novel by a patient who has self-harmed PRETTY extensively, and rather than ensure he get proper medical attention, she essentially throws him a first aid kit and tosses him out the door so she can pour herself a glass of wine and call her niece... and it devolves from there).

-> Ongoing insistence throughout the narrative that one’s childhood trauma entirely explains the warped/dysfunctional way a character behaves or views the world, which is why the books go out of their way to give EVERY potentially violent character a traumatic childhood; when Theo insists that no one ever became an abuser who hadn’t been abused themselves, I wanted to throw the book across the room. (That is a MYTH, SIR. GET OUT OF HERE WITH YOUR ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGY.)

-> Female murderers whose pathology boils down to “history of depression” and “traumatized by a male loved one/family member.” Because, as we all know, depression + abuse = murderer!

-> The “therapy” depicted in both books is laughable and so so unrealistic, mostly because neither narrators function as therapists so much as incompetent detectives, obsessively pursuing a case they have no place pursuing (or skill to pursue - both just happen across every clue mostly by way of clunky conversation with all the people who can provide precisely the snippet of info to send them along to the next person, and the next… until all is revealed in a tired, cliched “twist”). Their constant Psych 101 asides were so tiresome and weirdly dated (also, the constant harping on countertransference got so ridiculous that at one point during "therapy" Theo literally attributes his headache and a particular emotion he feels to Alicia, as though the contents of her head are being broadcast directly into his mind... and I'm PRETTY SURE that's not how it works???)

CHARACTERS

-> Psychotherapist narrators with abusive fathers and pretensions of being Sherlock Holmes, which results in both characters crossing ALL KINDS of ethical lines as they invade the personal lives of everyone even tangentially connected to their cases (and, in Theo's case, violate all kinds of patient confidentiality. Yeah, yeah, by the end, that's the least of his offenses, but before you get there, it's baffling that NO ONE is calling him out on this).

-> All female characters are either elderly with hilariously bad advice, monstrous hulking brutes, or beautiful bitches (except for ~MARIANA~, who is Bella Swan-esque in her unawareness of her own attractiveness, despite multiple men trying to get with her almost immediately after meeting her. I'm so tired of beautiful female characters being oblivious to their own hotness. Are we meant to believe all mirrors and male attention have escaped their notice? If it’s to make them “relatable,” this tactic really fails with me).

-> All characters of color are shallow, cartoonish side characters, and most of them are depicted as unsympathetic minor antagonists (the Sikh Chief Inspector in The Maidens continuously drinks tea from an ever-present thermos, and his only other notable characteristic is his instant dislike of Mariana, whom he VERY RIGHTLY warns to stay out of the investigation that she is VERY MUCH compromising… the Caribbean manager of the Grove is universally disliked by her staff for enforcing stricter safety regulations at the bafflingly poorly run mental institution, because HOW DARE SHE. There's a very clear vibe that we're supposed to dislike these characters and share the protagonists' indignation, but honestly Sangha/Stephanie were completely in the right for trying to shut down their wildly inappropriate investigations).

-> "Working class" characters (or basically anyone excluded from the comfortably upper-crust, educated main cadre of characters) are few and far between in both stories, but when they show up, he depicts them as such caricatures. We got Elsie the pathologically lying housekeeper in the Maidens, who is enticed to share her bullshit with cake, and then a TOOTHLESS LEPRECHAUN DEALING DRUGS UNDER A BRIDGE in the SP. I kid you not, a man described as having the body of a child, the face of Father Time, and no front teeth, emerges from beneath a bridge and offers to sell Theo some "grass." I was dyinggg.

-> There are no characters to root for. Anywhere. Partly because they’re all so thinly drawn — and because we’re clearly supposed to view almost ALL of them as potential suspects, so they’re ALL weird, creepy, or incompetent in some way.

-> The flimsiest of flimsy motives, both for the narrators and the murderers. Theo fully would have gotten away with his involvement in the murder if he hadn't gone out of his way to work at the Grove and "treat" Alicia and his justification for doing so is pretty weak; his rapid descent into stalking and murder fantasy and his random ass decision to "expose" Alicia's husband as a cheater with a spur-of-the-moment home invasion and staged attempted homicide is ONLY justified if the reader hand waves it away as WELP, HE'S CRAZY, I GUESS (after all, he DID have an abusive father and a history of mental illness, and in Michaelides novels, that's ALL YOU NEED to become a violent psycho). I guess we're lucky Mariana didn't also start dropping bodies (because the logic of his fictional universe says she should definitely be a murderer by now... maybe that'll be his Maidens sequel?). But she especially had NO reason to randomly turn detective - and she kept trying to justify it by saying she needed to re-enter the world or that Sebastian would want her to (??), even though she had no background in criminal psychology... or even a particular fondness for mysteries (really, I would've accepted ANYTHING to explain her dogged obsession with the case. WHY were Sebastian and Zoe so certain she would insert herself into the investigation just because one of Zoe's friends was the first victim? WHY?). As for Zoe and Alicia, their motives are mere suggestions: they were both abused and manipulated, and voila! Slippery slope to murder.

WRITING STYLE

-> Incessant allusions to Greek tragedy and myth, apparently to provide a sophisticated gloss over the bare-bones writing style, which opts more for telling than showing and frequently indulges in hilariously bizarre analogies. Credit where credit is due — the references to Greek myth are less clunky in the SP, and I liked learning about the Alcestis play/myth, which I hadn’t heard of before - but OMG the entire characterization of Fosca, who we are meant to believe is a professor of Greek tragedy at one of the most respected universities on the planet, is just absurd. His "lecture" on the liminal in Greek tragedy is essentially the Wikipedia page on the Eleusinian Mysteries capped off with some Hallmark-card carpe diem crap. The lecture hall responds with raucous applause, clearly never having heard such vague genius bullshit before.

-> Super clunky and amateurish narrative device of interludes written by another character; Sebastian’s letter reads like a mashup of Dexter monologues and Clarice’s memory of the screaming sheep, but by FAR the worse offender is Alicia’s diary, where we’re supposed to believe she painstakingly recorded ENTIRE CONVERSATIONS, BEAT-BY-BEAT DIALOGUE, even when she’s just been DRUGGED TO THE GILLS with morphine and has mere moments of consciousness left… and even before that, she literally takes the time to write “He's trying the windows and doors! ...Someone’s inside! Someone’s inside the house! ETC ETC” when she thinks her stalker has broken in downstairs. WHO DOES THAT?)

-> Speaking of dialogue, the dialogue is so bad. Based on his bio, Michaelides got a degree in screenwriting, which makes his terrible dialogue even more baffling.

-> HILARIOUSLY rendered voyeur scenes where the narrators spy on couples having sex. Such unintentionally awkward descriptions. First we had Kathy’s climax sounds through the trees and then the bowler hat carefully placed on a tombstone before the gatekeeper plows a student. Again, I died.

PLOT/"TWIST"

-> The CONSTANT red herrings make for such an exhausting read. Michaelides drops anvils with almost every character that are so obviously meant to designate them as suspects in our minds. There is absolutely no subtlety in his misdirections.

-> The “crossover” scene between the SP and The Maidens makes no sense - when in the timeline does Mariana’s story overlap with Theo’s? They confer just before Theo starts working at the Grove, obviously (though Mariana appears to be the one who alerts Theo to the job opening there? Whereas in the SP, Theo has been obsessively tracking Alicia since the murder and had already planned to apply to work there?), but then are we supposed to believe that while Theo has been psychotically pursuing his warped quest to “help” Alicia, he’s also been diligently treating Zoe, so invested in her case that he repeatedly reaches out to Mariana to get her to visit Zoe and even writes Mariana a lengthy letter to convince her to do so??? And then a couple days after The Maidens ends, Theo is arrested???

-> But the thing I really did hate the most is how Michaelides treats his female murderers (who are both also victims themselves) as mere means to deploy a “twist”; there’s no moment spared to encourage our sympathy for Zoe, who was groomed and manipulated by the only trusted father figure in her life, and even after spending a decent amount of time getting to know Alicia via her ridiculous diary, where it’s so apparent that she’s been demeaned, objectified, manipulated, gaslit, and/or used by EVERY man in her life, she’s sent packing to spend the rest of her days in a coma… HOW much more satisfying would it have been for her to succeed in exposing Theo and reclaiming her voice? But no, she basically rolls over when he comes to finish her off (SPEAKING OF — ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THERE ARE NO SECURITY CAMERAS IN THIS INSTITUTE FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE????), writes one last diary entry, and drifts off forever. And then a couple pages of nothing later, the story is over. GOODNIGHT, ALICIA!

Both books kept me rolling throughout (by which I mean eye-rolling but also rotfl). Maybe I will check out his next effort — I’m morbidly curious what he’ll turn out. It does leave me wondering whether I should give up on thriller novels entirely, though. Are many of the weaknesses of these novels just characteristic of the genre? Maybe I'm just holding these books to unfair standards? I'm mostly only familiar with thriller films — many of which I think are amazing — but maybe you can get away with more in a film than you can in a novel.

...I really only intended to write a handful of bullet points, but more and more kept coming to mind as I wrote, to the point where subheadings became necessary. Whoopsie.

#the maidens #the silent patient #book review #alex michaelides #thrillers #books

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starfirette · 3 years

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Ok but Helena Bertinelli x fem!reader where Helena takes all her pent up anger out on reader thru sex and she just tops the FUCK out of R and it’s super hot and R lowkey loves when Helena gets angry when it leads to steamy sex👀 oof I need a MINUUUTE😫

a/n: this is very smutty. it is more emotionally angry, and y/n more takes her anger out on helena, BUT i think it's good. .......i think?? | 18+

masterlist | more helena | inbox | ships + requests open

Every single piece of furniture was toppled over.

The fine china that you’d once had shelved on display littered the floor in ground little pieces.

It was a shocking scene to say the least, especially when you were expecting to walk through the door and take an instant nap.

After being in Moscow for the week, both you and Helena had been looking forward to coming back to the shared Alaska home high up in the mountains.

As you stared around in a state of shock, Helena pulled you by the waist. It was as though she wanted to shield you from the destruction that laid before your eyes.

You weren’t naive. At least, not too naive. You could recognize what was going on.

The last time something similar happened was three years ago. At that time, you and Helena had recently been married. It was the threats and destruction that followed Helena which caused her to leave Gotham with you in tow. Together, you traveled halfway across the across the country, in search for a haven that would protect you from Helena’s enemies.

But they’d found you. Again.

“Get your coat,” Helena instructed as she pushed you towards the foyer.

“But-”

“Get your coat, now, Y/n,” she snapped again, not bothering to look at you.

You felt oddly embarrassed by the way your wife had spoken to you. You mustered a submissive nod as you hurried to pull on the coat you’d just taken off.

Helena’s angry, Italian cursing bounced off the walls as she turned through the house, her shoes crunching over glass. She spoke with someone in the phone. Her words were fast and icy. She rarely spoke in Italian, but you’d been with her long enough to learn some of the lingo. She spoke about a safe house and about a rabbit--

Maybe rabbit wasn’t the right word.

But you’re positive it’s something about a safehouse.

You waited in the foyer, shivering in the heavy coat you wore despite the warmth it was generating.

Helena came rushing to you after her phone conversation ended. “We’re getting back in the car,” she instructed you, using her hands to physically turn you back to face the door.

“Wait, what’s going on?” you asked, feeling dumb as she snatched a random sweater from the coat closet.

“We’ve been found, so we’re leaving,” Helena said again, slowing her words as if she was trying to dumb it down for you. She put her arm around your waist, ushering you out of the house and carefully down the snowy pathway that led to your driveway. The fresh powdered snow had two sets of footprints, your own and Helena’s. You didn’t see any others, nothing that would have alerted you to thinking someone had broken in.

Your face burned with warmth as Helena buckle you into the passenger seat. You don’t like being babied by her. You were tempted to bitch about the way she was treating you, but you knew better. At least, right now. You try to remember she’s in a panic, and she’s running on auto pilot.

The car raced down the long driveway that wrapped in a spiral down the mini mountain.

Your heart thumped in your throat as she sped away from the house. You clutched into your seatbelt, letting it dig into your palms. “Slow down,” you finally blurted out.

Helena grunted in response. Her foot reluctantly pumped the break.

You know she doesn’t like to be told to slow down, or to relax, or to be safe. Even so, Helena knows you don’t like when she drives to fast, or goes into a rage, or puts her safety on the line.

The drive was silent as she expertly navigated some snowy backroads. You wanted to talk to her, maybe even distract her from whatever was boiling in her brain. She didn’t explain what was happening. You were left to your own devices. You could only assume she was taking you to one of her safe checkpoints in Cordova. That had been ingrained into to your mind; Cordova is safe. If anything happens, go to Cordova and call someone, whether it be Harley or one of Helena’s contacts in Italy.

You slumped down your seat, shifting all of your body to lean against your door, your head against the window. "I love you," you muttered.

Helena didn't say anything.

The underground house in Cordova spans 500 square feet. It's nothing fancy. It's more of a basic studio flat than a house, really, with a very well structured lay out. The kitchen consisted of a two burner stove and an old fashioned ice box. On that same note, the given bedroom was really just a queen size mattress on the floor, shoved in a corner against the north eastern wall. It had a pile of new pillows, still wrapped in their Macy's store liners.

You dropped your coat on the little coffee table in the dead center of the room. It faced an outdated, but thorough, television set, with a boxy TV and VHS player. Stacks of worn VHS tapes and magazines were laced neatly on the little coffee table, alongside the clunky television remote.

A single door was on the western wall, and you assumed it led to the bathroom.

You pried off your shoes as Helena closed the heavy vault door, turning all of the metal spires so the locks clicked, leaving only you and her within the room.

It was a heavy silence for a couple minutes. Helena didn't do anything but stand, staring intensely at the vaulted door, as if it was responsible for destroying your mountain top mansion.

You curled into the bed. The quilts had the consistency of hotel blankets, thin and flimsy, allowing all the cold air to pass through the threads.

The side of the bed sank when Helena sat down, her long legs bent at the knees awkwardly. Her hand placed softly on your back, which was huddled in the corner of the bed, pulled over with the quilts.

"Are you okay?" Helena asked. Her voice was hard. She sounded as if she were in a great deal of pain.

You rolled over. You faced your own wall, turning your back on her. When you did not answer, Helena asked again. "Don't ignore me," she snapped.

You jerked upright.

Helena looked momentarily surprised, as if she'd watched a corpse rise from his grave. You stared at her with wide, angry eyes.

"Don’t even start,” you snapped, holding up a finger to stop whatever words Helena was about to start blabbering out.

"You're not allowed to speak to me any way you want, any time you want," you added with a jab of your finger. You scrambled to leave the bed, tripping over the bedding as you clumsily plunged out of her reach.

"I understand that you're stressed," you said, trying to control the volume at which you spoke. "But you always take it out on me. You always make me feel like the world's going to end."

Helena pinched her nose, bending so her elbows rested on her knees. She looked stressed, just so stressed, just about as stressed as you were feeling, but maybe less angry and shaky. "This is serious, Y/n," she said slowly, as if she didn't think you would have understood her otherwise.

"Even so, we have to keep our wits about us. We have to keep our relationship steady, otherwise we're just going to fall apart and fail. This relationship will not last. It will not last. We are always going to be chased by these troubles, by your enemies. I think I could handle it if we didn't get into massive fucking fights every time it happened. It feels like I'm a kid again, watching my parents go back and forth, staying together 'for us kids', when it's pretty clear that divorce would just be better for all of us."

Helena by now had released her face. She had a blank expression as she stared at you.

"I'm sorry," she finally said.

You couldn't muster much energy, so you shrugged and collapsed on the little sofa. "I don't care anymore," you muttered. "I just want water. I want to sleep."

Helena ran to your side. She knelt at your feet, quite literally on her hands and knees for you. She braced her hands on your thighs. "How can I make it up to you?"

You stared down at her, unsure of what to say.

"I cannot lose you," she said next. "There wouldn't be a reason to have such safehouses like this if I lost you."

"I cannot handle these fights anymore. It's too much."

"What can I do?"

"I just want to sleep," you sighed. "I'd rather just...listen to the television."

Helena led you to the bed, straightening out the mess you'd made when you'd trampled out of it. You shimmied out of your pants, throwing them out so you could sleep comfortably.

"Please just talk to me," Helena begged as she laid behind you. She wrapped her arms around you tenderly, your back pressed against her chest. "I'm just tired, Helena," you sighed as you let your eyes fall shut.

Helena dragged her hand up the stomach of your shirt, her calloused palm tucking close against your belly.

"I'm tired," you whispered.

Her fingers slipped beneath the band of your underwear. Her palm cupped your warmth, her lips pressing soothing kisses behind your ear.

She did not tease that night. She swept two finger tips into the opening of your hot, twitchy cunt, swiping drops of arousal and then spreading it around your clit. The lubricant beneath her fingertips made the sensation slippery and slick. You slowly gasped at the feeling. The sensation got you to slip out of your body for a split second, as if you could see the scene playing out in front of you. Your hips were grinding fast and hard into Helena's hand.

You snatched her wrist and pushed her hand down. "Inside," you snapped. "If you're really sorry, then inside."

"As you wish," Helena murmured. Her three fingers pushed up and in, stretching the velvety walls of your cunt out. You wanted to scream. Her fingers curled and reached up at the spongey spot way inside of you, like the brightest star in all the galaxy.

"Shit!" you cried. You lurched your head back, your hair scrunching up into Helena's face and nose. She didn't seem to care as she slowly pumped in and out, always making sure to press up at your starpoint.

"Never again," you cried as you gripped at Helena's forearm. You used this as an anchor point to keep you grounded while you wiggled your hips into Helena's hand. "You're never again going to treat me this way. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Dove, yes," Helena assured you in a soothing voice. "You're such a good bird for me," she sighed, her cool breath tickling your ear. "And you deserve good things. You deserve to cum all over my hand."

Yes, an internal voice shrieked within you. You thought another version of yourself would punch through your chest and take over, take over everything.

Your entire existence rolled up into nothing but pure light as you felt your high coming on quickly. You knew you were cumming, and Helena did too, for she used her other hand to simultaneously stimulate your clit.

The pressure released, like a balloon snapping in your belly.

You were breathing heavily as you sank into Helena's arms. You hadn't realized how tense you'd been until all of your muscles relaxed.

"I'm sorry, Dove," Helena murmured into your ear. She held you tight and close. Her natural perfume, a blend of rosewater and fresh flowers, flooded your senses. With your energy dwindling after such an exertion, you didn't have the strength to argue or complain. You laid there, silently accepting her apology. No longer were you distracted by the wanton desires for orgasm and relief. And in the same way, you were no longer consumed with bitter anger.

"Do you promise we're going to be alright?" you asked, voice cracking and hoarse.

Helena kissed your neck.

"I do."

#just so we're clear i have no idea who the villains of this story are #whomstever broke into your mansion is anonymous #there will be no part two #i have no more creativitiy #i spelled that wrong #i dont care #helena bertinelli x reader #helena bertinelli imagine #helena bertinelli imagein #birds of prey x reader #birds of prey imagine #dceu x reader #dceu imagine #dc x reader #dc imagine #starfirette writes

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ot3 · 3 years

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i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey.

anyway. here you have it.

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith. I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it.

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene.

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land.

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass.

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area. In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.

#long post #really long post guys. look out !#rvb

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why-this-kolaveri-machi · 3 years

Text

please. i can’t do this alone.

Titans 3.01

thoughts! thoughts! thoughts! some red hot thoughts!

SPOILERS ahead.

1. one episode in, and this season already looks set to give me everything i want. its abandonment of plot and storytelling conventions as it goes from one point to the next at breakneck speed; its cheerful bastardisation of iconic storylines from the comics; the ‘as-you-know-bob’ clunky exposition on one end and extremely restrained, subtle explorations of complex character dynamics on the other; endless shots of neon bleeding into black and blue corridors, shadows and silhouettes; my delight in seeing it celebrate and deconstruct the dark nolan-y batman aesthetic at the same time; my bafflement that it’s so fucking goddamn obsessed with the batfam when it’s supposed to be about the TITANS; kory just... saving every overburdened, clunky scene that she’s in by her sparkling charisma. just... *chef’s kiss*. muah. my show is back, in all its glory.

MY SHOW IS BACK, Y’ALL!

1.5. i mean... this show is so artful and weird and not afraid to go absolutely bonkers in exploring its characters’ psyche, but can just about barely stage a passable comic book fight when every tom dick and harry and their new streaming services can deliver ones that are far more exciting. i love this show with every atom of my body.

(there’s something to be said about rooting for the underdog as well. a pleasure in finding something to love about what other people dismiss. but! enough navel gazing! i have fictional characters’ navels to look at! metaphorically! and maybe literally!)

2. i expected jason’s death to come about pretty early in the season as soon as i heard rumours that red hood was showing up, but for it to happen in the first five minutes of the first episode... that’s a record.

(well. “happen.” still don’t know what exactly went down there.)

2.25. GOD. jason is such a tortured and tragic character in this show, used and passed around by people with alleged good intentions, never really fitting in anywhere. he’s veritably bleeding vulnerability and the need to belong, the need to be known, and yet the tragedy is that his death proves that nobody in his life knew anything about him at all; that they only saw the flimsy walls he put up to protect his soft core, and thought that that was all there was. that they say they loved him, but blame him for his own death.

dick is flabbergasted that jason can read, though we know from last season, from what jason revealed to rose, that he has a love for plays and music. barbara is quick to dismiss his actions as ‘impulsive’. bruce has no idea that his supposed son was building his own little chemistry lab right under his nose, and beyond that, no idea that jason needed structure, stability and validation beyond being left alone in a huge house with a treasure trove of dangerous weapons. kory thought his decision to fight the joker was from not learning and growing when the guy tried to kill himself last season and nobody apart from dick even tried to talk to him about it! did you consider that he might still be suicidal? especially after the titans admitted to having “given up” on him because he was just “too hard”?

2.5. the one thing that’s been consistent across all three seasons (so far) of the show is the unreliable narrator trope. there’s a reason why the characters’ dismissals of jason’s actions as impulsive is so repetitive; why jason’s death is a mystery dick feels compelled to solve. it’s a flailing attempt to know his brother much too late--but with red hood, maybe he gets a second chance, just like he got one with the titans. this is what jason’s arc has been building up to. this is ‘death in the family’ but more fucked up in some ways. it didn’t linger on the death because the death wasn’t the point. the joker isn’t the point. everything that came before it is.

this way it will also make perfect sense that the red hood’s main enemy becomes the titans rather than batman.

2.75. goodness knows what’s going on with jason’s little chemistry project. at first i thought he was immunising himself to joker gas or something, but maybe it’s what passes for lazarus pit juice in this universe?

anyway, it’s pretty impressive that jason learnt all of that from a college chemistry textbook. STOP BRINGING UP THAT HE READ SOMETHING, DICK--

2.8. i’m glad that dick doesn’t immediately sink into self-loathing and guilt and tries to investigate jason’s death while also acknowledging how he failed him. it’s like he actually learned something from the last two years!

anyway. more about dick later.

3. oh how i love titans!bruce. a lot of characters had a lot of Opinions on his reaction to jason’s death in this episode, but again, i ask you to consider that they’re unreliable narrators, and this universe’s bruce is a product of how it shaped him. bruce wayne has become a phantom to himself--an artifice borne out of vigorous discipline and crushing self-denial.

bruce has been batman for a very long time, and without a robin for much longer. (dick must be... in his early thirties? so he was robin for about, say, 10-12 years according to the timeline of the show. that still makes bruce pretty old when he took on his first robin.) things have... calcified (possibly parts of his brain). the personal cost and the collateral from the mission he’s taken up for most of his life is too much to countenance; it has to be a war, and war requires sacrifice.

on some level bruce knows that’s a lie. he’s so goddamned alone. what’s he going to do? sit down and cry? who’s going to listen to him now? oh, is he going to just stop being batman? who’s going to stop gotham from consuming herself then? he’ll just have to forge ahead, do better next time, maybe he’ll be firmer with them, or kinder with them, or notice more things, or train them harder, or spend more time--

3.25. don’t get me wrong: titans!bruce is an asshole and a half. his roster of potential robins was honestly bone-chilling. the fact that there’s a twisted root of compassion makes it more disturbing.

3.5. alfred’s dead! it must’ve been pretty recent, because i could’ve sworn that dick tried to call alfred in the very first episode of season 1, or at least considered calling him...

what a devastating double-blow for bruce then, losing his father-figure and his, uh.... son-figure so close together.

4. i don’t know about barbara yet. i mean, i like her, but she had so much clunky expository dialogue to deliver this episode, and for an episode that was named after her, she only showed up halfway through it. but i like the weight of history behind her interactions with both bruce and dick and her compassion to bruce before he cruelly crossed a line. i also like the implication that she and dick have been in touch recently, and that she didn’t immediately try to guilt-trip dick about some perceived abandonment. it’d be too repetitive.

4.5. there’s also a sense that she ran interference for dick a lot whenever there was something Too Big and Emotional for him to confront directly, and i like and appreciate that character beat.

5. dick, my man! it really does feel like a substantial length of time has passed between the end of s2 and the beginning of s3... kory’s got a new costume, they’ve become celebrities in SF, working missions together, and dick’s actually smiling! genuinely enjoying his work and having fun with it for possibly the first time in the entire series! it’s really a far cry from the fractured, dysfunctional mess that they were at the end of the last season.

i just hope this doesn’t mean that they’ve magically reached a resolution off-screen to all of their fucked-upness from last season, and that the repercussions--for gar in particular--are actually addressed on screen.

5.25. i mentioned this briefly above, but it really is so refreshing that dick doesn’t wallow in guilt and self-loathing after jason’s death; he acknowledges his and the titans’ failure, is able to admit to barbara honestly that he’s not doing great, and is actively trying to reach out to bruce to make sure he’s ok, is trying to investigate what made jason seek out the joker on his own, and is probably the only person not immediately buying that it was jason’s recklessness that got him killed. i love that dick is finally beginning to trust his instincts or just employ them at all after years of guilt and paranoia and self-loathing. we love some positive character growth!

5.5. another thing i love? the bruce-dick interactions on this show. every scene they’re in together is so fraught with tension, both of them holding themselves back, their emotions on a whipcord-tight leash. dick wants to reach out to bruce, is even somewhat familiar with this brand of denial in the wake of grief, but wants barbara to make the first move because he genuinely does not know how to get bruce to open up. his instincts are right, and wonderful, and genuine, but his expression has been smothered by years of trauma, emotional and physical self-discipline, and what i suspect is poorly treated mental illness.

it takes a lot for him to finally explode at bruce at the end of the episode--in a way he hasn’t done even when his only opinion of bruce was ‘fuck him’--and it’s all the more startling for how subdued he’s been through the episode, how much he’s been holding back his emotions for bruce’s sake. love it.

5.75. it sort of hurts my heart to see the flying graysons poster in jason’s room. there are a few implications:

a) jason settled into dick’s old room despite living in a giant mansion with dozens of other rooms he could’ve used

b) he didn’t take down dick’s poster--not when he moved in and was idolising him, not when he moved out of the titans and was sort of hating him. i wonder if the reminder of what dick was before robin--that he was forged out of unspeakable tragedy--gave jason the connection to dick that he so desperately wanted in real life

c) dick moved right back into the room and slept on the bed that was now jason’s. grief can be so quiet and piecemeal sometimes.

6. i spy the beginnings of actual arcs for both gar and kory! i just hope that with the move to gotham their stories don’t fall to the wayside...

6.5. i’ve known tim drake for less than ten minutes but if anything were to happen to him i’d kill everybody

7. this review has gone on for too long and i am tiRED. however, before i leave: i miss some of the dedication-to-aesthetic that titans season 1 used to have. remember how the first few episodes didn’t really feel like a superhero show but something out of gothic horror? there was something gorgeous and raw about that, about open landscapes and the road and creepy buildings looming up at the end of it. moving to titans tower in s2 really ruined a lot of that for me, given its ripped-from-architectural-digest aesthetic, all smooth and clean and artificial.

i hope that we really explore gotham’s hellscape in interesting and innovative ways instead of camping out in the batcave all the time and indulging in the show’s unending love for long corridors, neon backlights and silhouettes.

8.....

9. wait, fuck, HOW CAN I FORGET ABOUT HOT PSYCHIATRIST GUY (TM)??? NONE of you prepared me for his return! NONE OF YOU! i gasped! i got up and did a happy dance!

listen, titans writers, if you’ve had a peek at my titans s3 wishlist, please go ahead and give the other items on the list a go too, thankyouverymuch.

#titans #titans spoilers #meta #jason todd #dick grayson #bruce wayne #barbara gordon #a tragic jalebi #a byronic cupcake

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angelguk · 4 years

Text

→ heartfelt — a jeongguk scenario

member: jeon jeongguk

word count: 6.4k

genre: angst idk maybe + slow (slow!) burn + best friends! to we could be lovers but we’re both to nervous to ask each other out

warnings: mentions of cheating / that’s it lol / jk is soft for oc and vice versa honestly / a lot of mutual pinning / mentions of virgin!jk

soundtrack: against the tide, will fox

Summer is gone. It's evident by the crisp breeze that sweeps through the air, idly plucking at the copper leaves dangling precariously from the branches that long to be free of them. Your hands are cold, even though they're are snugly buried in the pockets of your jacket - which is too flimsy for the current weather raging through your town. You'd misjudged how cold it was becoming, mind still clinging onto the warm reminiscences of summer. There was still a slither of golden sunlight splaying onto the ground, but the chill that filled the atmosphere negated the minuscule effects of the sun. You brave through it regardless, ignoring the goosebumps settling across your skin with every fierce gush of wind that travels through the air. But it's easy to ignore it, a slight spring in your steps as you trudge through the sodden ground, feet steering you down the familiar hill. The soil slips under your feet, but you already know which areas to avoid. Your steps are sure as you descend, heart thumping hard in your chest. You rather not focus your attention on that so you train your eyes onto the ground. One comfort is that you know you don't have to look for him. He's already waiting, back turned to your loud footsteps. The lake spans out before him, cold and murky but you're not afraid of it. The stillness is actually serene, the immobile water before you calming the rush of blood in your head.

You give it a moment, each step you take towards him another deep inhale of autumn air. Then, fondly, you knee the back of his leg.

"Oh fuck off!" He's turning swiftly, hand raised to punch your shoulder. You take it was soft laugh tumbling from your mouth, lips turned upwards in a smile. It echoes on his face a second later, petal pink lips spreading into a grin that makes your heart jump sharply.

"Hello to you too," You murmur, slinging your arm around his neck. You have to stretch out to reach him, he's been taller than you since freshman year. Jeongguk leans down in response, giving you the chance to ruffle his soft brown curls without protest. "You called me out here and you don't even acknowledge my presence. That's not very cash money of you."

Your laugh turns into a loud huff when he elbows your rib roughly. "Shut up. Let me hug you."

And you do, nuzzling your face into his wide chest as he wraps his firm arms around your waist. It's nice, to feel Jeongguk surround you, a sure presence that you know you're going to miss. But you don't want to focus on that right now, mind instead zeroing on how his body feels pressed flush against your own. There's taut muscle flexing underneath your fingertips, hiding beneath the billowy fabric of his sweater. He feels different. Very different from how you first meet him. The once scrawny kid that crushed your play-dough castle by mistake when you where nursery school and cried while helping you rebuild it because he felt guilty about it, is now bulky and tall. The memory coaxes a tiny giggle from your lips, one that Jeongguk catches on to despite your face being buried into his sweater.

"What are you laughing at?" He murmurs, giving your frame a tight loving squeeze. You lean into it, the press of his palm against the low of your back sending a strange tingle through your system.

"Nothing," You respond, tilting your head to get a glimpse of his face. He looks different too, his round baby gradually transforming into a bold jawline and pretty brown eyes throughout your time together. The change had resulted in half your school developing a crush on him, which you understand. Jeongguk is cute. Very cute. It's hard to deny, even though he's your best friend.

Maybe he can hear what you're thinking because he stares back, gaze holding an intention you can't decipher but it makes blood rush to your face. "You're not just thinking about nothing," He whispers, voice carried by the autumn breeze.

You hum, knowing his caught onto your lie but hasn't found what's truly ruminating in your head. "Just thinking about how much you've changed. And how much I'll miss you." Which is true, you will miss him immensely. He squeezes you hard at that revelation, tight like he's afraid you'll vanish from his hold right now.

"Of course I've changed," He retorts, tone light but you can sense something wavering beneath it. "So have you. And I'll miss you too. You and your stinky socks living in the back of my car."

You give him a sharp look, face warm from the way he laughs gently. "Please," You say, "How many times have I found your boxers in my car? Or your dirty shoes? Remember the time I found a condo-”

"Hey! We said we wouldn't discuss that. And," He continues loudly, gaze noting your open mouth. "It wasn't used. It probably fell out of my pocket.”

"Why would you even need one? It's not like you were sleeping with anyone," You say, an eyebrow quirked. Jeongguk flushes at that, cheeks a pretty rouge that you fondly poke at.

"Taehyung gave it to me," He says, arms still snug around your waist, the gentle lapping of water drifting through the air. "Just in case, you know."

"In case of what? You don't talk to girls." Maybe that's harsh to say but it's the truth. Jeongguk does not talk to girls.

"I do," He pouts. "I just don't want to lose my virginity to just anyone you know. I want it to be special." There's a faraway look in his eyes that makes your stomach to a funny thing. You poke his cheek again, forcing him to glance down. "I don't know how that's going to work out for you in college my dude."

He grins, cocking his head. "It'll work out, don't worry. I'll find someone."

For some reason the last comment makes you feel strange, skin prickling at the mere idea of Jeongguk with someone. He'd never dated anyone. Ever. No matter how many pretty girls threw themselves at him, the star quarterback with good grades and a sheepish grin, he'd never fallen into anything serious. He'd fooled around, of course, you'd heard the stories, seen some of them occur in the corner of some party. But as far as you know Jeongguk had never gone that far. He'd never really explained his reasoning, but the fact that he was now leaving you, moving far away into a world unknown, the thought kept reappearing in your head. You wonder who he'll choose, who he'll trust enough to do that with. It makes your heartache with an unfamiliar pain, which it shouldn't at all. Jeongguk is your best friend, not your boyfriend.

Your boyfriend is waiting for you at the cinema right now. And you know he wouldn't be happy to know that this is what you're thinking as you bid your closet friend goodbye. But you can't help it, not when Jeongguk pulls you closer to him like he wants to print your body against his forever.

"I hope you do," You murmur. You don't expect his body to still when you say that but it does. "I mean," You try again, "Not like that. I just hope you find someone who really loves you, you know. You deserve that." For some reason, the words feel clunky coming out of your mouth.

Jeongguk is staring at you hard, eyebrows furrowed together with an emotion you can't pinpoint, but the look itself makes your heart swiftly sink to your gut. "Do you love me?" It's an odd question, the words tumbling over themselves as they rush out his mouth. You naturally blanch, mouth agape as your search for the right answer because Jeongguk is still looking at you, brown eyes glittering in the soft sunlight that basks over his face.

"O-of course I do," You splutter. "You're my best-friend why wouldn't I love you?" He hums, eyes fluttering shut like he longs to snatch that sudden question back into his mouth. "Never mind," He mutters. "Stupid question. I love you too."

"It's not a stupid question," You insist but Jeongguk is squeezing you again, a silent plea not to prod. You clamp your mouth shut reluctantly.

"It is," He laughs. "I know you love me - as friends of course. Are you going to see Changwoo today?"

You raise an eyebrow, perplexed by his sudden curiosity. "Yeah, we have a date this afternoon."

"That's nice. You look good together." There's a coldness in his tone that you read easily. But you don't comment on it, too afraid to prod at him too closely. You don't want your farewell to end in a childish fight.

"Thank you," You say instead, careful with your tone. "Let's not talk about him though. I'm gonna miss you, you that right. Why'd you have a pick a school so far away?"

He sighs. "I'll miss you too." Then his gaze falters, head turned towards the quiet lake beside your joint bodies. There's a lump in his throat that you hear when he speaks. "I just thought...I just thought it would be nice to getaway. Go to a place where no one knows me. No expectations hanging over my head. A clean slate, you know. So I can explore who I am. I don't have to fit into what others think of me anymore."

You pause, flummoxed by the sudden confession. You had meant to joke about the distance of his university but instead, you'd stumbled into this. It makes your breath stick inside your chest, brain trying to process the torrent of words Jeongguk had just dumped into the air. You hadn't even known he was carrying all of this on him. He hadn't seemed down during senior year or graduation for that matter. You still, with clarity, remember his bright smile on that day. And the ringing sound of his laughter that floated through the air constantly, his happiness tangible at that moment. But maybe he was celebrating finally being free, from everyone's projections on his being, and not necessarily being free from the prison of the education system. It makes your heart sink your stomach, at the mere thought of Jeongguk feeling like he could be him, around the people who cared about him most. And you feel even worse for not picking up on that earlier.

"Really?" You quietly comment. "You hadn't said any of that before. Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because you'd worry," Jeongguk reasons, a small laugh drifting from his lips. He licks them, pink tongue poking out innocently, like his regretting saying anything in the first place.

"Of course I'd worry, that's my job. I'm your friend Jeongguk. I'm meant to worry about you." It comes out with more vehemence than you thought it would, but you mean it. Every word. What were friends for if they didn't care about each other? And you care about Jeongguk. Very much.

He must sense that in your words because he's suddenly looking at you, gaze sharp like he's trying to navigate through a precarious situation in his head. It's blatantly clear to you though, reading like black and white. But Jeongguk looks like he's lost in the grey, searching for a way out that won't dismantle what you have. You see it in the way he hangs his head, nose bumping against yours. Your heart hurts from how hard to slams into your ribs.

"I know. But you worry too much sometimes." He says it gingerly, as if he's attempting to walk across ice that looks frozen but isn't. "It's something I had to deal with on my own. I hope you understand that. Don't take it to heart." "You know I will," You murmur, the pain in your chest making your grip the front of his sweater desperately. "You should have told me."

"I know," He hums. "I know, I'm sorry. Forgot it. It's resolved now. I wanted to have a nice goodbye with you. Not this."

You bite back the words you long to say because that's what you wanted too. You won't see Jeongguk until next year. He'd decided beforehand to spend Christmas at his grandparents, who lived (inconveniently) across the country. And he wasn't keen on coming back for spring break either. So this was your last official meeting before he departed for the airport tomorrow morning. You didn't want to leave on bad terms, you wanted him to go knowing that'd you'd always be here for him. Still his best-friend even with the distance between the two of you.

That's what keeps your mouth shut. Instead of prodding further, you let it rest, rocking hard into Jeongguk.

"Fine. We need to talk about it someday, though."

He makes a small noise of acknowledgement, deep in the back of his throat. There's a hand running down your back. "I know. Someday. God, I'm going to miss you."

The pain in your heart spreads violently through your body, fingers clinging desperately onto his sweater. "I'm going to miss you too."

You remind yourself of summer. This past summer, where you practically lived in Jeongguk's pocket and the coming one, where'll you see him again. That's what quells the ache you feel. The reminder that you'll see him again.

—

Your eyes hurt. But you still keep them open, staring at the bright computer screen before you. You need to conjure up another four hundred words for this essay to be complete but for the life of you can you can't think of any. There's a hollowness inside of you, body and mind drained from the demands of your education. Your head is completely and utterly empty, fingers already itching to scroll mindlessly through your twitter feed. Maybe you will stumble on something funny that'll force your brain to produce an inkling of serotonin. You could really do with some serotonin right now.

Fortunately for you, the device emits a loud ping as your reach for it. You hurriedly toss your laptop aside, into the jumble of blankets you're currently huddled in. It's too warm for them but you don't care. There's a comfort in being wrapped up in a fluffy blanket. One you desperately need because there's no one around right now who'll stomach your constant whining and need for touch. Jeongguk would have - if he was here. But he wasn't. Something you're still not quite used to. The blankets keep your warm thought, a gentle heat that travels through your body. Even with the sun still raging outside, the onset of summer irrefutable, you don't shrug them off. But when your eyes land on the contact name flashing before your screen, you freeze. Despite the stifling heat filtering into your room, your blood runs cold. It takes you a moment to regain your breath before you muster the courage to tap the message open.

You don't know why you're nervous though. He's not a stranger. You don't talk as much as you would like to, the presence of distance weakening your bond. But that bond was still unbreakable. He was your best-friend after all. And yet, your palms still warm when you tentatively press on his contact name.

gukkie (04:23 pm)

hey

are you busy?

sorry for going mia

university is hard

You roll your eyes because he's acting like you're not in university too. But for once, you brush it aside, ignoring the essay hanging over your head, fingers swiftly typing out a response.

you (04:24pm)

hello 2 u 2 stranger

im good thank u for asking

and yes uni is hard jk i would know im a student too

gukkie (04:29 pm)

fuck sorry

i hope im not interrupting ur work

i just wanted to talk

i miss u

The text makes you pause, fingers stagnant above your keyboard. You chew your bottom lip as you respond, the strange apprehension you're harbouring overtaking your system.

you (04:31 pm)

i miss you too

how are you?

u doing okay?

don't worry i didn't want to do this work anyway :)

gukkie (04:33 pm)

uhhh i wouldn't say im doing great

but im alive

if that counts for something good

i don't know anymore it's kinda hard out here

You're blinking hard as you type, the sudden meekness in his tone makes your heart seize in your chest.

you (04:36 pm)

what's wrong?

talk to me please

are your class that hard?

gukkie (04:38 pm)

yes :(

i hate it here

i miss u

it's just really stressful

i don't mind the people

i've made good friends

it's just

THE WORK

IT'S SO MUCH

:(((((

you (04:41 pm)

u wanna drop out?

sorry im not being helpful i don't know what to say

prioritise? start a bullet journal?

i suck at stress management too u know that

but feel free to rant

gukkie (04:43 pm)

drop out and what? start an onlyfans?

you (04:44 pm)

im not saying that's an option but like.. that is an option

u would be very popular

hot bod big dick

i can see the dollar signs already

gukkie (04:47 pm)

how do YOU know my dick isn't average sized? huh?

where r they small penises rights

big dick this big dick that

it's not the size of the boat that matters. it's the motion of the ocean!!

SMALL PENIS RIGHTS I DEMAND IT

also

the work isn't bad it's just like, a lot. i can handle it im just really fucking tired

you (04:50 pm)

damn okay mr skinny penis

regardless!! don't forget to take care of yourself!

drink water! sleep! masturbate!! and eat u dumb bastard i know u forget to eat

gukkie (04:53 pm)

ASKLGJRK I HATE U

leave us skinny penis men alone

damn u r right i did forget to eat today

u know me so well

did i already say i miss u

i miss u

There's a warmth spreading through you that melts away the apprehension you were previously feeling.

you (04:58 pm)

i know u said it like ten times dumbass

when are u coming? wanna see ur ugly face

gukkie (05:02 pm) oh

i was texting u to tell u i wasn't coming home for summer

i've got a trip planned with my friends

maybe i'll stop by towards the end of summer

i probably will

but i might also go to my grandparents...moms staying there for summer and she offered to bring anything i needed

sorry

i wanted to see your face too

but i'll be home for christmas this year!!

i promise

The warmth immediately ebbs away, your hands suddenly clammy as you stare at the screen. It's been months since you'd seen Jeongguk. You hadn't hugged him, touched him, elbowed his ribs since last year. And while you're happy that he's settling into his new crowd easily, it still hurts. You feel like you're standing on the edge of his life, gradually being pushed out of view as shinier things replace your relationship. And you don't want to lose Jeongguk. You've lost enough this year already. Yet you tack a smile onto your face, like he's here in the room with you, observing your false expression. Your fingertips flash across the keyboard sure in their movements, even though you know everything you're saying is a lie.

you (05:10 pm)

that's fine!

i'll see u at christmas then

i have something to tell u btw

gukkie (05:12 pm)

i have something to tell you to

u go first

you (05:13 pm)

no u go first

gukkie (05:15 pm)

okay fine

guess who's not a virgin anymore

Oh. That's not what you expected to read. At all.

you (05:18 pm)

what poor girl fell for your trap

You're vehemently ignoring the ache gripping your heart.

gukkie (05:19 pm)

haha so funny

her name is miyeon

she's really sweet

Oh. That makes it worse. You don't know why but that makes it so much worse.

you (05:22 pm)

that's nice

i bet she said ur dick was small

gukkie (05:24 pm)

quite the contrary, my dear watson

she came back for seconds

and thirds

and im seeing her tomorrow

You really want to hit something. It would be very nice to smash your fist into something right now.

you (05:26 pm)

okay okay mr massive schlong

are you dating her?

gukkie (05:27 pm)

no lol

it's just a casual thing

you (05:30 pm)

do u like her tho?

gukkie (05:31 pm)

maybe? idk

it's weird

she's nice and pretty

and really fucking smart

but i don't really feel anything towards her

if u get what i mean

Your heartbeat finally calms down for a second, but the pain is still there, it's fingers digging into your heart tightly with no intention of letting go.

you (05:32 pm)

i do

use protection please

i don't want little demonic yous running around

gukkie (05:32 pm)

awww u know i would make a great dad

what did u want to tell me?

you (05:34 pm)

u? would make a good dad? that's funny tell me another joke

i kinda have to go now

i can tell u later

gukkie (05:35 pm)

don't leave meee :(

and don't lie to yourself i would make an awesome dad

why can't you tell me now?

but okay if you've got something to do go

i kinda need to run to a study group anyway

you (05:37 pm)

that's a lie and u know it

go run to your study group!! and remember to eat something 2 i'll call u later

gukkie (05:40 pm)

i will i promise

bye!!

CALL ME LATER

you (05:41 pm)

i'll call u :)

There's a harsh ping that indicates Jeongguk has sent you one more message, but you've already tossed your phone across the room, not even bothering to glance at it when it thuds loudly on the edge of your bed. You roll over, cocooning yourself in the blankets that smother you in their heat. It helps, a mild distraction from the bizarre pain that grips your soul with no remorse. There's an ache with every hard thump of your heart against your ribcage, eyes squeezed shut as you attempt to work through the foreign emotion that threatens to swallow you. It takes a while for you to find it, that place in your heart that isn't consumed by the overwhelming disappointment that consumes everything in its wake. You should be happy for Jeongguk. You know you should. He's out there, moving forward in life, meeting people that are important to him. And yet, that little tidbit about Miyeon makes something in your crumble. You can’t help but ball your fists up, involuntary folding in on yourself. Sometimes Jeongguk feels so far, for someone that whole so close to your heart. But it’s worse now that you know he’s found someone who he trusts like that. You never expected it. Well, you did, but you’d just refused to acknowledge that one-day Jeongguk would move on. He’d already moved out of the town you knew like the back of your palm, and now he’s drifting further and further away. In reach of your fingertips but too far away for you to grasp onto him and draw him back.

It would hurt a little less if your heart still wasn’t shattered from Changwoo. You can’t even bring yourself to Jeongguk about it. All the lies and false pretences that you blindly believed. Some part of you had loved Changwoo, but it was clear when you found him with his mouth on another girl that he never loved you. And after all of that, he had the audacity to accuse you of lying to him during your relationship. You remember it with a clarity that burns, the way he’d stood at your door, hands folded on his chest and that pretty mouth you once loved to kiss twisted into a scowl.

“Jeongguk. You love him. You’ve never loved me. It was always him. Always.” He’d spat it out with such vehemence, aiming right for your heart with his heated glare. It hurts even now. But what’s worse was the spluttered. At a loss for words because your boyfriend was jealous about your friendship with your best-friend. Yet he’d taken that as confirmation of his assumptions and nothing you could do could rectify that in is mind. It was always Jeongguk. Always. No matter how you phrased your words and tried to redirect the situation to his blatant cheating. He found a way to blame you. Blame your closeness to Jeongguk. Blame your love for your best-friend.

Maybe that’s why you had pushed him away. But it’s not like Jeongguk had noticed. You’d seen enough of his Snaps and Instagram stories to know how fast-paced and wild his life was. Too busy learning who he was to care about your silence.

You curled up in a ball now, face hot with the promise of tears. You blink them away before they can spill down your cheek, heart sore from the loneliness that consumes you. The blankets hold you as you mull over everything; the conversation you’d just had with Jeongguk, the screaming match you’d had with Changwoo, the questions that you ask yourself deep into the night when sleep has insisted on passing you by. It’s not something you can admit to - because then Changwoo would be right. And yet, you can’t help but turn that thought over and over again in your head. Jeongguk was too far from you now, but that doesn’t stop your heart from clinging onto the fond memories you have of them. He was your best-friend for a reason. There were days in high school when his obnoxious laugh and ridiculous jokes got you through the mountain of assignments that constantly weighed you down. You can’t forget the way his body feels pressed against yours, a sure hold, it’s intent comfort. Nothing had ever felt like that. Not even Changwoo’s hugs. You treasure those moments so much, to an extent that’s unhealthy sometimes if you're honest with yourself. But there’s also a small tiny part of you that quietly wishes those moments were more. More what? You’re not sure. Or you refuse to acknowledge what you mean by ‘more’. It’s there though, that slither of your heart that always wanted more.

—

gukkie (03:21 am)

heyyy

hi :)))

y/n

missss u

imissssuuuuu

so mcuh

gukkie (03:23 am)

wneh i cum back we need 2 talk

hae soething 2 teel u

i have

fuck

whatber

i really ned 2 talk 2 u

thts it

okai now i go

mmmmis u!!!

we tajl soon!

gukkie (10:43 am)

omg im so sorry

ignore those messages

i was really fucking drunk

summer has been interesting…

I DO MISS U THO

so much dude

can’t wait to you at christmas!!

you (01:12 pm)

lol okay

can’t wait to see u then 2

tell me what day you’re coming!

wanna surprise you

gukkie (01:37 pm)

how is it a surprise if you tell me you want to surprise me?

you (01:46 pm)

just tell me which date u dingus

gukkie (02:14 pm)

nope :) it’s a surprise

—

You don't hear the first thud, probably because your ears are filled with the melodious hum of piano keys skipping over a lofi beat. There's the familiar image of the anime girl studying on your laptop screen as you switch between documents, fingertips hitting the keyboard of your laptop swiftly. This essay is due in five hours and you'd only just started it, after wasting the whole morning laughing at memes on Twitter and taking naps in between the intervals of your boredom. Sunlight had already begun to wane when you'd finally parked your butt on your bed, somewhat motivated to power through this essay. What was left of the sun was still able to spear through the cloudy sky and constant snowfall, albeit in thin pathetic slithers. You blame the weather for making you sluggish and not your poor work ethic. Even though it's really just your poor work ethic. It's only after the third loud thud of a snowball smashing into your window, that your tear you gaze from the research paper you're scouring through for your essay on the implications of the social cognitive theory. There are about a thousand tabs open on your screen and you know sorting through your citations later will be chaos.

But you instantly forget the pile of work awaiting you, when your eyes land on that dark curly tuft of brown hair that you've grown accustomed too. You push your laptop off your lap so fast that it nearly tips towards the floor, your legs tumbling through the thick blanket you'd wrapped yourself up as you pluck your earphones from your ears and toss them onto the sheets behind you. The floor is chilly beneath your sock-clad feet but you're moving to fast to care. There's a frenetic thumping in your chest, mouth sore from how broadly you're grinning. He's standing at the foot of your window, thoroughly bundled up in a thick jacket and black scarf wrapped snugly around his waist. Your heart does an Olympic worthy back-flip with you spot the smile gracing his lips. It's a warming sight, how his petal pink lips are upturned and the slightest glitter in his brown eyes when you lock gazes. The buzzing in your head is deafening as you struggle with the clasps on your window.

"Jeongguk?" There's an immediate billow of cold slamming into you but you brave through it, your body warms from the blood pounding through you. "What the hell! You said you were coming tomorrow!”

He cocks his head, a behaviour akin to his lively cocker spaniel Miri. "Surprise! I told Mom to tell you the wrong date." It's followed by that sheepish smile of his, a small grin that makes your stomach flutter. But then you note the way he shivers, feet lodged in the snow-covered ground and ivory flakes softly settling into his hair. Your fingers itch with the desire to brush them away.

"Dude you're freezing, come inside before you get hypothermia."

He shakes his head, snowflakes drifting to the ground were the vanish among the vast sea of blinding white beneath him. "Nope. Come outside. I wanna go to the lake - that is, if you're not busy."

You blink, immediately thinking of the essay waiting for you to return. But this is Jeongguk, you're best-friend that you haven't seen for a month now, standing right in front of you. Professor Bang would get his essay when you were in the mood to write.

"Nope," You lie. "I'm not busy." And when he smiles, cheeks rosy from the cold, you know it's worth it.

It doesn't take you long to get ready, snatching your winter jacket from the closet and a scarf similar to Jeongguk's. Absentmindedly you grab a beanie for him too, remembering the sight of his rouge tinted ears and snow-coated head. He accepts it without question, tugging the thing over his head the moment you had it too much, boots kicking through the snow as you trek off.

"When did you arrive?" You ask, struggling to keep up with his fast footsteps. He's always been faster than you, even when you were kids. Too much energy in him since birth, like a puppy on steroids.

"Just now," He responds, twisting around to snatch up your gloved hand. Your heart jolts dangerously in your chest, eyes focusing in on the wisps of unruly brown curls peaking from underneath the olive knitted material of the beanie. You give him a look, despite the heat spreading across your chest when he gently tugs your forward, bouncing down the wet pavement.

"Now? Like now?"

"Like now," He reiterates, a glow in his eyes when he glances at you. "I had to come to see you first. You're my best-friend, you know."

"I know, you dimwit," You say, bumping into him. There's a sharp jolt that travels through your body when your shoulders touch, hands still clasping onto each other as you drift towards the massive lake down from your neighbouring homes. "You're my best-friend too."

You don't mean to read into it, but Jeongguk eyes linger on you for a moment too long. Or at least you think they do. But you're staring at him too. He's been gone for a couple of months now, due to his sports scholarship placement at SU. But those few months felt like an eternity, even with the countless calls and chats you'd never been that far away from Jeongguk. Not since you'd tied his hair into a ponytail on the playground and coaxed him into playing princesses with you. You can't help but peer at him now, carefully examine his face. There's a smidgen of stubble poking out from chin which had turned into a squared firm jaw somewhere in the middle of high-school. His shoulders look broader too, even under the bulky fabric of his jacket. But this most jarring change is his hair, tumbling into his face in pretty loose brown curls. There's tucked away now, but it was the first thing you'd noticed when you spotted him smiling at your window.

You wonder if he'd let you tie it up into a ponytail now?

It's a thought you tuck away, for now, mind concentrating on the sudden anecdotes spilling from Jeongguk's mouth. You learn the name of his roommates all over again, the reckless shenanigans of Taehyung and Hoseok first-rate comedies from how hard you laugh at them. But he keeps his words from straying to a certain aspect of his life that you're more curious about than you should be but you can't help it. You'd never been one to pry into his love-life but Jeongguk had been extremely silent on that subject since he'd moved away. Only dropping Miyeon’s name once and then never talking about her again. Like she never existed in the first place. He’s quiet on the subject of love. More so than when he lived here and you used to bump into him on dates at the mall. It stings a little, you won't lie, that he’s been vague about it. But you don't have the right to demand that from him, even when it leaves you sitting up at night, wondering if he's with someone else at that very moment.

By the time the lake drifts into your line over vision the conversation has died, a natural silence sitting over the two of you that's not demanding to be filled with noise. You let the crunch of snow beneath your boots echo between the two of you, a satisfying familiar noise that eases away some of the tension plaguing your heart.

Jeongguk slings his arm around your waist a moment later, effectively tugging your body into his as he halts right before the shoreline, murky grey sand piling over his sneakers. The calmness that had selected over your heart vanishes, replaced by a frenetic beating. There’s a roaring in your head, cheeks hot when his palm settles on your side. A firm soft touch. Your tummy tingles even with the thick fabric of your jacket separating his skin from yours. He hums when you bury your face into his chest, nose full of a scent that is purely Jeongguk. It’s crisp and musky but also sweet and light. Sharp just like him. Soft just like him. There are not enough words in your possession that you can use to describe how it affects you. But the serenity that blankets you is evidence enough. You wallow in it, the smile on your face involuntary. It’s because of comfort that Jeongguk’s bring you that you miss the contemplative furrow of his eyebrows, his own cheeks tinged rose. He’d forgotten how nice you feel in his arms, clinging onto him in a manner that makes him what to protect you. There are thoughts that meander inside his mind, the brittle wind biting his face gently drawing him away from them. The warmth of your body pressed against his keeps him put. But it always raises a torrent of questions in his head. There are things he needs to ask, clarify really. You hadn’t told him about it but news travels fast in your small town. He knows about Changwoo. Not the minute details but enough of the story to want to punch that asshole in the face. He’d only kept it to himself because he was waiting for you to tell him. But you never did. That’s why he’d taken back what he wanted to tell you during that drunken summer night. He couldn’t spill the contents of his heart out like that. Not if you weren’t able to reciprocate his feelings. Sometimes Jeongguk thinks you still love Changwoo.

He hopes you don’t. He really hopes you don’t love Changwoo anymore. Maybe it’s the fear of breaking down a wall he’s grown to cherish that keeps his mouth shut. He would love to grow closer, get to know you in a way a friend never could. But he’s not sure you want the same. He doesn’t know what he would do if he took that step forward and you turned your back on him. Even the mere thought of the rejection has his heart panging painfully inside of him, aching at the idea that you wouldn’t be able to love him the way he loves you. So he holds you, for now, tugging you as close as your thick jackets will allow, not caring that the wind is nipping at his face. This can be enough, for now, he tells himself. One day he’ll tell you. One day. But for now you sway together like this, content just be in the presence of each other. Not wanting more or less, just together. For now, you can be together.

#jungkook x reader #btswriterscollective #btswritingcafe #bangtanarmynet #jungkook angst #bts x reader #bts angst #jungkook fanfic #jungkook scenario

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naivesilver · 3 years

Note

I'm trying so hard to work out which of these fics could possibly be Pinocchio or August related and let me tell you...I am struggling with these vague and intriguing titles... how about 'fair folk' and 'fair enough' because I'm curious. AND also '28th of August' because i WILL be sad if that isn't an august fic

AHSJGGHAGGFDKJH first of all, thank you for the ask

Second, I regret to inform you that there are only two Pinocchio fics in that list and they’re at the very top because they’re the ones I’ve worked on most recently. Make of that what you will :^)

Ask me about one of my WIPs

Soooo let’s crack this open:

Fair enough - This one is the oldest of the three Word documents and it’s palpable from what it contains. There are, in fact, two fic incipits inside, one of which is a Sonic Hunger Games AU (who’d probably been stagnating there for a while when I last updated the file - very 2015 of me, I’d say) while the other is the sequel to this Barduil AU I never got around to finish.

I’m not sure of where I was going with the THG AU, or if I ever did more about it beside assigning characters to districts, but the Hobbit fic I had a vague plan for. Since the first installment was a Harry Potter/Triwizard Cup AU, I wanted the sequel to involve Bard and Thranduil meet again decades after their school years and pick things back up from where they’d left them. Don’t judge - these were still my teenage years, okay?

(You’re not getting a snippet of either, though. The Sonic one is in Italian and the other is in terrible, clunky English. I’m sparing you the trouble.)

Fair folk - I’D LOVE TO GET BACK TO THIS UGH basically it’s a Vecpio fic where Espio is a fae trying to lure a clueless Vector into giving up everything for him. I had everything set up - the pacing the atmosphere, even Charmy’s involvement (I’ve got that scene ready almost word for word) - but since the issues I’ve had with Vecpio fics last year I dropped most projects about that ship and this one in particular never went past the first vignette. Not saying I will never finish it, but who knows when it will happen or how much the result will be changed as a consequence of this.

Anyway, here’s a snippet! I liked the way I started this one, so I’m not ashamed of it:

There is a glint of recognition in the crocodile’s eyes, and he squares his shoulders, wary even as he steps closer. “Bloody hell. Do you go around scaring people like that all the time? You almost gave me a heart-attack.”

Espio very nearly smiles. Bravado is always a welcome diversion, particularly when it’s as flimsy a façade as it is now. “Sometimes.”

The man scoffs. He’s only a few strides away now, but still he doesn’t seem anymore unsettled that he was at first. He doesn’t sense anything wrong in the air, then, nor does he notice the ring of flowers grown around Espio’s feet, a perfect circle of snowdrop and hellebore.

That’s nothing new. They almost never notice – not until it’s too late, that is.

28th of August - Sadly, no relation to the dumbass man of the same name. You know how I said earlier that I’d had issues with Vecpio fics? This right here is the culprit - or well, one of the culprits.

Basically what happened was, since I’d written a Vector fic based on the IDW Sonic comic (and specifically the Zombot virus arc), I’d decided to do an Espio one at the end of that arc too. Except the pressure I put on myself to make it as “good” as the first one, a pretty bad mental health episode and general creative insecurity mixed poorly and I kept starting and abandoning the story because it didn’t live up to my expectations. There are about six or so versions scattered in my WIP folder, with progressively more random titles as I tried to trick myself into not stressing over it any longer.

It took me a four month break from Vecpio fics and almost every other kind of writing, @freenklin-labby being the most supportive creature in existence and some big priority reassessment for me to be able to publish the final version. It was WAY shorter than this WIP and a few of the others, but it coming out is a miracle on its own. And this is a good chance to show off where I started, now that this fucker doesn’t scare me any longer.

So here you are:

It’s not that he fears what he might find inside. He can see it from where he stands already, their stuff strewn carelessly on the floor while Charmy picks his way through it, looking for who knows what among the rubble. And it’s not the smell, either, the damp, rotten stench that Espio remembers from all the other buildings he helped fix, filling every nook and cranny and leaving a lingering aftertaste on his tongue.

Neither would be enough to deter him, on their own. He’s many things, and not a lot of them good, as he’s come to realize while they were on the run, but he’s no coward. He won’t be scared off by the havoc Eggman’s scheme left behind – even if the zombots were very thorough in their mindless fury, it seems. Even their TV, pretty banged up as it already was, looks as though it has been punched through. The floor is littered with sharp pieces of glass from the broken screen, enough that he’d tell Charmy to be careful where he puts his feet, were the kid not flying up and about already.

No, it’s the door that’s troubling him. Or, well, lack thereof: the hinges are still there, already beginning to rust after being exposed to the elements for so long, but there’s no trace of the door itself. Not even a splinter.

#bewilderedmoth #you know I thought you'd had enough of my august ideas :^)#ask meme #sonic #the hobbit

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border-spam · 4 years

Text

(Featuring @godkingsanointed ‘s amazing OC JK)

Mid COV

“There’s a H… there."

Seifa tapped a black nail into the paper Jak-Knife was staring at so intently their mask’s front grill brushed against the page. They let out a rumbling groan, slowly shaking their head side to side as she reassuringly patted their hand, leaning pressed against the length of their back so she could peer down at the scrawled letter splayed on the table in front of them.

"A H? Why??” they whined, cupping the sides of their head in calloused hands with a dejected sigh. Words were stupid.

It had been a long day for both of them.

Sei had only just made it to her ship after a night of red tape and managing delays in her office below. Tyreen’s Saints had incredible skill in somehow making sure their daily business ended up impacting Troy’s in some way. Missing shipments, deadlines shifted far shorter than possible with no warning, the usual shit. She’d sat for hours after her shift, gritting her teeth while pouring through their condescending e-coms, pausing every now and then to distract herself from the frustration by catching flashes of today’s arena stream.

The Blight Devil had ripped through raiders on the flickering office screen as her papers shuffled. Heretics who’d led an assault on a protected settlement and refused to repent now faced the Holy Father’s executioner, a fitting end to parasites sucking lifeblood from the isolated villages the COV kept in food and medical supplies.

She’d found them after the fight as she left her office that night, leaning silently against the elevator gate in the lower workshop that lead to her ship docked above the Mechanicum. Head bowed and tilted to the side, ankles crossed and arms folded across their chest. They were spotless as usual, arena blood expertly removed from their skin, but the weight of the fight was visible on their frame - tired and quiet.

They’d perked out of their doze as she approached, and lifted a bag filled with something hot and spicy from the Slums as a greeting. JK was always like this. They had as much an open invitation to her home as the others, but while she’d retire some nights and find Ven and Eli already smiling cheekily from her kitchen table and expecting dinner to appear now that she’d gotten home, or Troy curled up asleep in the same tiny wall cot that she’d told him was his years ago, JK never entered without her.

Always waited by the elevator with offering in hand, a gift of food or beer like an olive branch. Habit, she figured. Something from a life of survival in Pandora’s roaming clans she’d maybe never understand, but she could appreciate even though she reassured them it wasn’t needed every single time.

She could tell they were struggling to keep going now still, heavy muscle shifting under her ribs as they groaned at the letter covered in smudged ink between their elbows on the kitchen table, muttering about the rogue “H” through their mask’s respirator.

Words made no damn sense, even less when they were marked down in writing.

Bandit cant had always served JK well, icons, symbols, communication scratched into rocks and dirt and corpses with the tips of jagged blades. Writing was pointless, they’d been told that for as long as they could remember. Adults in their clan had mocked newcomers to Pandora, said their big words and fancy letters were just to hide behind. A mask without a mask, so they could pretend they were better, stronger than the salt and blood of the earth that crawled across the planet’s dusty wastes in scavenging mobs.

You didn’t need to write or read when your family could respond like a singular pack unit to bird whistles or rhythmic pounding on dry rock. Learning would be a waste of time and resources better used to serve the marauding horde.

This H was a waste. The flimsy, golden pen clutched in their calloused fist was a waste, a symbol of wealth, education, of weakness on Pandora. If it hadn’t been a gift, they’d…

“Because without the H it says tanks. Like, war-machines, you know?” Seifa laughed, pushing against them to her feet and shooting a deadeye finger gun at their chest with a silent pow as she back stepped to her side of the table.

“But gotta say, that looks like a love letter, JK” she grinned, lowering herself into her seat with an ungraceful thump.

“..She a fan of tanks?”

They huffed quietly, refusing to meet the shit-eating grin they knew she was aiming at them as she shuffled the papers in front of her and leaned back into her chair with a creak of wood.

“She likes tanks, yeah. She.. likes all weapons. All machines. Makes ‘em, fixes 'em..” they murmured as Seifa clicked her tongue in response, wolf whistling.

“Sounds like my kind of woman.”

“She’s… my kind of woman.” Jk replied through a crackling laugh, scratching the pen against the paper with practiced concentration. “She should have nice things like.. letters. She should have poems, songs.. chants… and thank you.” they looked up, catching Sei’s inquisitive gaze “Thank you for helping me.” She followed their hand, gesturing towards the paper with a blunt finger.

Sei laughed, smoothing loose hair back over her shoulder. “Don’t thank me, pal. I think if anything, I’m using you as a distraction..” she sighed, expression turning somber as she dropped the stack of papers to the table in front of her, grimacing.

“This jank is terrible.”

“Words?” they offered, lenses catching the light as their eyes followed her when she stood.

“Nah JK, numbers” she scoffed, rolling sore shoulders as she stepped towards the kitchen counter to their side. “WAY worse. Listen, want to try something gross?” the chair struggling to support their bulk squeaked behind her as JK turned to face the cupboard she was rooting through. “I got this new coffee..-somewhere.. where is..- Ahh!”

“I like coffee, sure!” they chuckled with a nod, thumping their fist onto the little table the pair had been sharing in her ship’s kitchen

“This coffee though - ” she corrected smugly “This coffee has been shit out of some horrible little monkey thing on Eden-2” she smirked, stifling a giggle in response to the barking guffaw that erupted behind her.

“WHAT” they yelled through the muffle of the mask’s filters, deep voice cracking in amusement.

Sei turned, waving the foil bag towards them playfully as she leaned back against the counter.

“I’m not joking, gift from an ore dealer me and Ven had to sweet talk into very generous trade agreements on Astrensis a month ago. I don’t know if he was trying to impress me or what, but this is basically worth its weight in platinum and it’s-”

“ - It’s shit juice!” JK gasped between rolling belly laughs.

“It’s fuckin’ shit juice pal, you’re not wrong!” she chuckled, smile wrinkling across her nose as she flipped the coffee maker’s switch, grinning softly as the clunky hiss of the machine filled the little kitchen quarters.

Jk sighed happily behind her, twisting to stare at their paper again. “Rich people are so wrong. They don’t belong, not here, waste everything. Just walking sacks of ego thinking their paper money will stop this place taking its due from 'em”. They grunted thoughtfully, then continued in a quieter tone.

“I thought you were a rich person when we first met, another off-worlder.”

Seifa turned, wide-eyed in surprise at the comment.

JK was someone she’d known for years now, but even with so many hours of quiet time together in this ship, a quiet hiding hole away from the Holy City’s heaving bustle and fame both their titles reluctantly carried, even after all this time, they rarely spoke of their own feelings in this manner. JK’s thoughts were something they held deep in their chest, opinion’s they’d share, advice they’d willingly give, but their thoughts? She wanted to hear more, it was an unusual glimpse into an incredibly interesting mind.

“You thought I was rich?” she balked, pointing towards her chest. “How? You seen the way I live?”

Their head tilted, turning slowly to glance around the cabin. Clean, homely. Plants and textiles covering cracked wall panels… repaired and well-maintained kitchenware, the coffee machine behind her newer than nearly anything else surrounding it. They shifted, looking down at the polished and well loved table, the stains and scratches buffed but still visible in the finish. Years of love and use.

They made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a laugh, tilting their head slowly to the side. “Not about what you own, Seifa. It was how you carry yourself. You’re the only person in the room till you don’t want to be, then you were never there at all. Eyes miss you.” they rumble.

“Don’t belong here. Don’t belong out there either, in the city. Covered in gold, thought you were like the others. You aren’t though.” JK hums, shifting their eyes to the scrapped together coffee machine behind her.

“..You’re like him.”

She’d laugh if that wasn’t such an insult, rolling her eyes and huffing a chuckle into her fist.

“Thanks. What a compliment.” she groaned, flashing a quick grin before lifting a finger to scratch at her jaw thoughtfully. "… I’m not rich though I fleece the twins for all they are worth, sure, but that’s just good business.“ the homemade machine behind her whistled quietly as she paused, breathing deep the acrid aroma of roasted coffee wafting through the room.

"My clan might not be called that, but it’s still what they are. We’ve a creed of support. One of us does well for themselves? Strikes it rich? Lucks a factor as much as skill. There’s 10 bad deals for every good one.. some get a real bad streak, JK.” they nodded, understand her meaning if not her experiences.

“There were times before the twins where I needed help from family, care packages and donations to keep my ship running and fuel tanks full, now I repay that debt with what I earn here, spread the wealth to others who struggle now like I did then.” Seifa shrugged, uncomfortable in sounding anything close to generous regardless of the truth. “ It’s our creed, like I said. Family first.”

Jk grunted, nodding to themself as they stared at the table in front of them, the scrunched letter in shaky lines.

“Family first..” they echoed, not quite to themself, and not quite to her either.

Family.

They let their eyes rest on the pen gripped in their hand, tilting it slowly. The solid gold barrel reflecting light the same way the gilded fangs in his crooked grin had as he pressed the box into their open palm. Troy had been so happy when he handed them the case, blushing and shifting his weight from foot to foot as he waited for them to open it. They’d not known what to do with the contents, looking back and forth between the solid gold pen and him awkwardly. Waiting for him to explain how they should react, anxiously hoping he’d guide them as always.

He’d laughed, plucking it from the case and pointing at the name etched into the bodywork.

“It’s for you, see, it’s your name like we p-practiced. J.a.k-.k.n.i.f.e, see it?” his hand had been trembling with excitement, cheeks flushed and smile squinting his eyes as he loomed over them, pressed close enough to hear his ragged breaths.

“Now when you write you’ll know I got your b-back, yeah? I’ve got your back, understand? 'Cus you’ll know that I know you can do it, and I’ll keep teaching you.”

They hadn’t known what to say, the words that felt right were choking in their throat. They knew Troy often compared himself cruelly to them, would emasculate himself by placing aspects of who they were on a pedestal then berate himself for not reaching. It was hard to communicate their awareness of it with him. He was so easily hurt by his weaknesses being recognised, it was easier to pretend they didn’t notice and insist on complimenting him when they spotted him sinking under his own detrimental thoughts. Lift him up when they saw him flag.

But this, writing? Reading? Troy was excellent at this. It was something he could help them with, and as soon as he’d realised they could do neither, he’d jumped on the opportunity to teach them. They understood it was a repayment of his own volition, even if they couldn’t understand why God King Calypso would feel like he’d owed them in any way. They were his guard. They shielded him. They didn’t need to be thanked, you don’t need to thank a brother…

Seifa waited for as silence fell between them, giving JK the chance to continue, but they said nothing, nodding almost imperceptibly as they continued to stare at the pen.

They got lost sometimes in the depths under that mask, but the people close to them understood, and it was easy enough to bring JK back into the current. Wait a moment, give them a chance to snap back, then pull them back into the conversation.

She cleared her throat to break the quiet.

“So, is this lady rich then? If she likes poems and songs… and weapons?”

It snapped them out of their daze immediately, turning snake quick to glare through the mismatched lenses at her instead.

“She… she has money yes, she works hard. Very hard. I don’t know if she even would like a poem. It’s just something.. I see sometimes on the echonet, those movies Troy watches.”

“You give poems to great women, don’t you…?” their voice caught on a question towards the end, something they weren’t wording but clearly needed an answer for.

Sei stepped towards them, reaching out to lay a hand on their shoulder as she carefully arranged the words that felt most right for them.

“Maybe..” she started tentatively, leaning down a little to meet their eyes through the mask’s glass. “..if that’s what she wants, sure. But it sounds like this woman doesn’t need fancy things, JK. Sounds like she’s plenty good at seeing the truth of what things are, huh?”

They nodded emphatically, the quiet choking sounds from under their mask emphasising their eagerness to agree.

“Thought so” Sei grinned cheekily. “Why not write how you see her then, huh? No poems, just the truth of how things are.” They rumbled as she patted their shoulder, turning back to the small kitchen to prepare their drinks.

She smiled triumphantly to herself as the welcoming sound of the pouring coffee mixed with the scratching of their pen behind her, before it was interrupted by a stern grunt.

“Seifa, how do you spell refuge?”

#borderlands #borderlands 3 #bl3 #troy calypso #calypso twins #leech lord #seifa #jak-knife #my writing #my hcs #lldrabbles

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