#man i could only find green pepper emoji | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chil2de · 3 years

Note

Your sharing a bed with the JJK men hc's were incredible 😩 special mentions for Megumi's bed head, Nanami being a secret cuddle bug, and Yuuta having to drink both iced coffees (that fucking sent me fjdndnfd I could picture it so clearly).

You're super talented so could I, er, possible get a NSFW version? 👀 💳💥💥💥💳💳💥💳💥

Thank you so much 🥺💕

hello anonie!!! thank you dear i’m so glad you liked them!! please the credit card emojis had me cackling LMFAOOOO you really made my whole day out here!!!(THE ICED COFFEE WAS MY FAVOURITE PART TOO)

well i managed to hit the max amount of characters allowed in a tumblr post with five characters alone so i’m going to have to split this up into several posts. it just kinda happened ig

characters in this post: itadori yuuji, gojo satoru, okkotsu yuuta, fushiguro toji (megumi was supposed to be here but i had to reserve him for next post😔)

this work is nsfw. if you’re new here, please read my disclaimer before proceeding. thank you and enjoy!

based off of this post

itadori

- itadori would prob be a ‘deer in the headlights’ if you woke him up in the middle of the night

- but after that? shit, he’s so nice to you. so kind and generous for his baby girl. whether he’s fucking you ‘cause he thinks you might be able to sleep after an orgasm or there’s just an incessant desire for him- doesn’t really matter all that much to itadori. he loves you either way :)

- gets horny so easily LMFAO

- would 100% dick you down if you asked him to and i like to think that he still keeps his really sweet personality during sex cause aaaa he would be so soft and reassuring

- hardcore dom yuuji sounds sexy as all hell but let’s be real… this man won’t kill a fly and apologises for stepping on ants. only exception being angry sex but overall reserving hard dom for sukuna :)

you pepper tiny kisses onto itadori’s face, treating him with the utmost care like handling fine china. his skin feels so soft against your lips, and he smells very faintly of milky soap. there’s some traces of brand cologne on his shirt, as well as his natural scent.

“yuuujiii-“ you coo, blowing air very gently. when he doesn’t stir, you run your fingertips through a bundle of his cotton candy tainted hair. it evokes a reaction from him, so you continue to press him.

“y-uuuu-ji!”

after a few moments, itadori lets out a soft whine before grumbling incoherent blabber. “i won’t eat the pineapple! kugisaki will scream at me!”

you giggle before prodding him again, when finally he relents and jolts awake, eyes wide and mouth slightly parted at how close your face is to his.

“‘s it morning yet?” he wrinkles his nose, stifling a yawn. you emit a hum in thought before wrapping your arms around his neck, pulling you into him. itadori squeaks in surprise when he feels you latch your lips onto his neck, suckling and carefully breaking the bonds underneath his sensitive skin. his moan comes out groggy, still laced with sleep.

“that drives me crazy, you know that, right?” itadori laughs, though his voice comes as a wobble.

“i know. and they look so good on you too, hm?” you giggle, caressing one hand from his neck and then down to the hem of his shirt. your fingertips flutter against his bare skin and he shivers physically and audibly. you smooth your palm flat along his chest, dragging your nails carefully against his muscles.

“kinda.. wanna.. go to.. sleep.. but i don’t.. wanna fall asleep…” itadori mumbles against his pillow. the fabric muffles most of it, but there’s a strain in his voice that leads you to believe he’s moaning lightly. guess after sukuna ripped his heart out, this area hasn’t been quite the same, huh?

“so? then go to sleep, yuuji. i’ll be fine-“ “-no way! i gotta take care of you”

“so why don’t you?”

“‘m going to! i was asleep just half a minute ago!”

“and besides-“

he shifts himself up into a sitting position, leaning his back against the headrest. itadori opens his arms, motioning for you to crawl on top of him. without any haste, you clamber over his built frame, ghosting just over the print of his hard dick.

“not that i mind but- we did, you know, in the morning already-“ “oh, shit, sorry- it’s totally fine if you don’t want t-“ “-just messing with you!”

itadori pulls your neck down and gifts you with the same treatment you were offering him earlier. his tongue is hot and wet against your skin and you can already feel the precipitation forming at the back of your knees. calloused yet tender hands smooth around your waist and he smooths his palms over your shoulder blades.

after itadori’s satisfied with the mark he left, you can’t help but groan a little into his mouth when his lips suddenly claim yours. he drinks you up, relying solely on your taste like he’s drowning and you’re the air he needs.

itadori takes his sweet time cherishing you, or rather it’s still his state of half slumber, but you can feel a dull ache prick your abdomen. you scratch up his shirt, motioning for him to take it off. you’re unsure what comes over you, but shit, you don’t want him- you need him.

“heyheyhey, ‘s okay. don’t worry, i got you.”

“i’ll take care of you.”

“just relax, okay? i got this.” he only coos with sweet reassurances, peppering small kisses and handling you with the utmost precision.

you whimper, balancing your palms flat against his abdomen for additional support as you sink down onto itadori’s cock. he lets out a hum of content, forehead bumping against yours as he allows you to adjust.

“you good?” he murmurs after a few moments, capturing a few strands of your hair in between his fingertips. you nod meekly and itadori hisses out a breathy exhale. he’s sure that if he goes rough as shit you might end up more broken than being able to sleep, so he screws his eyes shut and exhales to maintain his composure.

blazing hot lips scrape against your ear, and his voice comes out in a husky tone.

“tell me how you want it.”

by the lords of everything and all that is holy, itadori only chants the same phrase over and over in his mind. it’s a miracle that he’s able to think straight with all the blood rushing to his cock. he’s more than happy to take it slow, reward you with slow and long strokes while he showers you with high praises. but he can’t ignore the twitch that he experiences when he envisions that pretty lil fucked out face of yours, all messy and ruined for him.

you mutter that you have no preference, that you don’t care because anything he’ll do for you is perfect, and it only gives him a beaming smile at your words.

itadori grabs the scrunched up ball of his shirt that he was wearing before ripping the fabric into half with his bare teeth. you watch his eyebrows perk when he notices how fucking hot you just found that, evident with the way your walls fluttered around him.

“here, babe.”

you part your lips and he stuffs the fabric into your mouth, there’s a little bit of excess hanging out, but he reminds you that you look sexy as hell either way, on top of his dick like that with your hands on his chest, legs spread, face flushed and ready for him.

“don’t wanna be wakin’ anyone else up.”

yuuta

this man is about to end my whole career

yuuta wouldn’t bring it up on his own accord just because… respect.. and he doesn’t want to pressure you or make you uncomfortable into doing things you’re not ready to.

it’s kind of a gray area for him because he doesn’t relish the idea of bringing up sensitive and/or extremely awkward topics so he really said ‘i’ll leave it up to future me’s problem’

but holy shit. let me absolutely tell you.

the second you hint at it? anything of the sorts? 0 to 100. he is FREAKY you cannot tell me he’s innocent just LOOK at the man

can make you scream with ease. all that practice he’s been doing with handling katanas? he doesn’t need his dick to make you cum. will gladly lick up your leftover juices and remark with a smile on his face how ‘it tastes good, angel’

similarly to itadori, i think he would be sweet and patient when asking for your preferences, etc, but after that you’re gonna have to find something to bite onto

“and? what’d you tell her?” yuuta remarks from over his fanned out deck of three cards. his gaze flickers to you as he awaits a response before using his index and middle finger to lay down a +4 card.

“red, by the way.”

you huff and glare at your boyfriend, picking up four cards and attempting to hold them in such a way that they don’t all fall and rattle to the floor. truth be told? you’re seriously a sore fuckin’ loser. you don’t know how he does it, but you’ve never managed to win a game against yuuta.

“i told maki-san that it’s her problem, not mine. if she’s so pressed about people taking them, why does she keep noodles stored in the fridge? really, noodles in the fridge? they’re really spicy as well! made my nose run like hell.” you scoff in distaste, throwing down a random red card on the pile.

“you totally ate them didn’t you?” yuuta giggles, beaming you a wide smile.

“also.. told her that i didn’t see them instead but- yeah.”

“aren’t you worried she’ll find out? oh, and, uno.”

“she might just beat me up to be honest, and, uno, you say? not anymore, love.” you sneer, throwing down a +4 card.

“i want green.”

“i’d protect you.” yuuta states over his cards. you feel like cracking a joke and laughing, but there’s absolutely zero implication on his facial features to show that he’s joking. that, and his serious tone, of course.

you flip your cards down onto the table and yuuta squeaks, pointing towards them.

“uh- i can see your cards-“

“it’s okay, not like i was gonna win anyway.”

at this point, yuuta’s mind races a hundred miles an hour. he’s panicking, blood pressure raised, heart thumping and throat clogged. oh, shit, did he do something wrong? did he upset you? is it ‘cause he said he’d protect you with no regards to the fact that you’re perfectly capable of fending yourself off against maki? fuck, he’s such a god damn screw-up, can’t even take care of his girlfriend correct-

“hey.”

your fingertips slide around his neck, hands interlocking at the base of his head. your thighs balance on his lap and you straddle him, legs either side of his.

he can’t help but hitch his breath, holding it in as though one wrong move and you would dematerialise.

“what’re you thinking about in that head of yours?”

whether you’re referencing his mini panic attack just now, or if you’re referring to all the multiple times he’s battled just bending you over and railing the absolute shit out of you, there’s not much room for debate when you brush your clothed sex up against the print of his dick.

yuuta snakes his slender hands around your throat, holding it in place. you can feel the arousal pool and wash over you, and you’d be more than surprised if you hadn’t soaked through your clothes.

he lets out a breathy laugh, devastating your stomach with butterflies due to how attractive he sounds. yuuta’s soft lips brush the shell of your ear and his other hand moves to rest on your waist,

“why don’t i show you?”

before you can utter a tease something along the lines of “show me what? how you’re too scared to hit me in bed?” you’re already down, flipped over and bent over the table you and yuuta were using moments prior ago for uno. the cards have splattered all over the wooden floor and you only hiss in discomfort as the cool surface scratches against your delicate skin. your boyfriend towers over you, leaning down as his torso clicks into place against your back. even through his titanium white jacket, you can feel his calm and collected heartbeat. he rests his head on your shoulder, nudging his face into you.

“don’t scream, okay? or, try not to, at least-“

his warm fingertips ghost over the curve of your ass, where he pinches the skin there before delivering a loud slap. you squeak, back arching as you jolt from the action. he proceeds by grabbing the inside of your thighs, long middle finger hoisting around your underwear and pulling it to the side. he makes note of the red lingerie you’re wearing and gives you a small chuckle, peppering a kiss to the side of your face.

“-unless, of course-“

“-you’d prefer everyone hear me fuck you stupid.”

“safe word’s blue, angel. i love you and thank you.”

truth be told, you were never sure what to expect from yuuta. hell, you’d never really seen the man’s dick before, sure you caught glimpses in the morning whenever he’d wake up but it’s really not the same. nothing in the world can compare to the first time you felt his piping hot tip brush up against your slicked cunt. and it was embarrassing, actually, the way your pussy was seething for him already.

with a firm hold on your tailbone, yuuta utilises his lower body strength to ram his dick all the way inside. there’s a garbled and choked moan that hisses from you when you feel your walls wrap and deform around the girth of yuuta’s dick. you whine even more so when you can physically feel a thick vein that decorates his shaft.

“the mirror.” yuuta commands in a low tone, redirecting you to glance at the same mirror you’d always fantasised about him fucking you in front of.

his eyes are half lidded, riddled with concentration. it reminds you of that feral and focused gaze he gets during serious battles.

“don’t look at me. look here.”

you trail the outline of yuuta’s arm veins as a result of him rolling his uniform sleeves up; following his v line that points towards his dick. you can only gawk in awe when you realise you’ve taken him to the base of his shaft.

his gaze locks with yours for a split second and he snaps his hips out until just about his tip is visible inside your cunt.

and shit, if his pretty pink cock isn’t the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, especially with that attractive curve. you’re sure the gesture is just to wind you up, but you can’t help but swoon at him showcasing his pride to you.

“so- mmhf- pretty-“ you whine, words jumbled and breath caught when he slams his dick inside without any prior warning. you can only shriek in exclamation when his tip bruises your cervix, and you’re unsure whether you lament the sensation or not.

he only gives you a cheerful hum, reminding you of his usual cheery disposition. it’s not until then that you realise how much of a fucking beast he’s acting right now.

“right? i’ll put it to good use, i promise.”

gojo

- i know we’re all thinking the same thing here lmfao

- trying to sleep? good for you, now, open your legs for satoru.

- oh you can’t sleep? atta girl, down on your knees for satoru.

- bye i can literally imagine gojo saying some dumbass shit like “think you were trying to sleep but i couldn’t help but think how good my dick would look down your throat like that. sorry, love, you’re not sleeping tonight.”

you blink your eyes in turn with the cicadas chirping aside, stifling a yawn. everything around you down to the very last detail screams at you to sleep, but you just cannot. from the pitch black night that floods the room obscurely, to gojo’s even and quiet breathing beside you. you’ve tried it all. you’ve counted an excess amount of sheep, you’ve tensed and relaxed your body more than you can remember. hell, no matter how many times you’ve flipped the pillow you always seemed to feel less exhausted each time.

you can’t watch netflix, because you’ve binged all your favourite shows. it’s not that you’d wake gojo up because, who cares? by the time you finish scrolling through the endless lists it’ll be time to get up.

you ponder over the things you can do, continuing to subconsciously blink furiously. that is until gojo makes note of your stupid actions and starts giggling like a high schooler at his first sleepover.

“what the hell are you doing?” he snorts, cackling into the pillow like it’s the best joke he’s heard for quite some time.

“shut up, satoru. i’m trying to sleep you ass.” you tut at him, berating him for ruining your divine concentration.

gojo audibly shifts onto his stomach, his right arm crosses over the back of his head as he lazily rests his palm onto his scalp. the other arm preoccupies itself by landing it smack bang onto your chest, fingers wandering up to cup your breast.

“satoru, huh? that’s daddy for ya” he remarks, still giggling in a state of half asleep.

“uh-huh. goodnight.” you dismiss him and his nonsense.

“just go take a shower. always helps me whenever i can’t sleep.”

“hm? you’re giving me actual good advice and being a normal boyfriend? i think i might be asleep already, this is the best dream ever.” you remark sarcastically, prying gojo’s glued wrist off of your breast and sitting up. you could go for a shower, actually. you’re not sure why but it’s always so therapeutic to take one at night rather than the morning.

“huuuh? how could you say that? you’re so mean, (y/n)-chaan! i offered you my love and the world and this is how you repay m-“

“-goodnight satoru. i love you.”

“don’t think professing your love for me will change my mind! i’m still upset at you right now, young lady!” gojo shouts from over his pillow, exclaiming and irritating you in the way he knows how to best.

“yeah, yeah. okay.” you mumble softly to yourself, bearing a wide grin from ear to ear nonetheless.

when you move to crank the water on in the shower, you realise that you didn’t bring along a change of clothes. you momentarily pop back into the bedroom to ransack the drawer for anything that you can find.

“are you back to apologise for being so mean to me?” gojo whines and you can see the pout evident on him even when it’s pitch black.

“no, i’m just here for clothes, satoru.”

you hear him mumble something but it’s muffled by the sheets he’s underneath so you don’t heed any attention to it and resume in taking a shower to help keep your insomnia at bay.

with a ginger step and a small ‘oopf’, you heave yourself into the large shower that only a headass like gojo would bother buying. it’s reminiscent to what a hot tub looks like on the inside, with surrounding jets practically in a full 360 degrees. the things so steep that there’s a small step up in front of the shower outside the actual structure. it must have cost quite the fortune.

you reach in for the built in shelf to grab ahold of some of your toiletries as you allow the water to fall in a gentle sprinkle, almost like rain. there’s an audible squeeze reminiscent to trying to get the last ounces of ketchup as you apply some body gel to your hands, lathering it up.

despite standing, the warmth of the water leads your muscles to feel less tense. the only noteworthy downside is that the running water is tremendously loud. how on earth is gojo sleeping through all that racket?

slender fingertips ghost over your inner thighs. you can feel his wet and sturdy chest in place against your spine.

“surprised to see me?”

“you know i can’t let my baby talk shit like that.”

really? that’s his issue at hand here?

“so which is it?”

“acting like an intolerant brat because you’re tired or ‘cause you wanna get dicked down?”

gojo loops his arm underneath your leg, bending it up. you almost topple over in the process and you lay one hand flat against the tile.

“don’t answer that. sometimes it’s so obvious that you’re such a whore for my dick.”

“huh?! what the shit are you saying?” you snap at how correct he is.

gojo yanks your face back, digging his fingers into your cheeks as he forces you to face him. it almost sends your neck into two pieces, straining to look back at him.

“oh, really princess? just the other day you were begging me to fuck you”

“remember that? couldn’t wait so you rode me in the car? you know, baby, all you gotta do is ask.”

your legs tremble and psyche wobbles when he pries your mouth open with his thumb, promptly before spitting into it.

“don’t bother with the bullshit. i’ll play the games, not you.”

he drags his hard cock against the curve of your ass, slapping it against you.

“i don’t think i feel like fuckin’ you right now.” gojo sneers, humming sardonically. his lips quickly latch onto yours when you spin around to meet his gaze. like the fucker he is, gojo moans and whines into the kiss- lips ravaging you whole and tongue capturing your essence.

“baby girl, i was gonna let you top me. you know i don’t let anyone do that.”

his long middle finger prods against your cunt, forcing itself in with ease.

“damn, you’re soaked. you really wanted to milk me dry that bad?”

you hate him. hate him so fucking bad. he flashes you that attractive smile of his, azure eyes sparkling and snow white hair disturbed with water.

gojo pulls his finger out before sucking onto it in front of you, lapping all the excess arousal off.

“i’m not playing with you tonight.”

toji

- i literally don’t even need to say anything here

- just be sure to make a hospital check up appointment or something

- um-i uh- please remember to breathe after this one? maybe touch some grass? ALSO my first time writing for toji AAA i hope he’s okay

maybe if you don’t breathe? nah, that wouldn’t work. there’s still air acting around your limbs when you move so you’d be disturbing the barriers there. let’s see… maybe bit by bit? surely if you slowly inched his shirt up? then again, wouldn’t toji chew you out halfway through? maybe you should just give it to him straight up? just slip your hand under his shirt. come on. but he looks so peaceful, sleeping like that.. long eyelashes fluttered closed, lips relaxed and not scowling. his eyebrows are softly arched. he looks so soft, lips parted, chest rising and falling with every breath.

fuck it. just do it. cuddle him already.

you muster up all your courage in one fell swoop and you bend one leg over toji, resting it just above his groin. your right arm sprawls out over his chest and your hand rests against his toned arm. he’s already sleeping with one arm bent up with his hand supporting the back of his head, so you utilise the free real estate to nestle your head in the crook of where his shoulder and collarbone meet.

when he doesn’t move after a while, you deem your life to be safe and exhale with ease.

“you’re not asleep.” toji states in a groggy, husky tone. it’s supposed to be a question, but, coming from him it almost sounds like a challenge.

“yes?” you squeak out meekly.

“‘yes?’ you asleep or not?”

“i can’t sleep again.” you murmur against his shirt and he exhales a small sigh. the arm that you’re clinging onto moves to draw small circles on your thigh that rests on toji.

“when’d you notice?” you inquire, glancing down at his large wrists.

“like five minutes ago. nice try, kid.” toji snorts indifferently, chuckling at your behaviour.

when you don’t make an effort to respond, toji’s interest peaks and he lets out a small hum of intrigue when he follows your gaze.

he turns his head, brushing his lips up against your temples.

“see anything interesting down there?”

“as a matter of fact-“

you nestle yourself in between toji’s large and built thighs, digits curling around the waistband of his boxers. he only smirks at you through the dark, cock twitching through the fabric. you notice toji hover his hips up so that you can slide his boxers off for him and you happily oblige.

“-i do.” you chime, licking your lips.

it’s cute, though, if you thought toji was gonna let you handle him like that all by yourself.

as you kiss a trail up his thick shaft, toji yanks ahold fistfuls of your hair before grabbing your face off of his cock.

“who said you could suck my dick? that’s real cute.”

“thinking you actually have a place in my house.”

“i didn’t train you to be such a depraved slut. know your fucking place, because this isn’t it.”

“how many times do i gotta tell you? you don’t belong here. look around. do you see anything that shows a woman lives here? no? that’s because you’re nothing but a fuck doll for me.”

toji hisses out profanities at the gag you spew when he slams your tiny little mouth back down on his dick.

“lose the teeth you imbecile. unless you’re trying to tell me that you can’t suck my dick properly.”

incessant whines and garbled sentences are muffled by toji’s cock. whatever remnants you had of your vision are nothing but a blur as tears stream your cheeks, nose running and sniffles resurface in a repeating pattern over the slick sounds of slurping and gagging. your mouth stretches as far as it can go and the corners of your lips shriek in despair. you can feel the skin there stretch and pull beyond what’s considered normal.

even through all that, you manage to glance up at toji through your water logged lashes. you’ll be a good girl for him. you need to be.

“fuuuck. that’s a pretty sight.” he grumbles and a deep chuckle resonates through his chest. within a few moments, toji fumbles to reach for something.

you can only wince and screw your eyes at the suddenly blinding flash of a light in front of you. one can only assume he’s taken a photo of you in your humiliating state.

you can feel the fear settle into your veins when that telltale ping of a message being sent vibrates throughout the room. if you were to listen hard enough, you could hear a notification go off in the next room over.

your throat feels raw, jaw tense and locked open. it’s been a good twenty minutes of toji face fucking you to teach you a valid lesson. it’s all in the will of him wanting to drag this on, savouring every miniscule slurp, whimper or gasp. when his strokes start to feel sloppier than usual, you can’t help but feel relieved.

as you squirm about due to toji shooting hot ropes of his thick cum down your throat, the door softly clicks open.

“megumi. you’re just in time.”

“she’s way more obedient than your mom ever used to be.”

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unpack-my-heart · 3 years

Text

This is the first thing I’ve written for the Shameless fandom, but I am utterly besotted with tomato-obsessed-vegetable-growing Ian Gallagher and so wrote this!

He was out there again. This time, he was wearing bright yellow rubber gloves that went right up to his elbows, and they were covered in soft-looking dirt. He’s got a streak of dirt on his face too, powdery, from where he’d presumably wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. His almost-too-orange hair shon brilliantly in the oppressive July sunshine, and Mickey watched as beads of sweat, almost imperceptible, slid down the side of his face.

It was the third time this week that Red has been out there, elbow-deep in mud, or tenderly caressing the lacey tufts of green shooting out of the ground. Sometimes, Red will tug on the tufts, and the soil will give birth to a misshapen carrot, much smaller than the type Mickey buys at the supermarket that come shrink-wrapped in rustly plastic, but Red doesn’t seem to care. He beamed at every fucking carrot as if he’d never seen one before, as if that carrot was the best, most precious thing he’d ever laid eyes on in his entire life.

Mickey watched him as he sprayed something from an unmarked spray bottle onto tomato vines that twist and turn, vein-like, up a beaten-up old trellis. Plump, bulbous tomatoes hung from their stalks, and Mickey watched, feeling more and more voyeuristic, as Red plucked one from the vine and popped it into his mouth. Red chewed slowly, methodically, before smiling, all too wide and with tomato pulp mushed between his teeth. It should be disgusting, and yet, as Mickey watched the blissed-out smile reach Red’s eyes, papery skin crinkling, it’s not. Not anywhere close.

When Mickey moved into the apartment building, he’d barely noticed the garden. The apartment was cheap, suspiciously cheap, but Mickey couldn’t afford to be suspicious. So, when the greasy and smelt-like-onions letting agent had shoved the wad of paper under his nose, he’d signed on the dotted-fucking-line.

“It’s in an up-and-coming area, you know. You’re getting a real steal here, and it’s a ground floor property, no hauling heavy goods up the stairs,” the letting agent had said, tugging at the limp, flaccid tie around his neck.

Mickey had just rolled his eyes and shoved the papers back. “Save the fucking speech.”

It had taken him a pitiful two trips with Iggy’s busted up old pickup to schlep all of his worldly possessions from one side of Chicago to the other. A couple of soggy cardboard boxes filled with miscellaneous crap, a pair of practically broken but still just-about useable kitchen chairs, and a mattress with not a single functioning spring. When Iggy left, pickup grumbling down the street, Mickey had sent Mandy a picture of the chairs stood pathetically in the middle of the otherwise empty room.

She’d sent back a string of laughing emojis, at least when i come and visit i won’t be sitting on the fuckin’ floor

It took Mickey another three weeks to accumulate enough second-hand furniture to pass as a genuinely functioning adult, and by that point, he’d barely opened his blinds, never mind noticed the stretch of scrubland that barely passed for a communal garden that stretched out beyond the confines of his bedroom window. It was by accident that Mickey had happened to open the blinds just as Red was strutting past his window, wrestling with an enormous bag of soil. The soil slipped out of his arms and Red cursed, loud and long enough that it startled a grunt out of a bemused Mickey.

“Fuckin’ shit, fuckin’ slippery bastard, fuckin’ all over my fuckin’ boots! Jesus fuck.”

Hands twitching, Mickey watched as the orange-haired man, resigned to his muddy timberlands, kicked the rapidly emptying bag of soil, before grabbing it with both hands and tugging it along the floor, leaving it to rest in front of three large, raised vegetable beds. Red squatted down and ran his hands over the surface of the soil, head cocked inquisitively.

Mickey stared at the man, hand resting on the window pane, ready to pull it shut and get on with the rest of his day, but before he could, and without warning, Red looked up.

Red looked up, stared directly at Mickey’s swiftly reddening face, and waved.

Feeling like he’d been caught with his hands down his pants by his third-grade English teacher, Mickey slammed the window shut and pulled the blind across, a vital extra layer of protection from the outside.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” Mickey scolded himself, before purposefully striding out of the bedroom, and slamming the door behind him, resigned to not re-enter the room until he was quite sure that Red had gone.

The next day, after Mickey had dragged his aching bones back from the chop shop, engine oil and miscellaneous grease coating his hands, he’d floated into his bedroom on autopilot. He tugged the blind up, and shoved the window open, eyes blurry and half asleep. A wiggling figure in the distance caught his eye, and his stomach dropped.

Red was out there, forehead damp and glistening in the evening sun. Mercifully, his back was to Mickey, as he leant down, fussing with something buried deep in the pillowy looking earth that covered the surface of the first vegetable bed. Red’s ass wiggled this way and that, a unrhythmic dance to the chirpy evening birdsong, and Mickey let himself watch, eyes glued to the dirt-covered denim, only for a second, before he forcefully pulled the window shut again.

Only, the window groaned loudly, and, ridiculously, Red peered between his splayed legs, and waved at Mickey from his rather precarious upside-down position.

Mickey pulled the blind shut and stomped out of his bedroom, determined to forget about Red and his fucking pruning shears.

The plan, however brilliant in theory, failed miserably in practice, and resulted in Mickey finding himself, yet again, covertly watching Red chew his fucking tomatoes. If Mickey cared, or if he was the kind of guy that had some sort of gardening glove fetish, he would have realised that Red tended to the garden in the evening, when the sun dipped, bloated and heavy, below the treeline, and bathed the grass in dazzling, shimmering golden light. If Mickey cared, or if he was the kind of guy that jerked off furiously in the shower thinking about the way the muscles in Red’s arms rippled, taut, when he hauled bags of soil from one end of the garden to the other, he would have devised a way of opening his blind just so, just enough to see out of, but not enough that Red could see his peering, lurking face.

For a kid who had grown up in the underbelly of Chicago, whose first word was ‘fuck’, only to be followed by ‘you up’, Mickey had been remarkably quick to come to terms with the fact that he only liked fucking dudes. The first time he’d slept with a chick, the noisy, breathy, wetness of it all had kept his dick limp and his ego in tatters, and she’d thrown him out of her bedroom with a ‘fucking faggot’ for good measure. He’d slept with countless other women since then, a painful exercise in compulsory heterosexuality, and as he ploughed into them from behind, he’d screw his eyes shut and pretend the fleshy give of their hips was tight, coiled muscle, and pretend that their high-pitched blabbering were deep, guttural moans. It hurt, every time, when they’d slink off, hair mussed and lipstick smudged, and he’d be left splayed lifelessly on damp sheets that smelt like sex, but he managed. He had to manage. Until Terry Milkovich, silverback gorilla, had died in a wheezing, heaving mess on the kitchen floor, and Mickey was free.

He fucked his first guy on the night of the funeral, was fucked by his first guy three nights later, and never looked back. Mickey was pretty comfortable with what he liked and liking what he liked didn’t make him a bitch.

But this? Staring at some guy whispering sweet nothings to his peppers, hiding behind the blind every time he so much as glanced in Mickey’s general direction? This was horrifyingly close to pining, teetering on the edge of teenage puppy love infatuation type shit, and it set Mickey’s teeth on edge. Milkovich’s didn’t do crushes.

A knock on the window startled him, shattering his belligerent introspection and rattling his bones.

It was Red, who had somehow managed to creep his way across the scrubby lawn, up to Mickey’s window. Mickey blinked at him, dumbly.

Red started to speak, but Mickey couldn’t hear him.

“The windows closed; I can’t hear you!” Mickey shouted, dumbly.

Shit.

Red stepped out of the way, just in time, and Mickey shoved the window open.

“Uh, window was … y’know. What the fuck do you want?”

Red smiled.

“Do you want a tomato?”

#shameless #gallavich #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich #ian x mickey #ian gallagher x mickey milkovich #shameless us #tw: slurs #tw: the word f*ggot is mentioned #in passing though #this is just ridiculous but i had fun writing it!!

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cryinginthebackseat · 4 years

Text

initials t.c.

Fandom: Open Heart

Pairing: Tobias Carrick x MC

Words: 7.299 (I’M SO SORRY)

Summary: Tobias Carrick makes Claire an offer she can’t refuse.

Warnings: 50% plot, 50% smut, swear-a-thon, blasphemy

Author’s Note: when the book first introduced us to tobias carrick, the first thing that hit my mind was “okay, but that dude is like the carbon copy of jesse williams and that’s hot” but then, once it reveals who he is and what’s his role in the book i went “interestinggggggg” cause you know, i’m a sucker for morally grey characters and all, and i’m not even ashamed to admit it. also, carrick is shaping up to be such an interesting character with each chapter and maybe one day- okay, maybe this sounds like a pipe dream- but one day, i hope he can be a li (let a girl dream plz) lmao

also if anyone’s interested, i made a PLAYLIST to accompany reading the fic.

the title is inspired by serge gainsbourg’s initials bb

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Cast down off heaven Cast down on my knees I’ve lain with the devil Cursed god above Forsaken heaven

To Bring You My Love - PJ Harvey

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Whenever Claire thinks about Tobias Carrick, admittedly, unfortunately, tragically, she always thinks about his eyes first before remembering what a colossal pain in the ass he is.

It always comes in that order. Like the number 3 always comes before 4, like the seawater dragging back from the shoreline before a tsunami occurs, like pouring milk before the cereal (she honestly didn’t get what the fuss is about until one day Elijah cried ‘oh, hell no you don’t, satan!‘ one morning and proceeded to give her bullet points why pouring the milk before the cereal is considered a sin and more of an abomination than Nephilims’ existence and that there’s a higher probability that she’s a psycho for being a ‘milk first’ kind of person). So apparently, Claire’s a psycho now which explains so many aspects- but she digresses and the point is, the reaction is uncontrollable and she high-key hates how she can’t control her goddamn mind most of the time.

The point is, she needs to stop thinking about him to begin with.

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Claire Castelnuovo was born in the summer, under the sign of Gemini. Marilyn Monroe once said that stands for intellect, being a Gemini, but she was too blissfully unaware of this guerdon that she devoted her adolescent years to being outdoors instead. Too many days she spent trampling along the cornfields with her cousins until the skies faded out with brilliant purple-tinged amber and she was carrying a piece of the sun in her skin and smelled like one, stuffing wildflowers inside her boots as she walked around the neighborhood with her dad’s old stethoscope, napping in a hammock with Oasis’ All Around the World on repeat. By the time she hit 15, her black strands had turned brown from repeated sun exposure. She loved it.

But it was a different time, a different place. Somewhere that only exists on the margins of her memories, lost and hidden.

Now, Claire prefers the night.

It’s 9:30 pm when she arrives at a hotel bar in downtown Boston. A newly christened establishment which has somehow become a regular spot for Hemingway’s enthusiasts once the Boston Globe wrote an article about their Hemingway Daiquiri and how, as they wrote it, ‘probably the only place that’s brave and crazy enough to adhere to the 1930s original recipe’ and bourgeois party birds at wee hours during the weekend.

Her eyes are gritty, dry and strange. Her mind’s much worse for the wear- she feels like shit, like in the middle of watching that scene from The Green Mile shit when all is hopeless and you feel like walking out of the theater, but you’ve spent your last savings just to buy the ticket, so you decide to stick through it.

Claire makes a beeline for the bar, tries to flag down the bartender. She orders an Old Fashioned, making sure to specify to double it because she’s not a regular here and he’s not Reggie and that’s how she’s been taking her drink for years.

She knows well deep in her bones that she should be somewhere else. Somewhere more familiar, somewhere where Tim Mcgraw often plays from the subpar speakers, and the rustic wooden bar countertop is gouging and discoloring from the cheap household cleaners and alcohol stains, and her friends are cramming together in the same booth in the back, reveling and laughing until they close the bar down and make a mess all over. Perhaps it’s a mistake coming here, where no one’s a familiar face and the drinks are a tad overpriced for her budget.

But then, perhaps this is exactly what she needs; the unfamiliarity, the visceral feeling knowing that she doesn’t belong here, where no one knows her name and the huge deal of weight she’s currently carrying on her shoulders. Perhaps, she can’t face her friends after what happened, after what Esme has done. Shit, how could any of this happen? Claire knows this all on Esme’s, but her guilt has grown hopelessly tangled with her anxiety. She’s her intern, for fuck’s sake, Claire’s supposed to prevent this from happening in the first place.

Man, where’s Declan Nash when she feels like punching someone in the face?

Claire makes the mistake of drinking her drink too quickly, because it hasn’t been ten minutes and she’s drained half of the content. Then she reaches for her phone in her bag, fiddles with it, absent-minded, equal parts bored before then settles on watching the band performing Art Pepper’s You Go To My Head and immediately thinks of that time she accidentally dropped her brother’s saxophone in a moment of her rather graceless, wine-soaked self with the whole family present.

Someone plops down on the empty stool next to her. Claire’s now scrolling through her phone- again, bored. Sienna commented on the post Elijah shared to the group chat with a few unnecessary-yet-totally-necessary emojis to the already convoluted series of texts and Claire only reads them in silence, not only because her friends’ texting behaviors are too chaotic for her to follow sometimes but she’s not really feeling like talking to anyone right now.

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

Famous last words.

Claire freezes in her seat. Her phone’s still glowing in her hand, alighting her features. She recognizes that voice- too well, that is and it’s enough to set off her flight-or-fight response.

She glances up from her phone, preparing for the worst.

Well, what’s presented before her is literally the worst.

“Of all the gin joints…” she says once her eyes find Tobias Carrick sitting next to her, still in his work shirt, sleeves rolled-up, a few buttons undone, reeking of smoke, soap and antiseptic with a shit-eating grin plastered over his face.

She should have gone to Donahue’s instead.

“Evening to you too, Castelnuovo. Drinking your dinner tonight, I see?”

“What, this? No, this is breakfast. 100% daily value of alcohol and pretty much nothing else. I mean, it’s not the weekend without a bad case of hangover and an aspirin snowglobe in the morning, am I right? You know, like a glass of aspirin? Not a literal snowglobe?” she blabbers, realizing just so by the time she hears him snort. Claire chokes down another sip to shut her mouth up. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m about to commit first-degree murder and burn this whole place to the ground,” he drawls, the ever goddamn sarcastic. “What do you think? I’m trying to get dru-”

“No, I mean what are you doing here, of all places? Can’t you get drunk somewhere else?” she interrupts, her midwest accent does funny things to the vowels and consonants- something that only happens whenever she’s in distress, or at least according to Jackie.

“Last time I heard, this joint’s still owned by the Hilton, not a certain junior member of the Diagnostics Team at Edenbrook hospital.”

“Dude, what do you think of the H in Claire H. Castelnuovo stands for?” Deadpan, trying to keep up with the rolling sarcasm, she retorts. He smirks.

“Horatio?”

“Get the fuck out of here,” she mutters, mid-eye-roll, mid-snickering.

He chuckles, his voice rich and smoky amidst the late-night swing and distant chatters. Carrick doesn’t leave, of course, typically him- if those anecdotes Ethan told her has taught her anything about his character, that is- defying everything, scheming his way to the top, the embodiment of ‘those devilish boys with their heavenly eyes’ type your mother warns you about.

Not that the latter is relevant.

“Or what?” His mouth twitches but there’s a hard, challenging light in his eyes that she knows too well by now.

“Or I’m leaving.“ She shoots him a glare. He’s testing her patience- again, like it’s his finesse. Some things never change, it seems.

“Come on, Castelnuovo, don’t be a sourpuss. The night is young and I can promise you, the last thing I am is a horrible drinking buddy.”

With a touch of irony, she replies: “I’m sure. I bet you asked your friends to fill out a questionnaire every time you went out with them, did you?”

Carrick hums.

“You’re funny.” But he says it in the same tone that someone might say Jesus fuck, you’re probably one of the most frustrating creatures I’ve ever laid eyes on. Also, because the next thing he says is: “A little rough around the edges, but funny nonetheless.”

“That makes one of us then.”

Carrick frowns, which is kind of a surprise because she’s half expected him to flash her that signature cheeky grin of his.

“Listen, I’m just trying to make a friendly conversation here. I know we haven’t really seen eye-to-eye with each othe-”

Claire snorts and crosses her arms over her chest. “That, doctor, is an understatement of the fucking century.”

“Okay so, we’re like Tom and Jerry but sans the background music and a naive little duckling running around calling one of us his momma, but I feel like now’s the time to call out a temporary truce between us.” A beat, then: “I heard about what happened with the intern.”

Something flashes across her face- and Carrick must have noticed it, because his face does this odd thing- it softens, even for a moment. She hates it. He’s not supposed to be looking at her like that, not supposed to see her at her weakest state or saved her ass- And Jesus, why does she have to be indebted to Tobias Carrick, of all people- But god forbid, the last thing she’ll ever do is crying in front of him.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she mutters, barely audible, trying to temper her fluctuated emotions.

“Then don’t. We can talk about anything else or fall into some sort of endless, meaningless platitudes. Whichever will work.” As if sensing Claire’s lingering hesitation, he adds. “Tell you what, to sweeten the offer, your next drinks are on me.”

She assesses him for a long minute, eyes narrowing. She’s shaking her head, but her mouth, as if against her will, instead says: “Careful, Carrick, there’s a chance I’ll be abusing that offer and run you dry.”

"Hey, if you want to butcher your liver so bad, don’t stop on my account,” he says. “Don’t worry, though, I’ll make sure to save your ass again this time around. Pro bono.”

Claire looks as if she’s just swallowed a dead rat. “Thanks, but no thanks. Death seems more like an appealing choice.”

“Well, I stopped death from interfering then, I’ll stop it again.” Carrick winks, she pretends to gag again yet remains still in her seat, so Carrick waves at the bartender for their order- she orders for a refill and he, a martini and Claire is this close from asking 'shaken or stirred?’ but then remembers who he is and immediately washes the question down with her drink.

“You know, if anyone told me weeks ago that I’d be having a drink with you tonight, I probably would have socked them.“

Carrick is in the middle of lighting his cigarette, but laughs instead. “The Times They Are a-Changin’, as Bob Dylan said.” A puff of smoke escapes his mouth, curling around his fingers. Claire instinctively looks away. “Which reminds me of that one time your mentor sang Ballad of A Thin Man on the fucking subway when we were 20.”

She swivels her head to his direction, on the verge of choking on her drink. “Hold on, hold on, Ethan Jonah Ramsey sings?”

“Give him a dare he couldn’t refuse and a few shots of whiskey, and I promise you he’ll sing like Sinatra on crack.” He grins, his eyes are all crinkled and bright; she thinks that means he’s genuinely amused. “Ah, good times. We were like- wait, who was it he’d like to say we’re like again?”

A small smile pulls at her lips. “Bert and Ernie.”

“Jesus, he really fucking compares us to some Sesame Street characters, huh?” She laughs at that, loud and bright. He does the same. “Personally, I’d always say we were like Butch and Sundance back then- rebels with a cause, a band of misfits, trying to leave our marks on the world. You know those types. We were young, we wanted so much- I still do. I mean, let’s be real, whoever’s wanted to be defeated at their own game?”

A crease forms between her eyebrows, not quite a frown.

“Nobody,” Claire concurs, hating herself for it. “But was it worth it? Betraying the closest thing you had to a brother or a lover…” Carrick coughs on his smoke from the latter. “or whatever in the process just to get what you wanted?” Claire was obviously aiming for that brash, hard-hitting jab, but it lands gloriously too soft.

The bartender finally places their ordered drinks down on the bar. Carrick reaches for it, taking a careful swig, then sets his glass down. He takes a deep breath.

"It’s nothing personal. It never was. I never considered him as my rival.”

“Yeah, but by doing whatever you did, you’ve made an enemy out of him,” she counters. “Look, Carrick, I know we live in a dog-eat-dog world and I know being good sometimes doesn’t get the job done. Perhaps Machiavelli was right. Perhaps, when necessary, you have to be ruthless, dissembling and manoeuvring- what did he say again? ‘The end justifies the means’? But if any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, if everyone outright surrenders to their darker side, then what’s left of our humanity?”

For an interminable moment, there is only silence. He simply stares at her, as if she’s a walking, talking Rubik’s cube he can’t solve or a book that he has opened and now he’s got to know so much more and she feels pinned under those warm irises, uneasy.

Suddenly, his mouth begins to take shape; the corners hike up, stretch and then he does the unexpected.

The bastard fucking laughs.

“Excuse me?!” she spits, white-hot anger lacing each word. Carrick laughs harder- the audacity- despite Claire’s growing razor’s edge stare. “Did you just laugh at me? I was being fucking seriou-”

“Sorry, sorry.” Wiping an imaginary tear from his left eye. “I was just remembering Harper’s words. She’s right, you really are on the side of the angels, aren’t you?”

She points at him with her glass, snarling. “And you, mister, are the devil himself with a medical degree and an egg head- and I don’t mean the slang for a highly academic person.”

“Ouch,” Carrick says out loud, still kind of laughing, borderline frowning. “Okay, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“Damn straight. Though you have a lot to apologize for.”

He groans. “Don’t tell me you’re still pissed about that one patient I stole under your nose?”

“The North remembers, ser,” she says, mean-spirited.

“Then does the North remembers that I saved her life?”

“Oh, so you’re discrediting the efforts of the other doctors that helped you make the cure?”

“Alright, alright. You win.” Carrick holds up his hands, the universal gesture of defeat and takes one final drag of his cigarette. He stubs it out, all the while keeping his gaze on her.

“So, how exactly can I make it up to you?“

Claire blinks- once, twice, thrice, realizing his intent. His voice drops an octave and he’s leaning in, close enough for her to notice the constellations of freckles splaying across his face and the way his brown eyes glinted like two shots of whiskey under a stream of light, intense and all-consuming. She feels her mind races, her brains feel as if they underwent a short-circuit and get caught on fire, and the fact that her mind’s on the precipice of exploring the idea is not helping.

A burst of laughter erupts from her throat, not that it’s funny- there’s nothing funny about the situation, but someone ought to diffuse this shift of tension between them, or that was her aim, at least.

“What, you wanna pay me back?” she asks, trying to keep her voice from cracking but failing miserably. Fingers trembling against her glass as she chugs nearly a quarter of her drink in one go.

He notices that.

"A Lannister always pays his debts, does he? If you think that I owe you one, then I’ll gladly pay.” His eyes flick back to her face, searing into her. The air crackles between them. The band is playing a different song now, a sound that only exists on the margin of her attention. If they’re in, say a mid 2000s rom-com movie, someone would probably interrupt this moment and save her from this. But this isn’t a movie.

Claire licks her lips, a candid reaction which encourages him to inch closer- or is it her? She can’t tell anymore. Tracing odd patterns on the palm of her hand with his finger and oh god, this is Carrick, the bane of her fucking existence, she’d shoot him first before she kisses him. But something about the prospect of fucking this bastard twists her insides deliciously into a confused mess.

“How? By fucking me?” she inquires, feigning scandalized- all that Catholic guilt bullshit.

He grins, all-teeth and wolfish and shrugs as if they’re talking about his life insurance policy or shit. “Well, that’s the idea.”

“But you don’t even like me.” It should come out as I don’t even like you, but even she knows that’ll be just another lie she tells.

“On the contrary, I enjoy our rivalry far more than I should, Castelnuovo,” he purrs and places a hand on her knee. Her throat bobs. She’s wearing a skirt, it didn’t seem important then, but now his hand feels warm against her skin, dangling on the edge of impropriety. Like gravity, all it takes is a little push for him to cross that line.

“I should be disliking the way you talk to me, challenging me and putting me on the back foot every goddamn time. I should be focusing on taking you down a peg, but the more I see you, the more I realize you have an attractive kind of power. And I’m just one man. And if there’s anything I learned, the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

But then his movement suddenly ceases. Claire almost asks why.

"However…”

“What?” she stares up at him, eyes wide, breath hitching.

“However if you only accept alcohol as the currency for transactions, then I’ll tell the bartender to get us another round instead,“ he tells her, offering her one last chance to back out from this, from making this mistake with him.

Claire stares into her drink, actually mulling this over. Her mind tells her no, but the other part- the alcohol-infused part of her mind- whispers otherwise. She imagines if Ethan or any of her friends are here, they would probably grab her shoulder and shake the living hell out of her for even reconsidering his offer.

But then again, intelligence, alcohol and desperation have always had a bad history of getting along together.

“What about June?” Claire asks against her better judgement, after a long, considerable pause. Carrick raises a confused brow.

“What about her?”

“I thought you guys…” she trails off, makes a face, feeling all-kind of flustered and aroused and wow, she’s really doing this, huh? “I mean, I don’t know- I don’t wanna get in between you guys.”

“Nah. It was only a three time thing, but there’s never been anything between us.” He chuckles at Claire’s askance look. “If you don’t believe me, you can fact-check it with the woman herself,” Carrick adds, looking at her dead-on with his eyes like he wants to get the message across.

She regards him silently for a long second, and maybe she’s a touch drunk now, maybe the bartender put something in her drink, or maybe she just needs to blow off some steam after what’s been happening in these past few weeks and Carrick happens to be a decent warm body for the occasion, but Claire finds herself shifting closer.

"Then I want you to pay me back.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah,” she answers, more sure this time, more determined.

Her nose bumps his, his breath fanning across her face all the while Carrick’s slightly pushing her skirt up, letting his fingertips travel higher. His eyes keep darting back and forth from her eyes and lips, checking for her reaction. There is no inhibition here, not anymore. People might be watching- heck, they could be already watching and it terrifies her that she doesn’t give a damn about it.

“But if you tell anyone about this, I swear to god… ” she warns and a shadow of mirth passes across his eyes, making her almost regretting this. Almost.

“Claire, darling.” It’s the first time he’s ever said her name and her stomach does a tango. “Your secret is safe with me.“ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He gets them a room in the hotel, it’s on the twentieth floor. Carrick handles the accommodation- he can afford it, apparently, which is not really surprising and the nuisating check-in procedure while Claire only waits in the lobby like a beautiful, agitated china doll amidst the turbulent sea the whole time until he comes back, flashes the room key at her and beckons her to follow.

She goes ahead of him, but he catches up. His body heat sends her anxiety rocketing sky-high through the roof as they walk next to each other, hands briefly brushing against one another but she ignores that (or at least she tries).

They are silent in the elevator, they are silent even once they reach the designated floor and walk down the hall to their room where the dim and shadowed lights follow their steps like vultures.

Carrick holds open the door for her and she enters, taking in the windows and the striking view of Boston skyline peeking behind the curtains, the TV and the queen-sized bed. The latter does nothing to assuage the anticipation that’s bubbling in the pit of her stomach, by the way.

Claire hears him shut the door, locking both bolts. She peers at him over her shoulder, half-turned, one eye on him. Their eyes meet, neither speaks. He’s taking off his black peacoat, back against the door, he’s looking at her as if wanting her is his full-time occupation and the realizations comes in like a mule kick, how that tiny voice inside her head, the one that tells her that this is a bad idea and she’s better off leaving never comes.

The room is not considerably huge (with $110 per night, you would have expected you’d get a bigger room), he could easily have her in six large steps, yet he stands there. Sizing her up, smirking rather devilishly, handsomely as if challenging her to make the first move. It’s another fucking game with him. A display of power, waiting who would fall first.

Claire finally turns around to face him. With a renowned determination, she removes her coat, letting it fall unceremoniously onto the carpeted floor. Her blouse follows next and her skirt, which she tugs it oh so slowly down her legs.

Carrick’s eyes widen, if she doesn’t know better, she thinks he’s speechless. He takes a deep breath, his gaze religiously following every movement as she twirls around once more to unhook her bra. His jaw clenches and unclenches. He’s having a hard time keeping himself in check which she takes an immense pleasure in. Claire just wants to see the man squirm for a change, even if she has to shed every article of clothing she wears.

By the time she slips off of her underwear, she is breathing raggedly. He hasn’t yet approached her so she crawls onto the bed, lying on her back with one elbow props her up, legs crossed. She kicks off her heels, rolls down her stockings with a bit of that noir come-hither, Lauren Bacall-esque heavy bedroom eyes.

Finally, Carrick steps closer until he’s only a hair’s breadth away, like a target, filling her line of sight. The tension in the room is hot enough to send the thermometer reaching its maximum limit and she’s burning, burning, burning right through the core.

Claire cranes her head up to meet his gaze, noticing the way he’s drinking in her body like a pirate ogling a bottle of rum. High-strung, tense, Carrick lowers his head to her, his fingers carding through her long hair. Dimness consumes him raw, his silhouette is starting to find its place amongst the shadows except for his eyes. Never does the fire in his eyes falter, merely alight.

They are already nose-to-nose when Claire suddenly raises her hand over his lips. He withdraws from her, looking confused and hot and bothered.

“Take a seat over there, will you?” She motions to the settee near the bed, her tone leaving no room for argument.

He smirks, but she can see his bravado if faltering. “Ordering me around in the bed now, are we?”

“Didn’t you say tonight is about you making it up to me?”

“Touche, touche.” Carrick straightens his posture and makes his way to the settee across from her, shifting uncomfortably in his seat given the growing issue in his pants.

With eyes still trained to his, Claire cups her own breast, fingers pinching her pebbled nipple before the same hand travels lower down her stomach, her thighs. Carrick leans forward in his seat, obviously liking where this is going before Claire slowly and teasingly part her legs for him to see.

A surprised groan escapes him.

“Jesus, Claire,” Carrick hisses. “Fuck, I didn’t know you’re a goddamn tease.”

She doesn’t bother replying to him, but a winning grin finds its way across her face as she lays on her back, her shame and modesty are distant, knees pulled up so he can have a clear view of her. With two fingers, she runs them along her folds, dragging them slowly up to her clit. Claire imagines they are his fingers- which once upon a time would have horrified her, but tonight, as she repeats the motion over and over, knowing that he’s sitting there, watching her without being able to get his hands on her, she decides to submit to this newfound fantasy.

A rustle pulls her back to reality. He’s undoing his own pants, palming his cock, runs his fingers over the leaking head.

A low moan catches in her throat at that, her gaze snapping up from his erection to his face where his irises have darkened and pupils dilated. He wants to show her, that’s he’s as depraved as her when it comes to wanting, that he fucking wants her and in spades and she fails to think like a normal human being anymore.

Claire uses that image to work on herself harder, faster, feeling the intense pressure beginning to build beneath her fingers. She’s so wet now, despite him being able to see that, she wants him to hear it as well as she uses her idle hand to tap against herself. Carrick growls, his pace matching the rhythm she’s setting.

She slips her fingers inside her, drops her head back against the mattress and bites a loud moan that threatens to escape her lips. Flushing scarlet all over her abdomen, her breasts and up to her neck. Her blood thumping louder than bombs in her ears, her breaths begin to come in gasps.

Another fast and hard thrust from fingers, and Claire finds herself sighing his name.

“Tobias…”

And every last bit of his self-restraint snaps.

In just a blink of an eye, Carrick is already on his feet, grabs her waist, harshly, and tugs her down onto the edge of the bed where he’s now kneeling before her. He doesn’t bother with the teasings or soft kisses or caresses, and even before Claire has the time to register what’s happening, he crushes his face between her parted legs and eats her out.

She gasps, high and fleeting, twisting the bed sheet between her fists while his tongue flicks over her, moving back up, back down, lapping along her folds in the same motions she showed him with her hand, how she likes it. Claire forgets how to breathe. It just occurs to her just how arousing the sight of him on his knees like this, sending her mind hitchhiking into outer space.

“Oh, fuck.” She breathes, back arching on the bed with a drawn-out moan. “Fuck, Tobias!” Her hips gyrate over his mouth and she presses her heels against his shoulder blades. She’s so close. All she needs is a little push to send her careening into oblivion and it seems that Carrick can sense it because he brings two digits to her entrance and slides easily inside her, setting a ruthless pace.

With her hands reaching out to the back of his head, Claire cries out his name and trembles violently. Encouraged, Carrick curves his fingers inside her, hitting that exact spot that finally undoes her as she comes, long and hard, around his mouth and fingers- the kind of orgasm that you can feel deep in your bones- and watches as fireworks dance behind her lids.

When she finally comes down from her high, everything is hazy. It’s like waking up from a deep slumber after a decadent soak in a scented bath and she loses all orientation, until she feels him nipping the inside of her thighs. She hisses, glances down, heavy-lidded eyes finding Carrick is leaving bruises after bruises all over her skin like some kind of a lewd memento of his work, like he wants her to remember this the next time she wakes up in her own bed and he’s not there.

"Are you trying to turn me into a Na'vi, doctor?” She asks, still kinda breathless, feeling surprisingly conversational despite having just experienced, if not, one of the best orgasms in her life. He smiles against her thigh and withdraws from her, only after her thighs are sufficiently bruised enough, licks his fingers clean and stands up at the end of the bed.

“Maybe. You’d make a cute blue extraterrestrial creature, though,” he replies cheekily, then undoes the button of his shirt, showcasing his naked torso.

Claire feels her cheeks heating up again, but forces herself to stare; eyes following his pectoral muscles, down to the toned lines of his abdomen while he slides off of his pants. The man is one fine specimen, alright, and he knows- smug bastard- and she thinks it’s such a shame that Carrick is… well, Carrick. If the man learns how to shut up for one minute or avoid trying to sabotage everyone’s career at Edenbrook altogether, maybe, just maybe, she’d consider him.

“But honestly, I just wanted to hear you say my name again,” Carrick continues, crawling his way up to her, pulling her out of her musings. He settles between her thighs. His lips finding her ear and nibbling at the lobe while his fingers pinching and pulling at her nipple. Claire shivers. Nails scraping along his skin, raising angry marks that would certainly be there tomorrow.

When they kiss, it’s so good that she can’t help but curl her toes. He kisses her like he’s trying to steal her breath or her name. She can taste herself in his mouth, which sparks so many feelings inside her. Her mind’s foggy, sweat pooling on her forehead. Carrick is but shoves his tongue into her mouth, lapping at her, biting, sucking and she leans hard into the kiss, retaliates by scraping her teeth against his bottom lip. It spurs him on. Making his cock twitch against her thigh and Claire decides she can’t wait anymore.

Claire rolls her hips at him. He takes the hint and rolls over to grab a condom from his pants. Then he’s back on top of her, his weight and heat crushing her most deliciously and brings her body further up the bed with him; she drapes her legs around his hips, hands gripping his arms. Her lust and anticipation collaborate to the point of near madness.

Carrick nips the taut line of her jaw and drives himself into her.

They both groan in unison.

“Oh, fuck.” Carrick mumbles between shaky breaths, his face pressed against her throat. “Fucking hell, Claire, you feel so warm.”

Claire, on the other hand, goes rigid under him. Her mouth hangs open and her world narrows down to the feeling of his cock inside her and the pleasure that builds up again in her abdomen.

This is happening, she thinks, he’s inside her and it feels so amazing. She might as well be crazy for agreeing to do this with him in the first place, but the promise of the thrill beats the doubts.

He starts slow, just the smallest fraction of hips, gently thrusting back and forth in shallow motions. She whines, frustrated and impatient, raising her own hips to meet his, but Carrick’s weight pins her onto the mattress and she can’t fucking move.

“F-faster,” Claire stammers, her molars grinding like toothache.

The bastard smirks, like he’s been anticipating the word coming out of her mouth.

“Beg for it.” His words are punctuated with every unhurried stroke he’s giving her, teasing her and if she’s not in the middle of being fucked right now, she would have kicked him in the balls.

Growling, she swallows her plea by pulling Carrick down for another kiss. This time, she’s the one who does the biting and the sucking, making sure he’s distracted enough and then just like with all the things she does in her life, she takes the matter into her own hands.

With all her strength, she scrambles up, pushes him off of her and knocks him onto his back flat on the bed. When she swings her legs to straddle him, his eyes pop.

“Holy shit, you are feisty.”

“Only cause I’m angry and horny,” she bites off. Angling herself above him and with one hand, guides his shaft back to her opening. “And you- you weren’t doing a proper job fucking me.”

He smirks. “I was trying to wind you up.”

“Fuck you.”

She lowers herself and sinks back onto his cock, relishing in his moans and growls.

“Baby, you’re doing it.” His hands curling around her waist, his head falls back onto the bed, exposing his throat and Claire is so hard-pressed not to bite him there.

Claire ignores his smartassness, naturally, and lifts herself, drops back down. Slamming her hips into his until she’s bouncing on him. Nails clawing at his chest. Finally be able to set a pace she desperately craves for, finally wiping that smirk off of his face.

Under her, Carrick is biting his lip in an effort to not to lose control. His hands are everywhere now; her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her cheeks. Leaving fire on its wake. She might still hate him after this is strange, little arrangement is over but at this juncture, he’s exactly the remedy she needs after everything.

Then Carrick wraps his arms around her and picks up the pace, thrusting into her hard and fast. Claire shakes. She can’t catch her breath, her forehead pressed on his shoulder, her teeth latching onto his skin. Breathing a string of 'fuckfuckfuck’ while he squeezes her ass and continues to fuck her with careless abandon.

"Tobias.” Her moans amplify. She’s close to climaxing again, her legs quivering. Eyes wide shut. “Please, please.” So much for not begging.

He pulls her to him so their foreheads meet. Their lips brush against each other, but they aren’t kissing, merely trading breaths. A hand touches her cheek and her lids flutter open, finding his eyes- those depthless, amber eyes that pretty much lead her to this point, are watching her, pulling her in.

“Say it again,” he encourages darkly, face twists in pleasure. “My name. Say it again.”

She does it again, it comes out as a groaned whisper, repeating it over and over again like a sacred mantra.

Her second orgasm sweeps through her, making her spine arches, it tears a winded moan from her throat and it’s more than enough to trigger Carrick’s own release; fingers digging into the soft flesh of her hips, groaning gutturally.

Panting, sore but sated, Claire collapses on top of his chest, his arm still drapes around her. The rise and fall of his breath lull her to sleep. Before she knows it, he gently rolls her to his side, pulling the covers for them and kisses her on the shoulder, which comes out as… odd for her.

The bed moves and she feels him leaving.

He’s leaving.

She doesn’t know why it stings, but it does. But also Claire opts not to pay no mind to it and forces her mind to surrender to sleep that once again tries to take hold.

Claire wishes she doesn’t dream of him that night, but she does.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It’s way past midnight when she wakes up. The room is dark. The curtains are closed. She’s still naked and sore under the covers, mind reeling in from what has just transpired.

One might ask in which universe does Claire Castelnuovo agree to sleep with Tobias Carrick? Well, apparently they did it in this one and oddly still, she doesn’t regret it. Though she’s still low-key sad that he left her straight after sex, but hey, what can she do about it? This arrangement itself is nothing but a means to an end, anyway, a perverse alternative for him to pay back what he allegedly owes her, she shouldn’t be surprised if he left after the ‘debt’ is paid.

Feeling her mood somehow takes an unexpected dip, she gets us from the bed and gathers her clothes on the floor.

She’s in the middle of zipping up her skirt when the bedside lamp flickers and comes on.

Claire turns around. Carrick, rousing from sleep, looks at her, rubbing his eyes and stifles a yawn. His lips still tinged from her kisses and bites.

“Leaving so soon?” he asks, voice still raspy from sleep and Claire thinks her mouth is hanging open, standing rooted to the spot like a spider on an icicle; frozen in time.

For a moment, she does nothing but stares at him, being rendered speechless. For many times, Tobias Carrick never fails to surprise her. Just when she thinks she has him all figured out, he comes sneaking in through her windows like a thief in the night and it just strikes her, how he really is an uncharted territory for her. Despite her having him pinned under her, exploring the hard planes of his body under the touches just a few hours ago.

The man is like a fucking myth, at this point. She knows him only from stories and her limited time around him, but who is exactly Tobias Carrick? Is he the competitive doctor at Mass Kenmore, the Machiavellian asshole that severed his friendship/relationship with Ethan for the sake of his greed and ambition? Or is he, Tobias Carrick, the man who saves her life, makes her laugh and kisses her shoulder in the afterglow?

She’ll probably never know.

“Yeah, my roommates will probably deploy a search party if I don’t come home tonight,” she replies, distracted, finally finding her own voice back. He nods, feigning disappointment- or is he not? She clears her throat and continues putting on her clothes. “I thought you left.”

He chuckles at the absurdity of her deduction. “And without saying goodbye?” Carrick rolls off of the bed and rises to his feet. He’s already wearing his pants- thank fuck for that- and approaches her. “I may be an asshole, Castelnuovo, but just so you know, my mother raised me better than that.”

So they’re back to their usual last name basis perimeter. That’s good, right? After all of this, she thinks a little familiarity would be nice for her sanity.

“Good to know, then.”

Silence encompasses the room. It’s awkward and overwhelming and it throws her a little off-balance. At the bar, they seemed to know exactly what to say to each other- especially him; but now, even she can sense the hesitation in his gait, at the way he’s looking at her and a faint alarm is trilling her head. Because if he’s making this awkward, she can do a whole lot of worse.

"Oh, before you ask, that makes up for pretty much everything, yeah. I mean, it’s alright.” You fucking dumbass, she thinks to herself, averting his gaze while a smile blooms on his face.

“Good to know, then.” He parrots her words and she huffs a laugh, freely and sweetly, like she’s currently not knee-deep in her problems or she’s just fucked the most incorrigible man that ever exists. He does too, but his gaze lands on her mouth before going back to her eyes.

Another silence passes. It’s time to go.

“I have to go now.”

He nods mutely and moves away so Claire can step past him.

She wears her coat. In the mirror, she still looks thoroughly fucked; her hair’s dishevelled, she smells like him now, but she really needs to go. She promises herself that this will be a one time thing because, Jesus fuck, she’s supposed to be smarter than this. She’s not fifteen anymore, and this is not the summer where she can watch the sunset from the cornfields with her cousins even though his eyes possess the same color.

Yet she walks toward the door in a daze, like she’s forgetting something but can’t pinpoint what it is.

“Can I-”

“Hey, do you-”

She stops, mid-turning, and closes her mouth. She doesn’t realize she’s interrupting him.

“Oh, sorry,” Claire says, embarrassed. “You go first, it’s alright.”

“Can I have your number?” he asks, uncharacteristically hesitant.

She thinks he’s joking or maybe he’s just feigning interest, but one look at his eyes and she can tell that this isn’t smoke and mirrors.

The eyes, chico. They never lie. It’s dumb, but that line from Scarface is the first thing that comes to her mind. That’s why when she hands him her phone, her hand is shaking slightly. She has to bite her lip to stop herself from grinning like a maniac.

Claire takes a cursory glance at her phone once he returns it. He saved his number solely as t.c. with the water drop, the syringe, the ghost, the eggplant, the firework emoji and she chuckles endearingly, questioning the universe how he can easily get both a rise and a laugh out of her.

“I’ll text you?” Carrick asks again and she nods a little too enthusiastically at it, but what the hell?

“Sure.”

“Alright.” He takes one look at her, steps closer and for a moment, she thinks he might be going to kiss her.

“Goodnight, Claire,” Carrick says instead and she nods, admitting the fact that he’s not going to do it.

“Goodnight to you too, Tobias.” Then pauses at the doorway, feeling surprisingly bold. “I gotta give it to you, though, for someone who’s become the bane of my existence for months, you’re a damn good lay.”

He barks out a laugh, obviously, that Claire can hear all the way down the hall. And she thinks she can get used to the sound.

fin.

Tag list: @villain-fuckarooni @beckaroo @arfeiniel @this-person-is-busy @colossalpainintheass @drethanramslay @hatescapsicum @theeccentricbibliophile

#playchoices #open heart #tobias carrick #tobias carrick x mc #open heart mc #oh mc #pixelberry #choices stories you play

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domesticblisss · 3 years

Text

24 Hours

Marcel Barthel x Female Reader x Fabian Aichner Rating: Mature (Minors DNI) Word count: 2008 Warnings: Smut/A little angsty. Oral (female and male receiving), threesome, double penetration, PiV, anal. Alcohol mention. Inspired by Sky Ferreira’s song, 24 hours.

If she could describe their relationship, she would describe it with “I don’t know”. Simple as that. One big I don’t know. She doesn’t think they could be called friends with benefits, well, they talk almost weekly, ask how each other’s lives are going... does that makes them friends? She likes to call themselves “I’m in town, let’s do something with benefits”. They don’t live that far from each other, it’s a 4 hour drive from their respective towns, and an even smaller flight. Their schedule rarely match, she knows how busy they get with training and travelling for live shows and she’s constantly travelling for her own job too.

They met a few years ago, the three of them far away from the places they now call home. She was in Los Angeles to meet a potential new client to her company and Marcel and Fabian, just arriving from Europe, on their first tour with NXT.

She met Marcel first. Tall, blonde, energetic. The sharpest cheekbones she has ever seen, green eyes that made her breathless. He sees her sitting at the bar’s counter and decides to try his luck. To be honesty, she wasn’t looking for anything, but how could she say no to that angel face that she knew was trouble. He was funny, his thick german accent making her swoon. They kept their conversation going for what felt like 40 minutes until they hear a strong but at the same time soft man’s voice shouting Marcel’s name.

Marcel introduces the new guy to her, “This is Fabian, my partner! We wrestle together.” Fabian is... something. Tall, but shorter than Marcel. Bald, but she can see the hint of a thick beard coming in. Broad shoulders, morning sky blue eyes, more reserved. Marcel does almost all the talking, but only nice things comes out when Fabian decides to speak. He also got an accent, she can’t pinpoint from where exactly, assumes it’s european too and later finds out he’s italian. “A german and an italian, what a combination...” she thinks, mesmerised by the way Fabian stares at her and this knowing look Marcel gets in his eyes when he glances at the both of them.

They decided to move to a table, to get more comfortable. A few beers for them, a couple of gin and tonics for her and they stay there chatting, exchanging experiences and laughs for hours. The bar is getting more crowded as time passes and it’s almost midnight when Fabian asks “do you want to get out of here? somewhere more quiet, more private?”

“With the two of you?” she wonders, incredulous.

“We’re like a 2 for 1 package deal!” intervenes Marcel.

She stops, looks at their faces for a few seconds. Fabian is serene, just waiting for his ‘yes or no’ answer, Marcel looks like an eager kid at a candy store, about to explode with excitement but trying to hide it behind a nonchalant mask.

She wets her lips, looks at the both of them and agrees with it, “Sure. Where are you two staying at?”

They ended up going to hers, it being a five minute walk only.

What she thought would be a 1 hour top kind of night turned out to be a 48 hour weekend, with them stopping only to eat, drink some water and rest for a bit when it got too much. When she asked them if they need to workout or practice they answered in union “Oh, it’s gonna be a cardio weekend”.

Those little time out moments they spent getting to know each other. The boys told her how they started wrestling, places they’ve traveled and people they’ve met. She told them about how she started her own marketing company a year ago and how it’s slowly growing.

“I’m here for a client meeting, actually. A big, big client. I was at the bar celebrating.”

“So that means you got the contract, right?” Fabian asks excitedly.

“Yeah!”, and with her confirmation, Marcel agrees it calls for a celebration.

The celebration turns out to be 3 back to back orgasms for her. She was sure they would have had continued if she didn’t beg them to stop once she couldn’t feel her legs anymore.

The weekend went on like this. By the time the trio had to leave, they had exchanged contacts and addresses, finding out how close to each other they were.

They kept in touch, always reaching out to see how the other was, letting them know if they were around. That was their dynamic. A few encounters that lasted, 2, 3, 24 hours that, sometimes, she wished it would never end.

One summer, tired of all the work she has been doing, she decides to take a vacation. This comes up during one of their conversations and Marcel has the great idea of inviting her to watch them perform live, “You could stay with us, if you want to, of course”, Fabian chimes in.

Agreeing with it, she packs her stuff and leaves on the next wednesday. She decides to drive there, using those precious little hours to clear her head. The GPS system and radio are on and it’s time to go.

The first couple of hours goes smoothly. She sings along to her favourite tunes, dances a little and makes a quick bathroom break. When she’s back in the road, the GPS alerts her that an accident happened, doubling her arrival time. Deciding to let the boys know, she sends them a quick audio message on their group chat, “Hey, some accident just happened on the highway. Traffic is awful... I’ll probably get there by the time the show starts.” Fabian is the one to answer her, almost immediately, telling her that’s it’s okay, that when she arrives she should look for Harry Johnson from Relations that everything will be sorted out, finishing with a “Please drive safe, tesoro ❤”

That tesoro and heart emoji combo haunted her for the rest of the trip.

They never called her any pet names.

The rest of the trip went by without any troubles. She arrives 10 minutes before the show starts, with Harry waiting for her by the door, being greeted with a backstage pass and a front row seat ticket.

She was delighted with the show. The sheer athleticism, the lights and the charisma were out of this world. But she couldn’t believe was how well Marcel and Fabian worked together. They knew each other’s moves to perfection, they knew exactly what to do, when to attack their opponents, when to save each other. Their perfect partnership made them win the NXT Tag Team titles for the second time that night.

She ran backstage looking for them, meeting the duo at their dressing room.

Marcel was the first one to greet her, hugging her so tightly she couldn’t breathe, “I’m so happy you came to see us, liebe!”

The boys took turns on taking their showers to keep her company, deciding that it would be better to head straight to their apartment. Marcel went ahead of them, letting Fabian accompany her, guiding her back to their place.

It was a silent drive, with soft music playing on the radio. He kept his left hand on her right thigh all the time, rubbing soothing circles on its insides. On red lights he would either seal their lips together or pepper her cheeks and neck with light kisses.

As soon as she got through the door of their apartment, Marcel was on her, clinging on her lips like a starved man, “do you know how much we have missed you, liebe?”

“We can’t believe you are here, Tesoro. We shouldn’t stay that long without seeing each other again”, says Fabian, while kissing her neck.

“What is it with the two of you and pet names today?” she says between moans, both Fabian and Marcel hitting her sweet spots. Marcel stops and asks what she means with it, she says that this is the first time they ever called her something like that and all he says before lifting her up to snake her legs around his waist is “I’m sorry, let us right our wrongs”

The german takes her to his bedroom, Fabian following close behind. As soon as they arrive, they waste no time on taking their clothes off. Marcel lies on his bed, ordering her to sit on his face which she takes no time to comply.

“I brought lube and the plug, they are on the pink bag on the front pocket of my suitcase.” She tells Fabian when they break their kiss, and she can feel Marcel moan beneath her. Fabian wastes no time to grab it, covering two fingers in lube and inserting one at a time to get her used to it. He takes is time with it, going slow as to not hurt her, after a minute, he slowly inserts the plug.

She grabs him by the hand, brings him down to a quick kiss and as soon as he is up, she stars sucking him. Slow licks and stokes, increasing as she feels him lose control, he grabs her by the hair, making her deep throat his dick.

Between her legs, Marcel takes some time to breathe, mesmerized by the scene unfolding above him, “You two are so fucking hot” and goes back to his job.

They stay like that for a while, with her only stopping sucking Fabian when she reaches her high.

The boys switch places, Fabian now lying down, helping her take the plug off to switch it with his throbbing cock. Marcel is not left behind, lining himself between her thighs and entering her in one swift move.

Their great work on the ring transfers to the bedroom, with the both of them working in sync to make her lose her mind. It isn’t long before she comes again, taking Fabian with her. Marcel keeps his thrusts hard and deep even with her walls closing around him, making him reach his own high a matter of seconds later.

He collapses on top of them, making the other two laugh. They stay like this for a little while, basking in each other’s presence, taking in their scents.

Marcel decides to get up when he feels his dick going limp inside her, grabbing a towel to clean her up a little, and Fabian opts for grabbing a bottle of water for the three of them.

They get back to bed with her, silence consuming them. After a few minutes, all the thoughts she has been suppressing for sometime now comes back to her.

“What are we?”

“What do you mean, liebe?”

“Are we friends? Acquaintances? What is this thing we have? I’m sorry and if you guys want to end it after this, it’s okay, but I have to say it, I’ve been keeping it inside for so long… the days we have together are the best ones. Ever. It sucks that I can only see the two of you for so little time, one day or a weekend is not enough. I always look forward to your texts, even when it’s you sending some stupid gaming meme I don’t get or Marcel thirst trapping. I hate that we live so close to each other and see ourselves so little… FUCK I’m ranting, I’m sorry. I should probably leave.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Fabian stops her, “first of all, Tesoro, you are not leaving and we are not ending anything. Marcel and I were talking about this last week, that’s why we decided to invite you to the show tonight. We love you and we didn’t know how to say it. Wait, I guess I just did? Anyway… you have your life and we didn’t want to mess with it, but, if you want to, we could try and work something out.”

“So, what do you say, liebe? Could we work something out?”

“Yeah, we can work something out…”

#fabian aicher x reader #fabian aichner imagine #marcel barthel x reader #marcel barthel imagine #wrestling imagine #DB Writes

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rent-a-friend-au · 2 years

Text

Scene 3. First Flight

LEARN ABOUT THE RENT-A-FRIEND AU → Summary: Zhongli and Ajax's "first date" in Liyue, now that he has hired the prim and proper man to be his guide. First stop: the ever-unpopular Wanmin Restaurant. Scene Rating: K+ Scene Length: 3k words

One week later, Ajax finds himself stumbling through one of the many moon gates in Liyue Harbor, hoping what he has heard about them is true and that it really will give him some blessings; he’ll need them if he is ever going to find the stupid place Zhongli had suggested they meet at for their first outing together. This is, in Ajax’s incredibly professional and humble opinion, utter bullshit because how is Zhongli going to leave him to fend for himself through the streets of Liyue Harbor when he is supposed to be his guide? He had even scraped together what little Liyuen he knew to ask a passerby where he could find a ‘Wanmin’ once he realized she didn’t speak the continental language - only to be told, “I’ve never heard of that place before, sorry!”

Zhongli, he has learned, communicates very slowly over P.A.I.M.O.N., but the man seems to adore emojis and stickers - something about how incredible it is that people can express themselves in ‘little images.’ Ajax has a hunch that despite being a “friend,” Zhongil doesn’t actually have many friends. Even so, it’s only when he is about to give up and call his inconsiderate guide for help that he steps through that moon gate on a whim and into what he thinks is a secluded garden.

“Or maybe not?” Ajax mumbles, eyes roaming over the details of the space in front of him. Located somewhere between the outskirts of Feiyun Slope and Chihu Rock - probably too far west to be within city bounds anymore - is a lovely building of traditional Liyuen architecture. A cobblestone path leads visitors on a winding, whimsical trip around a dark green pond peppered with water lilies and an oversized maple the likes of which he has only seen in a visit to Mt. Tianheng in the north - that knotted trunk is not so difficult to recognize even to a foreigner like himself.

It’s quiet here. As if passing through that gate had taken him to another world or to Liyue’s past, a hush had immediately washed over his heart and mind.

“Ah, there you are, Childe.” Zhongli finds him standing under the shade of the early summer maple leaves, watching the near-black surface of the water. After observing his expression for a moment longer, he smiles. “I take it this place is to your liking?”

Ajax immediately snaps out of his reverie to send the man an irritated look, debating on whether he should tell him just how much he liked looking for this place. “...It’s pretty, I guess,” he reluctantly admits instead, then flushes even darker when he hears his guide chuckle. “Oi!”

“My apologies,” Zhongli coughs politely into a fist, but really, he is using it to hide his smile. “You surprised me, is all; I fully expected you to complain about how difficult it is to find Wanmin-tang.”

“So you were aware after all!”

“Of course,” he agrees unabashedly, tilting his head in the direction of the building’s main entrance in silent invitation. Ajax falls into step at his side. “Rest assured, Childe; this is the exception, not the rule. I will be sure to guide you thoroughly in the future, but I felt there was a valuable lesson to be learned here and could not resist the opportunity.”

“What are you, a teacher?” Ajax sighs past the doorway and through the corridor leading into the restaurant. “I’ll hear you out, but can we order first? I’m famished!”

The inside of Wanmin-tang is full of gleaming wood in comfortable, warm tones. From the look of the outside, he had expected to walk in on a small, traditional eatery where the stiffness of the staff would give him an itch. Instead, the inside is surprisingly modern, with seating not unlike a cafe or family restaurant and low-hanging glass globes giving off pleasant lighting. The windows are large, each with a view of some part of the garden, so when they are led to a table by one of the staff, Ajax feels as if he could reach out and touch the flora just beyond the glass.

“Hmm,” he let out, taking in their surroundings for a moment longer before meeting Zhongli’s gaze. “It’s unexpectedly nice in here, but… why is it so empty?”

He asks this question in hushed tones in fear of offending anyone listening, but his efforts might not have been necessary with the scarcity of customers at the moment. Other than themselves, there is an elderly couple dining with a young girl, likely their granddaughter, and a white-collar worker typing away at his laptop as he sips from a cup of coffee. Considering the timing of their arrival, this place should be in the middle of its lunch rush, and yet…

“How polished is your Liyuen?” Zhongli begins, folding his hands peacefully together in front of him the way he did when they first met. Ajax thinks it must be a habit as he shakes his head in response to the question. “The meaning of ‘Wanmin’ is ‘a restaurant for all.’ In other words, it is an establishment where anyone - poor or rich, heartbroken or healed - can visit and find comfort. Throughout your stay in Liyue, you may come across more places that are best discovered on one’s own rather than allow a guide to spoil your encounter.” His lips turn up slightly at the corners in a bitter smile. “That said, Wanmin is not very popular; its location is too obscure though beautiful it may be.”

“Is that so…”

“Oh, it’s Mr. Zhongli!” comes the Liyuen exclamation.

Ajax looks up from their table and its small, pretty vase filled with flowers he has never seen before - he had been staring at it while digesting the information Zhongli just shared and recalling his encounter with a certain food cart - and sees a young girl across the room with a round, wooden tray hugged against her chest. She smiles brightly upon recognizing his ‘friend’ and trots over to them. Upon closer look, the first things he notices about the girl are her warm, honey-gold eyes and the clip in her bangs decorated with a bear’s paw print.

“Xiangling, always a pleasure,” Zhongli greets kindly before switching to the continental language. “Allow me to introduce you: this is a new acquaintance of mine, Childe. It is his first time visiting Wanmin.”

“Oh? A new customer, welcome!” she cheers, switching to the continental language with an easy grin. Ajax can’t help but return her smile; her upbeat energy is infectious. “I’m Xiangling, one of the chefs here. Have you already decided what you’re going to eat?”

“Not yet,” Ajax admits sheepishly. “What do you recommend, chef? I like bold flavors, but I’m not used to Liyue’s spicy foods. Maybe you can ease me into it.”

She brings a hand to her chin with a thoughtful hum. “To tell you the truth, our menu is really just a suggestion for our customers. My dad and I take custom orders sometimes, but most of our regulars come to sample our experiments, too… say, how do you feel about fish?” Xiangling’s eyes light up as she draws nearer, reflecting both excitement and challenge. That’s fine; Ajax is no pussy.

“I like it,” he says confidently, and it’s an honest response. His homeland, Morepesok, is a small town by the sea where the new and the old seem happy to mix. Many of the restaurants there would receive fresh shipments of the local fish every morning. His father had been a fisherman…

Xiangling leans even closer, apparently trying to hold back her smile but failing, much to Zhongli’s amusement. “Then~ won’t you trust me with your lunch today? I promise to make it delicious!” she pleads, and Ajax laughs. She doesn’t need to try so hard; he was already willing to let her do as she liked the moment he spotted the hope in her expression.

Something about the way she insists reminds him of his younger sister Tonia, who often asked him for favors in the same manner.

“Have at it,” he says, casually waving off her efforts and giving his blessings. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Hooray! Thank you so much!” Xiangling’s genuine brightness is enough. Even if Ajax ends up absolutely hates the fish, he’ll never admit it; he still has a soft spot for kids. “And what about you, Mr. Zhongli? What will you be having today?”

The guide lets a secretive smile rise to his mouth. “It seems Mr. Mao will not have a chance to show his skills today.” Xiangling lights up once more. “Let’s see… if Childe is having fish, then I shall do the same. One order of your specialty, spicy boiled fish.”

“Mr. Zhongli! How many times have I told you it's fine not to go along with Xiangling's experiments?” comes a call from the counter. Ajax blinks as a man walks around the side, drying freshly washed hands in a towel as he approaches their table. “You don’t have to spoil her; she’s still learning! And besides, you already helped her enough by finding that part-time job at your company… Gosh, at this rate, I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you.”

“Oh, Chef Mao, please.” It’s Ajax’s turn to watch in amusement as Zhongli flushes lightly in embarrassment. “There is no need to bring up old favors. I am happy enough to continue enjoying myself here at your wonderful establishment. Xiangling is shaping up to be a wonderful chef, every day.”

‘Chef Mao,’ as he’d heard, seems to be the primary chef and owner of Wanmin Restaurant, as well as Xiangling’s father. Once he puts these pieces together, it’s easy for Ajax to see the whole picture: Xiangling wants to be a chef just like her father, but is currently working part-time at Guili Client Partners…

“Are you…” Ajax glances between Zhongli and Xiangling. “A ‘friend?’” he asks, but the question is met with laughter.

“No, she is not a field worker like me,” his guide answers, gaining his attention. He then begins to explain that Xiangling is working as a chef in the cafeteria where they had first met, to gain experience in a different environment.

And with his eyes on Zhongli, Ajax misses the way Xiangling and Chef Mao exchange glances, prompting the elder of the two to lean in close to his daughter and whisper in Liyuen, “Isn’t Mr. Zhongli…”

“So those rumors were true, after all! That means this handsome guy is the one?”

“He definitely looks Snezhnayan.” Chef Mao squints thoughtfully.

“Hmmm?” Ajax prompts, mistakenly thinking he had been addressed.

“Nothing!” Xiangling swiftly replies. “My dad was just giving me a suggestion for your meals. Speaking of which, we better get started on those for you, huh? Be back in a jiffy!” she says all in one breath, pushing her father away from the table by the shoulders.

“Did we disturb their work too much?” Ajax wonders. “I wasn’t expecting the owner himself to come out. Don’t tell me you’re actually well-connected?”

“Something like that,” his guide smoothly replies. “This restaurant is over thirty years old now. I visited often in my youth... Chef Mao took good care of me then.”

“I see,” Ajax nods before a question pops into his mind. “Say, how old are you, Mr. Zhongli?”

“Me?” Another staff member comes by with steaming cups of tea on a tray and deposits two on their table silently so as to leave their conversation undisturbed. “Twenty-seven years old,” Zhongli answers, taking up the handleless cup of tea in front of them. He takes a small sip and savors the taste before flipping the question around on him. “And yourself, Childe?”

“Twenty-one,” he answers, entertaining the idea of trying the tea. He’s not a huge fan of the stuff - coffee is more to his taste - but it suits Zhongli, he thinks.

“So young,” Zhongli comments lightly, and Ajax lets an irritated brow grace his features.

“Is that a problem?” he returns.

“Not at all. I simply noticed a trend, that's all.” When Ajax prompts him to continue, he says, “The customers who seek our services at Guili Client Partners seem to be getting younger and younger over the years… It is probably not a good thing,” he admits.

“How old was your youngest customer?” Ajax wonders aloud before catching himself. “Ah, am I allowed to ask that?”

Zhongli nods, eyes crinkling in the corners with mirth at his hesitance. “Yes, don’t worry. It was a sixteen-year-old girl who made probably one of the most memorable requests our company ever received: she hired about a dozen field workers to meet her at an intersection downtown, where they took a group photo to be shared on social media.”

“...That’s it? Just a group picture?”

Zhongli nods his head. “You would be surprised at the lengths to which some people are willing to go to make others believe they have friends or are popular.”

“Well, when you put it that way…” He has seen a lot of different shit as ‘Tartaglia,’ too. “When I was young-” Zhongli raises a brow elegantly. “-Okay, damn! When I was younger, I felt a similar kind of pressure to prove myself.” Ajax crosses his arms over his chest, flushing bright red. How did this guy get to the point of teasing him?

“Is that so,” Zhongli hums into his tea, completely unbothered. “Were you a rambunctious child?”

Ajax snorts wryly at the suggestion. “The opposite, actually.” His eyes land on the glassy surface of his untouched tea. There is a smoky scent rising from it, but no more steam. “I was a total wimp. My parents were actually worried and often asked if anyone gave me any trouble at school. They didn’t,” he assures once he sees concern rise to meet the curve of Zhongli’s mouth. “My older brother chased them away, you see.”

“So you have siblings,” the man concludes, smiling pleasantly. “How many?”

“Five total: two older and three younger.” At the surprised awe on Zhongli’s face, Ajax can only laugh. “Yeah, we’re a big family. What about you?”

He shakes his head. “An only child, but I was blessed with several life-long friendships early on.”

“So they’re like siblings,” Ajax understands. He smiles. “Good for you.”

Zhongli gently inclines his head in thanks. Xiangling reappears soon after with a larger tray than the one she was carrying before. “Sorry about the wait! My dad and I started arguing about how much ketchup to use!” she laughs.

“Ketchup…?” Ajax echoes in wonder as Zhongli gratefully receives his bowl. Xiangling gently sets his portion down next, leaving the Snezhnayan stunned. “What’s this?” he asks excitedly, a grin of disbelief ticking up to his lips as he meets the chef’s gaze.

“It’s squirrelfish!” she says with a flourish. “There’s no squirrel in there, don’t worry, haha. It’s just called that way because of this part here…” she gestures towards the fluffy center of the fish. “You have to debone the entire thing and then cut it in crisscrosses, which makes it look like a squirrel’s tail!”

“It’s been deep-fried?” Ajax asks, peering closer at the meal.

“To a golden-brown!” she answers proudly. “And then drizzled with tangy ketchup! I really hope you like it.”

A fork is passed to him, but Ajax shakes his head. “Give me a pair of chopsticks,” he demands bravely, though he has trouble taking a bite of his food. Xiangling watches him with barely-contained nervousness.

The outside is satisfyingly crunchy, no doubt a result of the thin crisp from the frying encasing each morsel. The inside, to his pleasant surprise, is tender and juicy, immediately snapping his appetite to attention. The tail and the head of the fish have been kept for presentation’s sake, it seems, but Ajax knows how to eat what he can from those, too.

“...It’s good,” he finally says. “No, it’s delicious. You’re amazing, Xiangling!”

The young chef throws her hands up with a squeal of glee. “Yay! I’m so happy you like it! Dad, he says he likes it!” she calls across the room. Chef Mao’s head pops out from an ordering window.

“Haha, of course he does! My Xiangling can’t be beat!”

“Oh, dad,” she melts, helplessly shaking her head as obnoxious, proud laughter escapes the kitchen. Xiangling then looks to Zhongli in askance, who nods in approval - before breathing another sigh of happiness and relief. “Well, I won’t bother you anymore.” Her fists come to rest on her hips. “Just let me know if you’d like any dessert later!” With a wink and a wave, she gracefully leaves them to their dining.

“I like her spirit,” Ajax comments, munching happily on his squirrelfish. “Do you think once Xiangling takes over, this place will get more popular?”

“Chef Mao’s skills are not to be overlooked,” Zhongli warns with a smile. “But, hm, I suppose Xiangling presents a sort of novelty to her dishes that may work in her favor. Whether that will be enough to overcome the obscurity of this location is yet to be seen.”

“...Will this place close?” he asks lowly.

“Ah, that is the least likely thing to happen,” Zhongli assures him. “The regulars here would surely never allow it.”

Ajax laughs brightly at the thought. “Of course, of course,” he sighs.

Wanmin Restaurant may be hard to find, but it welcomes even foreigners like him as if they were family. This place, and Bo Fa’s food cart… maybe he is starting to understand what Zhongli said about carving out one’s own encounters. For the duration of his stay in Liyue, he’s sure to become a regular customer to both of these places whether Zhongli is accompanying him or not.

He hates to admit it after all the trouble he went through earlier today, but… Zhongli is promising to be a great guide.

Notes: In this story, Xiangling has taken her mother's surname, which was “Xiong”, written with the character for “bear” [熊 (Xióng)]

NEXT → ← FIRST

#rent a friend story #genshin fic #zhongchi #tartali #genshin modern au #genshin zhongli #genshin childe #genshin xiangling #genshin chef mao

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snowdice · 4 years

Text

Road Trips and Missing Persons (Part 19)

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Relationships: Patton & Virgil, Virgil & Janus, Logan & Patton, Emile & Remy, Roman & Remus & Janus

Characters: Patton, Virgil, Janus, Remus, Roman, Logan, Emile, Remy

Summary: Patton was just getting groceries. The next thing he knew, there was a knife at his throat and he was an unwilling uber driver. Virgil’s on the run after the murder of his dad, and it’s not just his paranoia that’s telling him he’s being chased down. He has to get somewhere safe, somewhere he can trust, and all he has is a couple of stories from his dad and a name: “Green Bellow Foods and Dispensary.”

Notes: Secret Agents AU, knives, carjacking, kidnapping, murder mentioned, guns mentioned, pepper spray, blood mentioned, drugs mentioned, explosions, car crashes (more to be added)

This is a fic I’ve been writing on study breaks that you have probably all already seen at this point. I’ve affectionately named it the Goblin Brain Fic because it’s helping my brain actually get motivated for studying. I’ve slightly edited it for wording and grammar, but not for content from my previous posts. Feel free to send in asks to direct it because I’m not 100% sure where this is going and you can help decide if you feel so inclined! You can see the process I went through to build this at this link.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 My Master Post

“…Huh?” Patton said in response to the clearly fuming man that had just come into the room. At first, Virgil had assumed that he was talking to Virgil, but his eyes were on Patton. “What’d I do?”

Angry Guy took a moment to pause, his fingers twitching like he wanted to squeeze Patton’s neck. “Do you know why I called you?”

Patton opened his mouth.

“Of course, you don’t!” Angry Guy continued. “Because the only communication I’ve gotten from you in the past 5 hours is a phone call where you hung up before I could explain anything and an unintelligible string of emojis!”

“Well, what did you need to talk to me about?” Patton asked.

“There was a missing child,” Angry Guy said.

“Oh no!” Patton replied.

Angry Guy stared at him for a moment. “Him, Patton,” he said pointing at Virgil. “The missing child was him!”

“Oh,” Patton said. “I guess it all worked out then!”

“NO.”

“Wait, wait,” Virgil said. “Unintelligible string of emojis? You’re his brother?”

“Now, honey, don’t get skittish,” Patton said, which was when Virgil realized he had taken a step back.

“No, no,” Virgil said. “What’s going on? He’s your brother and he’s here.”

“Well, how exactly did you think I knew where the abandoned factory that happened to be a cover for a secret agency was?” Patton asked.

“It’s a what?” Virgil asked.

“Patton.”

Patton waved Angry Man off. “He already basically knew.”

“Wait,” Virgil said. “My dad is… was a secret agent?”

Angry Man looked a little less angry when he glanced away from Patton to meet Virgil’s eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Your father worked for me for a lot of years, which is why I sent my agents after you. I thought of him as a friend, and I am well aware that your mother is unfit,” his tone darkened considerable, “for a variety of reasons.”

“She killed dad,” Virgil said.

“I know,” Angry Man replied. “Though… I am unsure how you learned that information.”

Virgil didn’t feel like answering; instead he turned to Patton with an accusing look. “You knew!”

“Well, I didn’t know everything.”

“You knew enough! Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Well at first you had a knife,” Patton said.

“He what?” Angry Man asked.

“Then you were asleep. Then you were panicking. By that point I was worried that trying to tell you anything would make you panic more especially because you obviously didn’t want me to know anything about you. So, I decided it was better just to let you lead and figure stuff out when we got here.”

Virgil glared at him. “This is just like the cows,” he grumbled.

“So, the cows were a part of it?” Angry Man asked.

“No, no,” said Patton. “We were already off the interstate when that accident happened.”

“But he just said…”

“It was the cow game. We went past the cemetery near Hudson.”

“Why did you go the back way?”

“He had an active tracker on him,” Patton answered. “He threw it out of the window, but we thought it was best to get off the interstate.”

Angry Man turned to Virgil. “If you had one tracker on you, we should probably check you for more just to be safe. I wouldn’t trust your mother.” His nose scrunched up just a touch and his mouth turned down when he mentioned Virgil’s mom. At least Virgil and Angry Man seemed to be on the same page when it came to how much Mom sucked.

“So, you’re going to help me?” Virgil asked.

“Of course,” Angry Man replied. “I will make sure you are cared for.”

“And I won’t have to go with mom.”

“I would much prefer that you did not, and I am sure that would align with your father’s wishes. Particularly because he had in the past discussed such a theoretical circumstance with me and had threatened to “haunt me” if I ever let you near “that bitch.”

Virgil couldn’t help but chuckle at that even if it came out strained. “Sounds like dad,” he said and then shifted nervously. “So, what’s going to happen now?”

“For now, I’ll take you downstairs and find you a place to rest. Usually, I’d offer you food, but knowing Patton that has likely been taken care of.” Virgil nodded. “We’ll figure out exactly what’s going to happen next once I have figured out all of the other complications of tonight.”

“What other complications?” Patton asked.

Angry Man turned to him. “Well if you’d answer your phone,” he said, irritation coloring his tone once again, “you would be aware that everyone is missing.”

“What do you mean by ‘everyone’?”

“I mean, I haven’t heard from Roman since he checked the bus station near his house,” he gestured at Virgil, “hours ago. Remus has sent me exactly one very unhelpful text. His partner, my double agent, opened the last mission request but hasn’t responded in any way. Having known the man for the last two years, I am certain he is being completely irrational over his worry and doing god knows what. That is assuming he wasn’t found out and captured. I sent Fredrick and Darlene out investigate what was going on, but the last I knew, they were in a car chase and their communication devices cut out. I can’t even get ahold of his uncle after our phone call was cut off while the man was screaming.”

That made Virgil’s stomach clench in worry. “He was screaming?” Angry Man seemed to realize his mistake and grimaced. He glanced over at Patton as though for help. Patton stepped up next to Virgil and carefully put an arm around his shoulder. Virgil curled into the half-hug and allowed himself to be comforted even though he planned to return to being miffed at Patton for keeping secrets later.

“We’ll figure everything out and no matter what happens, I promise you’ll be okay. Logan knows what he’s doing and I’m going to help.” He looked up at his brother. “For now, let’s go downstairs.”

“Okay,” Virgil agreed.

“Maybe I’ll even get a full name out of you yet.”

“What?” Logan asked. “You don’t even know who he is? Did you just kidnap a random child?”

“Of course, I do. He’s Bob,” Patton said immediately. Virgil couldn’t help it, he laughed. Patton send him a wink. “Also, I’d say he kidnapped me.”

“I don’t care to know what you mean by that at the moment,” Logan said with a sigh, “but that isn’t ‘Bob.’ He’s Virgil Gates.”

“Remy’s kid?” Patton asked.

“You know my dad?” Virgil asked.

“Remy’s dead?!” Patton asked which was when the front doors opened suddenly.

“Quit telling everyone I’m dead!”

There was a beat of silence. “Sometimes I can still hear his voice,” said Patton cheerfully.

“Dad?” Virgil asked.

Want to read more? Click below!

Part 20

#sanders sides #patton sanders #logan sanders #platonic moxiety #virgil sanders #remus sanders #roman sanders #janus sanders #creativitwins #emile picani #remy sanders #kidnapping #murder mentioned #adriana writes #road trips and missing persons #road trips and everything in between

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supersizemeplz · 5 years

Text

Tell Me Your Secret

Part Two

Jeweler!Erik Stevens x Black PlusSized Reader

Another #supersizedfic short. The second and final installment to this short. I didn't proofread so excuse mistakes. Enjoy!

Masego spilled out of the bedroom and into the hallway. His smooth sound cleansing negative impurities from the air of the home. Erik two stepped as he smoothed his hands over the soft cotton of his sweater, dancing to the music with a smirk. His fingers gripped the bottom and gently tugged the sweater into place as he hummed along to the lyrics of Navajo.

His black cotton socks helped him glide across the floor of the bathroom as he entered, spinning as he sang. A bit off key but loudly nonetheless. As he checked himself out in the mirror, his music was interrupted by a soft ding.

That sent him rushing to get to his phone in the bedroom. It might be you texting him. He picked up the phone, bringing the screen to life only to smack his lips. His eyes read over a text from Shuri before he vowed to never tell 'Challa another damned thing. Sending back a quick 'it's just a little date', he tossed his phone to the bed to find his dark slip-in dress shoes. He never could remember their name.

Another ding broke his thoughts, but he didn't move as fast as last time. When he scooped up his phone this time, Shuri sent an eye roll emoji with her message. Not if it's with your princess. The Erik I know doesn't go on dates..

Erik stared at the screen for a moment, rereading the message. The little genius was right. He wasn't the type to go on dates. It'd never been a motivation until now.

Since he'd seen your smile..

Since your scent was something he could detect from a mile away..

Since your face was etched into his mind..

He sent back a short text agreeing to spill the details of the date when he got home if she'd stop the questions. She agreed, telling him he had til midnight to give her an update. He chuckled as left his phone on the bed once again. His steps were soft as he made his way back to the closet for his shoes.

They rested in their designated place, along with the other shoes that were neatly placed on the shelves that adorned the shorter wall of his closet. He slipped them on quickly, making his way to his collection of watches. Most he'd made custom for himself.

Brushing a finger over his gold patek, he grinned before slipping it from it's place in his display. It's black face sparkled faintly like glitter as the outline of the numbers glowed a hint of purple. Almost like soft heartbeat.

You'd once told him that you'd liked the watch. That it reminded you of him. He'd smiled when you said it, raising an eyebrow as he wondered what exactly that meant. Until you'd told him 'One of a kind and easy on the eyes'.

Latching on the watch, he noticed the time and put a bounce in his step. He'd slipped on his coat and slipped out the door in record time. Not forgetting to bring along the rectangle jewelry box he'd been saving and slip it in his pocket.

Ducking into his car and bringing the engine to life, he was on the road with twenty minutes to spare. Fifteen in which he'd use to get to you.

And they seemed to crawl by too slowly. Or maybe he was just ready to see you again. He'd bobbed his head to the songs of his playlist as he made his way to your place, mumbling the lyrics to keep his nerves calm.

Yet it didn't help soften the palpitations of his heart.

It only worsened when he'd laid eyes on you. You emerged from the doors of the fancy apartment building, beaming that smile he'd dreamt of numerous times. Your coils bounced softly as you made your way to him, hands tucked in the pockets of your red trench styled coat. Those brown legs peeked from the between the bottom of your coat and the top of your thick-heeled boots. You looked warm, but he wouldn't wrapping his arms around you if you still felt a chill.

It'd taken you laughing to catch his attention, looking up to him with amusement in your eyes. He'd mentally cursed himself for zoning out. After greeting you properly, he moved to open the door of his car. You slipped in with ease, melting against the heated seats. He'd missed seeing you rub your fingers along the dash, admiring the leather interior as he walked around the car.

You both made small talk as he drifted into the light traffic. Unforced and relaxed. He'd revealed where you both were headed for the night. Black Renaissance. A black owned restaurant that opened a couple blocks from his store, with a live band and dishes from around the world. It was the first place he'd thought of when you'd agreed to a date.

The owner was a client and friend of his, a big bellied male with a salt and pepper beard. That's how he'd gotten a special reservation, passing all the couples that'd been waiting on list for weeks.

Pulling up to the large establishment, the illuminated sign stood out. The restaurant's name spelled out in cursive with light reflecting off the sleek dark iron they were cut in. Erik helped you from the car, handing the young valet his keys before your way into the building. The hostess greeted him with a wide smile, giving a kiss to his cheek as she hugged him as well as you. You glanced at him, making him chuckle. His hand rested on the small of your back, respectively, as he followed the hostess.

You admired her glowing skin, watching the darkened coils of her hair bounce with her steps. The confident switch of her hips. When she'd seated you both towards the quieter side of the establishment, she'd introduced her self as the owner's wife. Explaining how much Erik told her of you before she hurried off to get your drinks.

"You talk about me, huh?" You smirked, slipping off you coat. "Good things, I'm hoping.." His eyes admired the brown skin your shoulders against the olive green of your off the shoulder dress. Matching once again. He smiled brightly.

"There's nothing bad that I could tell.." He slipped off his jacket, revealing the olive green sweater beneath. "Unless you have a secret side I should know about?" His eyebrow raised in curiosity. You only smirked in response, mimicking his earlier actions with zipping his lips clothes. He'd find out about your sexual desires and love for writing fanfiction at a later date.

He chuckled, nodding as he playfully squinted his eyes. "It'll surface sooner or later.."

You picked up your menu to look over the choices after throwing him a teasing look. "Hopefully you can handle it when it does.." He licked his lips, out of habit, as he studied you. Did that have a hidden meaning?

He left the matter alone for the moment, but it still sat in the back of his thoughts. You chuckled at his playful glare, sending a wink to him as a waiter approached the table with your drinks. When he'd ask if you were ready to order, you glanced at Erik. Since he had picked up his menu at all.

"I already know what I want princess. Just choose whatever you want.." Erik smirked, watching you as you glanced back yo the menu. Tucking your bottom lip between your teeth, you hummed softly. He'd sat up when you closed your menu. "You wanna go first?"

You shook your head. "I want whatever you're having. You seem so comfortable with it.." The waiter looked to Erik, waiting for his order. The Steakhouse special, a steak and a two sides of your choice. In a matter of minutes, you two were alone again.

"That's a lot of food. You sure you can handle all that?" Erik teased, taking a sip of his tea. You replied with a smooth 'There's nothing I can't handle'. He coughed as he cleared his throat, putting his glass down. You innocently sipped your water, shrugging.

Deciding to stop your teasing, you switched the conversation. Leaning forward as he answered your questions. Starting off with simple questions, you'd asked of his career and how he'd started. He'd told you about his degrees in engineering from M.I.T, also revealing that he'd been a military man. U.S. Navy and other government assignments.

Then it'd flipped to you.

He already knew you were an interior designer, but he wanted a glimpse into your personal life. Not too personal, but things like the school you attended and college life. He'd often found himself wondering how the life of a normal college student was even if that was many years behind him.

He'd been surprised when you revealed that you weren't the goody two shoes he thought you'd been. You'd partied, you'd drank, and you'd had your share of good times. He'd laughed as you told him how you'd once were labeled the girl on the stairs. That was the drunkest you'd ever been at a kickback.

The food came, and the conversation shifted again. This time to family. Erik had been a bit surprised that he was the one to bring it up. But he'd actually had a family now, people that cared for him despite his past troubles. He'd told you of them briefly, leaving out details like his older cousin T'Challa being a king and his younger Shuri being the genius behind the country's technology. Yet you'd soaked in every word he'd said, and vice versa.

He'd stopped his eating as he listened. His eyes watching your faces as you spoke of your family. Though small, he could tell you loved them. You'd spoken of your younger cousins and how they always tried to come out and see you when they could. He'd smiled as your eyes lit up when you spoke of Christmas and how it was your family's favorite season.

You chuckled as you told him of the extravagant decorations you'd had in your house. Lights decorating the halls and frosted christmas trees in almost every large room. He'd agreed to come over to see it after dinner when you'd offered.

"I could decorated the shop for you since its lacking festive decor.." You grinned as you sipped your wine, leaning forward onto the table as you spoke. He smirked, nodding as he glanced at your lips.

"I wouldn't mind that. I haven't really had the time to get to it.." He sat up, licking his lips. Your eyes flickered to them. "I've been a little focused on this one gift.."

Your arched eyebrow raised at that as you hummed. "They must be really special. Especial if they're getting they're own Stevens custom. Lucky them.." If only you'd knew. "You're one the real good gift givers, huh?" You wiggled your eyebrows, making him laugh.

He smiled, dimples deepening as he brushed imaginary dust from his shoulder. His heart warmed at your laugh. "But forreal, I try to be. Even though I don't really get anything, I still like to give something to my people. Ya know?" You nodded at that.

"I understand that. I don't get anything either, but I love the looks on my cousins faces when I get them a gift. It makes me happy.." You chuckled, taking another sip of your drink.

Erik gripped the box that rested on his lap, mentally encouraging himself to pull it from it's hidden place under the table. His thumb massaged the dark velvet as he looked over to you. You turned your head to admire the Christmas decorations of the city below, taking in the display windows and the few Salvation army volunteers that you could see. Full lips stuck in a small smile. He smiled at the childlike joy that graced your features.

"What if I did?" He finally spoke, catching your attention. Your eyebrows pushed closer together as you gave a small smile of confusion.

"If you did what, Erik?" You sat up a bit, tilting your head to the side a little. He found it adorable.

He squeezed the case in his hand gently. "What if I got you a present?" Bringing it from hiding, he held it out over the table. "You just said that you never really get gifts from family for Christmas. And I know I'm not family... but I really care about you."

You looked at the gift before reaching out to gently take it from him, opening the box to reveal a thin diamond bracelet. Pink diamonds framed in rose gold. One charm hung from it's center that looked a lot like Erik's watch. You smiled as you picked up the bracelet, carefully as if it'd break from your touch. Mentally cursing yourself for getting emotional. "Erik.." Tears blurred your vision as he helped you fasten it on your wrist. "Its beautiful.."

He smiled, holding your hand in his as he turned the charm over. "I even put something on the back.." You looked down to see words engraved into the back of it. Cursive and neat.

"One of a kind and easy on the eyes." You chuckled, looking up to Erik. "You remember that day?" It was his turn to shrug shyly. His fingers intertwined with yours as he brought your hand to his lips, pressing a gentle kiss to your skin.

"Of course I remember that day, princess.." He massaged his thumb over the back of your hand. "It was the same day I realized I want you to be more than a friend."

_________________________

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spamzineglasgow · 4 years

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(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

youtube

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

#review #reviews #music reviews #album review #The 1975 #Matty Healy #Maria Sledmere #music criticism #Scott Morrison

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ddproductionsw77 · 7 years

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Summer Plans (Riarkle Future One-Shot)

Fandom: Girl Meets World

Pairing(s): Riarkle (Main), Corpanga, Stuart x Jennifer, Joshaya (hinting), Zaydora (Cuz, like, why not, honestly?)

Characters: (Main) Riley Matthews and Farkle Minkus, (Supporting) Cory Matthews, Topanga Lawerence-Matthews, Stuart Minkus, Jennifer Bassett-Minkus (Minor/Mentioned) Maya Hart-Hunter, Shawn Hunter, Katy Hunter, Will Hunter(OC), Lucas Friar, Zay Babineaux, Auggie Matthews, Ava Morgenstern, Josh Matthews, Eric Matthews, Morgan Matthews, Amy Matthews, Alan Matthews, and Isadora Smackle

Rating: T

Description: Riley and Farkle are engaged and it’s great… It is! It’s just maybe, a little, not-great that they’re families still don't know? But summer is here and everyone is getting together; the news has to come out one way or another.

Author’s Note: So, technically, this one-shot is a part of my canon future Riarkle one-shot collection. If you want, read the other pieces in that collection, if not… Engaged Riarkle is still always cute, am I right?

“Daddy, it’s only been a week!” Riley Matthews exclaimed over the phone, looking across the kitchen to Farkle with an exasperated expression. “Yes, I’m sure we met for lunch last week.” She paused before her eyes widened, “No, no, I am excited to see you tomorrow! I’m just saying it’s not been that long.”

Farkle laughed as he listened in, moving over to start cutting peppers.

The brunette glared and quickly flipped him the bird before resting her hand over the receiver. Cory Matthews’ rambling could just barely be heard as his daughter mouthed, ‘Kill me now!’ and only made the young genius laugh harder.

“Daddy, I got to go!” Riley finally exclaimed, throwing her hand up. “Yeah, dinner’s almost ready so I will see you, and everyone else, tomorrow. Yes, I promise. I love you, too. Okay, bye, Daddy. Bye. Sleep well, too? Uh, yes, now goodnight, Dad!”

She pulled the phone back, crushing the ‘end’ button.

“Nice chat?” Farkle asked, tipping the cutting board into a pan to begin cooking.

The girl just groaned and tossed the phone aside. Riley then moved across the kitchen, wrapping her arms around the boy’s waist and laying her head against his shoulder blades. “Can we just run away? I don’t wanna go tomorrow.”

“You don’t want to see Maya?” Farkle asked, frying the peppers and glancing over at the cooking rice.

Riley scrunched up her face in his t-shirt, “Maya already knows!”

…That Farkle and Riley were engaged.

In fact, the blonde had actually known about the whole thing before Riley herself. Farkle had wanted to make it perfect and had called on Maya for help. Of course, the actual proposal could not have gone more wrong but Riley had still said yes.

The girl began twisting the ring on her finger around and around. How could she have not?

She’d say it again and again, over and over because of course she and Farkle were going to get married. Riley had always known that to some degree, she just wasn’t so sure her family or his would think the same way she did.

“I know,” He admitted, sighing and turning in her arms to face her. “But our families have to find out eventually.”

“Do they, though?” Riley asked, quirking an eyebrow which Farkle kissed with a chuckle. The brunette sighed heavily, leaning into his touch.

After a moment, Farkle stiffened slightly, “Wait, do you really think your parents will be mad?”

Riley rolled her eyes, bring the hand with her ring up to rest on his cheek, “Love, they got engaged at their high school graduation, there’s not much they can say.” She pulled him down, lightly kissing his lips before speaking against them, “What, uh, about your parents?”

“Furious,” He pecked her lips, “Absolutely livid,” Another quick kiss, “But who cares?”

Riley’s hands dropped to his chest, pushing him softly away from her as she groaned, “Farkle-“

“I want to marry you, Riley.” Farkle quieted her, taking her hands in his and pressing his lips to the ring glittering on her knuckle. The girl smiled softly, a little giggle escaping her lips, “My parents' approval or disapproval isn’t going to change that.”

Looking up at him with that look of utter adoration that she reserved for their special moments like this, Riley slowly nodded, “Always, right?”

Ducking to kiss her one last time before turning back to the food, Farkle nodded, “Always, Babe.”

Topanga’s was in chaos as Riley and Farkle descended the stone stairs together. It was a Sunday and they had all agreed that it would make the most sense to have the family get-together in the small cafe, so Riley’s mother had closed up shop to the public and pushed all the tables together outside in the courtyard.

Maya was in a corner, chatting with Josh, as she curled her blonde hair around and around her finger. All those years and the girl was still crushing hard, Riley knew. Just that morning Maya had texted about how it was totally time for her to take a shot with Josh, considering she was moving back to New York. Riley had just sent back a thumbs-up emoji.

Auggie and Ava had been left the responsibility of keeping two-year-old Will Hunter entertained, something that did not seem to thrill Ava, as the trio played round after round of peek-a-boo. The toddler seemed to be growing impatient as well, gesturing wildly to his older half-sister, who hadn’t yet noticed his distress. Riley knew the second Maya did, however, no one would be able to get the baby boy away from her.

Shawn, Cory, and Alan were bickering over the best way to grill a steak while Katy, Topanga, and Amy watched with bemused expressions. Uncle Eric was standing among the women, eating a large donut and shaking his head. He rested a hand on his mother’s shoulder and sighed, “Men, am I right?”

At the long table, Zay and Lucas were already sitting beside each other, talking. Riley imagined the best friends had a lot to catch up on, with Zay living here with them and Lucas in vet school across the country in Texas. Smackle was beside Zay, their hands intertwined, observing the chaos with mild interest. The pair had started dating just before high school graduation, over two years ago, and had managed to maintain the romance, even with Smackle in Sweden during the school years.

Farkle’s arm around her waist tightened as they both noticed the only party still absent. Riley leaned over, whispering in his ear, “They’ll come.”

“I’m not counting on it,” He muttered back before breaking into a grin and raising his free hand in greeting, “Lucas! It’s been forever, man!”

He left her side, going over to sit with the boys and Smackle, as another presence came up behind her. Riley turned and smiled at her aunt, “Aunt Morgan, I am so glad to see you!”

The blonde laughed and pulled her niece in for a hug, “Yeah, well, I try not to pass up a chance at seeing any of my brothers make fools of themselves.” They parted and Morgan looked Riley over, “You’re looking gorgeous, girl! Thank god you take after Topanga.”

Riley laughed but the sound caught in her throat as she noticed the couple coming down the stairs behind Aunt Morgan. She brushed past her aunt, rushing to greet them, “Mr. Minkus, Mrs. Minkus, you made it!”

“Riley!” Stuart greeted, cordially.

Jennifer gave the girl a nod and blank stare before glancing around, “Where’s my son?”

The brunette flushed, forcing the smile to stay on her lips. You’ve been with Farkle for three and a half years now, you should be used to this! Do not cry, do not cry, do not cry.

“He’s over there with Lucas and-“ She pointed and Jennifer moved past her without another acknowledgment.

Stuart shifted uneasily on his feet before awkwardly patting Riley’s arm, “It smells great!”

“I’ll tell my Dad you said so,” Riley muttered as her fiancé’s father also passed her by.

Jennifer and Stuart hadn’t always disliked Riley Matthews. Before she dated their son, the Minkus’ had loved her. She was a great, honest girl for their child to be friends with. They liked how happy Farkle was whenever he came home from the Matthews’ house, babbling on and on about Maya and Ladies and most of all Riley.

But having their son be friends with a middle-class girl of average intelligence was one thing. Him dating one? Giving up the college of his dreams to move in with one? That was a whole other story.

Stuart had been devastated that Farkle hadn't wanted to follow in his shoes, but over time he’d come to realize that Riley was Farkle’s decision and Columbia in New York was a decent school, too.

Adversely, Jennifer had basically decided that Riley was like an infection, the fever would break eventually. She just had to keep her son from screwing up too bad while still under the witches spell. It was just a phase, after all.

Dear lord, the woman might just poison you once she knows you’re going to marry her precious baby boy… Riley thought darkly, faking a smile to her perplexed aunt.

“Aren’t they the boyfriend’s parents?” Morgan asked, eyebrows raised.

“That they are.” She replied, overly enthusiastic.

Her aunt frowned, “Oh.”

“My baby!” Cory exclaimed from somewhere behind them, pulling his daughter into an overbearing, crushing hug.

Riley sat straight-backed in her chair, staring off into the distance with her brow furrowed.

Down the table, Katy and Maya were both trying to convince Will that mushy green beans were so yummy and the brunette felt a little like that was what it would be like trying to sell the engagement to her fiancé’s mother.

Nervously, Riley went to twist her ring only to find her finger bare.

Her heart dropped for a moment, eyes widening before she remembered that the ring was in her pocket. Couldn’t really wear an engagement ring when no one knew about the engagement.

“So, Riley,” Stuart started across the table from her, making her jump a bit and snap to look at him, “Any plans for this summer?”

From the corner of her eye, she could see her mother and father glance over from their conversation with her grandparents. Clearing her throat and clutching Farkle’s hand under the table, Riley remained calm as she answered, “Actually, yes. I was offered a paid internship at the New York Times.”

“No way, Riley! That’s awesome!” Zay exclaimed from a few seats down.

The brunette blushed and grinned as Jennifer Bassett-Minkus spoke up from her seat beside her husband, “Fetching coffee for writers with real potential? Sounds just about right for you.”

“Mother,” Farkle snapped, protectively. His hand tightened around Riley’s and she caressed his knuckle with her thumb. He glanced over at her, meeting those warm brown eyes. I’m okay, it’s okay, they reassured him. Sighing, he relaxed.

“What about you, Sweetie? What are you doing this summer?” Jennifer asked, emphasizing because obviously, her son should and would have plans separate from his serious, live-in girlfriend.

Looking over at his mother with a blank expression, Farkle answered, “I’m taking some courses in advance.”

“Isadora was just telling me,” The other girl’s head perked up at the mention of her name, looking down the table to listen to Jennifer, “That she was thinking of studying abroad. You should consider going along. Imagine the European countryside in this season.”

“Mom, I’m not studying abroad this summer,” Farkle argued, scoffing a bit.

“Fine, next summer, maybe?” Jennifer pressed.

The young man groaned in frustration, glancing down at his and Riley’s intertwined hands before looking back up into his fiancée’s eyes. His electric blue bore into hers long enough that she raised an eyebrow. Swooping down, he kissed the back of her hand and looked back at his mother.

“Actually, we're probably going to be pretty busy next summer.”

Riley instantly caught on, biting her cheek to stop from smiling. If this was how Farkle wanted to do things, she’d be right there beside him. She kept her eyes on the man she loved more than life as her future mother-in-law scoffed, “Doing what?”

Shifting her gaze to the woman, Riley spoke up, loud and clear, with a blissful smile on her face. “Getting married.”

The whole room fell silent.

Except for baby Will, who chose that exact moment to noisily spit his green beans back out on his plate.

“I did not see that one coming!” Uncle Eric suddenly exclaimed, thumping Cory on the back. “Guess the apple really doesn’t fall far from the… whatever.”

“Eric!” Topanga snapped, raising her hand.

“Wha- Ho- Bu- Wa-“ Cory sputtered, jumping up to run to Farkle and Riley’s seats at the table, gesturing wildly. He reached them, pointing accusingly at the young man, “You!”

“Him?!” Jennifer Minkus, who had been frozen in apparent horror, jumped up as well. “What about your conniving daughter!”

“Conniving?! Our daughter is conniving?!” Topanga howled, barking a humorless laugh, “That’s rich coming from you, Monster!”

“Okay, okay! Let’s all just calm down now!” Uncle Shawn shouted, standing up.

“Shut up, Shawn!” Both mothers yelled, sending the grown man cowering back into his seat.

Farkle and Riley looked at each other, both looking apologetic for the behavior of the other’s family. Leaning forward, she pecked his nose and muttered an I love you. He scrunched up his nose but smiled, mouthing the phrase back to her.

Farkle’s mother’s next shriek of disapproval popped their little bubble, “I just don’t understand! Getting married?! At you age?! Why?!”

Topanga gasped, whirling on her daughter with teary eyes, “Oh my god, Riley, are you pregnant?”

The girl’s mouth fell open as her fiancé yelped, “No!”

He continued to shake his head, “No,”

He glanced over at the girl, “No, right?”

“No!” Riley hissed, giving him an incredulous look before turning to address the whole table, “I’m not pregnant! Farkle asked me to marry him; I said yes! That’s how it works, everyone! We’re thinking about a wedding next summer. You’re all invited,” She turned to give Stuart and Jennifer a hard look, “As long as you actually wish us well.”

There was another long silence as Riley took the ring from her pocket and dropped Farkle’s hand to slide it back into place of her finger.

Finally, after a long, long time it seemed, Stuart cleared his throat, “Well, I’d like to come.”

“Come?” Topanga scoffed, “I’m helping you plan the damn thing and your father’s paying. Obviously, we’re coming.”

“Next summer, you say?” Grandma Amy piped in, brightly.

So, as any who have read my one-shot Just Go To Sleep, Riles knows, Riley and Farkle don’t actually get married until the summer after next, but at this time they didn’t know that, haha. For those of you who haven’t read Just Go To Sleep, Riles GO READ IT!!! And Farkle and Riley hold off the wedding because (oops!) Riley is pregnant at the time they would have had it…

Current Coming Soon List:

There’s a Farkle Under Your Bed (A Riarkle Future Snapshot): Farkle and Riley have been keeping their newfound relationship under wraps... until Cory finds Farkle under Riley’s bed that is Fighting With The Freaking Sun! (A Riarkle Future Snapshot): Even people who are perfect for each other fight and fighting with Riley Matthews is a little like fighting the sun The Lucky Ones (A Riarkle Socialite AU): Farkle Minkus, the young and newly appointed Head of Minkus International, has just married middle-class, all-American Riley Matthews and she’s quite a packaged deal... Can Riley play her new role of perfect, wealthy housewife? The Electronic Configuration of Hate and Love (Part 4): THEY KISSED! What the hell happens now?

I AM STILL TAKING RIARKLE PROMPTS! Honestly, I prefer to write in this universe (the canon compliant, future one) but I will probably take your AUs and such as well! Message me!

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rocknrollsalad-moved · 7 years

Text

Prompt: New

At first, it was a joke, as most things are with Tony.

Bruce had a terrible habit of forgetting his glasses. It’d be worse if he didn’t stash a pair everywhere. Tony found a pair in the refrigerator once and stood there holding them for ten minutes wondering how that had happened. In the end, he put them back.

It would be a bigger issue if Bruce was nearsighted but he only needed the glasses to see up close. His prescription was just bad enough he shouldn’t buy the readers down at the drug store but still did. So, often Bruce wouldn’t need them he’d put them down where he was and forget about them. There was always another pair nearby.

Tony put a pair on one day in the lab. Not the most clever of jokes but he sat there clicking blurry keys, that really should have been worse. He should not be able to see this well with glasses on, god, it was almost as if he was getting old. Thankfully that wasn’t happening.

Now the goal had been to get Bruce to notice, to fluster him and if Tony was really lucky, annoy him. He sat there working for so long that he grew impatient and asked Bruce to bring him a file he didn’t need and had digital access to. Bruce delivered the file and was turning back to his work before Tony had grabbed the file.

Two hours he sat in that lab wearing the oversized grandpa glasses waiting for Bruce to notice. Everyone else in Tony’s phonebook found themselves subjected to more pictures of him in the glasses than anyone needed. Ever. Both Pepper and Natasha threatened to block his number. Clint, on the other hand, was laughing so hard he couldn’t find enough emojis to express himself.

Accomplishing little and having annoyed others, Tony gave up and went about his day. Leaving the lab to do other work he told Bruce, in parting, that he could replace himself with a scarecrow and the other wouldn’t notice.

“Uh huh, yeah. I’ll lock up.” was all he got in response.

If it wasn’t so adorable the way Bruce poured himself into his work Tony would be offended. If there wasn't that absolute torturous face of joy he made when he completed something or a new discovery made, Tony would kick him out. But that wasn’t happening anytime soon. Sometimes you had to play second fiddle to science.

(God knows Tony has subjected many to the same fate)

The next time it was over dinner, they were sitting together outside the lab. Cross-legged on an expansive sectional with cartons of Chinese between them. Tony made the move to grab another packet of soy sauce but instead snatched Bruce’s glasses.

These ones were half frames, thicker than the other pair. If the last pair were grandpa glasses, these were the glasses of the dead. Tony felt himself getting older by the minute. And not that he’d tell anyone but his fortune cookie was a little easier to read as he pretended to struggle in order to mock the other.

At first, Bruce rolled his eyes and continued shoving food in his mouth. He always eats like he’s never seen food. It’s all or nothing with him and though Tony isn’t one known for his fantastic eating habits it drives him insane. Complete savage or informing everyone eating a fruit bar 10 hours ago is good enough. Not to mention it was awful to watch.

“They suit you,” Bruce finally says, there’s that playful spark in his eyes that Tony knows only he sees.

Bruce knows this is an insult. Tony’s prone to occasional bouts of vanity and glasses? They aren’t hip or trendy, no matter what the magazines say. Bruce and Tony both come from a generation, though, where you mocked the kid with glasses. You ripped your friend apart without concern when they showed up with their new specks. Some things, no matter what GQ said, wouldn’t be fashionable.

Tony preens for a minute, trying to pretend he’s complimented but it doesn’t work and he takes the glasses off. He tries not to look defeated but Bruce is sitting there looking so smug. Leaving Tony unsure if that angers him or turns him on. Perhaps both.

Tony deflects instead, putting the problem on Bruce. If he’d had better frames Tony would have looked good, naturally. “Why do you insist on buying the ugliest frames you can find?”

“Because they’re cheap.”

“Yeah, well you have got to stop basing your choices off of what’s cheap.”

Bruce rolls his eyes, stuffing what Tony is sure is an entire egg roll in his mouth at once and keeps talking. “I don’t know if you remember but I have this little problem? I get all big and green, it’s easy to miss. But it does tend to ruin shirts, pants, glasses, Harlem. You know, the usual.”

This is enough to stop Tony. Not the self-deprecating humor, he’s grown accustom to that. The logic, though. Given how often Bruce has Hulked right out of his clothes, it can’t be cheap. Why shop at Barney’s if it runs the risk of being ripped to shreds. Goodwill has to be the best option. “There has to be a better selection than 1950s nerd.”

“Steve did ask me where I got my pants the other day.”

Tony nearly chokes on the bite of noodles for trying not to laugh. Bruce throws a napkin Tony’s way in case there’s a mess. Which adds to the building laughter, the idea that this thin napkin would do anything to save the sofa (or Bruce) from noodles being spit back out is too much. And it was the exact joke Bruce was going for.

These are the moments Tony lives for. Not the quiet ones where they’re both calm and laying in bed or reading in the lab. Not working with Bruce or even fighting along side him. When they’re both just people. They laugh and joke and show sides of themselves few see. He wouldn’t trade this for anything.

For that and the way genuine smiles look on Bruce. He’d fight any villain thrown his way to see that on a daily basis. Bruce puts his glasses on with a look that says there’s nothing wrong with them, he’s almost right. They still age him and they still look like cheap, flimsy frames.

A week later Tony shows up again wearing glasses. They’re black but the inside of the arms is a bright red. Making Bruce’s glasses look even worse by comparison. There is a hardshell case in his pocket with a spare, identical pair inside.

“Geeze! And you said my glasses looked like a cliche,” Bruce says with a laugh, skipping any greeting and going right to mocking Tony. “You look like, oh god, the guy. You know the one, he died young.”

“Buddy Holly,” Tony says the words as if they cause him physical pain him. These are the moments he misses Rhodey. Someone actually from this century. “And I’ll have you know at least five of the most important and influential fashion bloggers have called these the must-haves of the season.”

“You can’t make things up to justify your fashion choices.”

“Well, yes. I can. Of course, I can, do you know who I am?”

“Hard to forget.”

“I make things fashionable, thank you.”

“Yeah, well good luck with those.”

It’s hard not to feel hurt. Not only did Tony think the glasses worked for him but they were a gift for the very man tearing them apart. Head held high, never cracking for a moment, Tony rolls his eyes as he always does.

“Learn to love them, mean and green, they’re yours.”

“You don’t know my prescription.”

“I know a guy.”

“Great. I can’t buy my glasses at the corner store but your shady, back alley glasses are better?” Bruce does all he can to keep from laughing as speaks. It was so over the top and it eases some of the sting that could have come from the words.

Tony holds them out for Bruce to take. It’s neither new nor impressive that they can tell what kind of prescription is in the lens without an eye appointment. The only trick was finding a pair of Bruce’s that weren’t the Dollar Store Special.

Bruce puts them on and his grumpy disposition and ill-timed jokes end, he can read what’s in front of him. Tony is staring as well. The glasses suit Bruce far better than he imagined.

“Alright, I...you win.”

“Damn right, I always do.”

“I’ll need the number of your shady van driving optometrist.”

“I said I knew a guy for the lenses. You won’t need new frames ever again but on the off chance the big guy tries to test that…” pulling the case out of his pocket, Tony hands over the spare. “I made the frames myself, modeling them after something a little more trendy. To call them unbreakable would be bold...so they’re unbreakable.”

Walking over, Tony checked the fit. There’d be a few adjustments that needed made and hew knew Bruce wouldn’t ask for them.

Bruce stood there short circuiting, you could see on his face as his brain worked through the dozens of created problems and tried to understand this. After a moment, he did the only thing he could and pulled Tony closer and thanking him with a kiss.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re welcome.”

After a few minutes Tony has Peggy Sue playing through the lab speakers, smiling to himself since he’s the only one in on the joke. Bruce has finally stopped testing the glasses, acting as though he’ll no longer be able to see if he looked at the right object.

Next, Tony will work on that wardrobe.

#joey writes #prompt fill #science boyfriends #stanner

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