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girlactionfigure · 1 year

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She just wanted to make things better for everyone, her brother said.

She was called a “true force of nature”, a “rolling warrior” who never gave up, continuously fighting for what she believed in and inspiring everyone around her.

When she died this past week on March 4 at the age of 75, she was remembered as a major American civil rights hero.

She “was born in 1947 [in Philadelphia] to two parents who had separately fled Nazi Germany as children in the 1930s,” according to Philissa Cramer, writing for JTA. “All of her grandparents and countless other family members were murdered in the Holocaust.”

At the age of 18 months, she contracted polio, an infection so severe, she spent several months in an iron lung and lost her ability to walk, according to her brother.

She said she believed it was her parents’ experience that led them to reject doctors’ advice to have their daughter institutionalized after she lost the use of her legs, according to Cramer.

“They came from a country where families got separated, some children sent away, others taken from their families by the authorities and never returned — all part of a campaign of systematic dehumanization and murder,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The experience of fleeing Nazi Germany left the parents and their children with a passion.,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We truly believe,” her brother would say "that discrimination is wrong in any way, shape or form."

Susan Mizner, Director of the Disability Rights Program and Kendall Ciesemier, Host of At Liberty and Senior Executive Producer of Multimedia, American Civil Liberties Union, wrote:

“When [she] was born, the fight for civil rights didn’t include people with disabilities. Disabled people faced rampant discrimination and segregation in American life. Disabled people experienced high rates of unemployment and were taught in separate schools. Changing these institutions wasn’t just a calling for [her], it was a necessity. At a young age, [she] learned that the world did not see her the way she saw herself, and she spent the rest of her life committed to changing that.”

“The first time that I really remember someone making me feel different was when I was about eight years old,” she told April Coughlin in Story Corps. “My friend and I were going to the candy store. She was pushing my wheelchair, and this young boy came over to me and said, ‘Are you sick?’

“I wished the ground would open and swallow me up. It made me realize that people saw me differently than I saw myself.

~~~~~

NPR correspondent Joseph Shapiro wrote:

“When she was 5 and it was time to go to kindergarten, her parents . . . went to register her but were turned away at the nearby public school.

“It would create a fire hazard, the principal said, to let a girl in a wheelchair go to the school.

“Her mother . . . fought to end the isolating and erratic hours — just a few hours a week — of home instruction and eventually [she] was allowed into a school building.”

“Kids with disabilities were considered a hardship, economically and socially," she would later write.

She spent the rest of her life fighting, first to get access for herself and then for others, her brother recalled.

“Years later, [she] graduated from college where she studied to become a teacher. Being a speech therapist was one of the few professions, she was told, open to a young woman in a wheelchair,” continued Shapiro.

“But again, she was deemed a fire hazard. This time, in 1970, New York City's Board of Education ruled that a teacher in a wheelchair would be unable to evacuate children during an emergency and denied her a teaching license.

“Having learned from her mother's advocacy, [she] sued. She got support in the local press. "You Can Be President, Not Teacher, with Polio," ran one newspaper story, noting the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.”

She said she wanted to see “feisty disabled people change the world”.

She did.

She “broke down barriers for disabled children and educators in New York City schools, protested until federal legislation protecting people with disabilities was passed and advised multiple presidential administrations on disability issues,” wrote Cramer.

Her tireless advocacy led to her being widely considered "the mother of the disability rights movement," the American Association of People with Disabilities wrote in a press release.

Her name is Judith Heumann.

This is a new story for the Jon S. Randal Peace Page. The Peace Page focuses on past and present stories seldom told of lives forgotten, ignored, or dismissed. The stories are gathered from writers, journalists, and historians to share awareness and foster understanding, to bring people together. And, as such, the stories this month for Women’s History Month are never relegated to one single month - they are available all year in the Peace Page archives and on this page each week throughout the year. We encourage you to learn more about the individuals and events mentioned here and to support the writers, educators, and historians whose words we present. Thank you for being here and helping us share awareness.

~~~~~

“Women have been making history for centuries; for some, this was the only choice they had. For women with disabilities in particular, it was either live the way others expected them to or fight for the lives they knew they (and all people with disabilities) deserved,” according to Melissa Young.

Judith Heumann “was perhaps most recognized in recent years from her appearance in the documentary ‘Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution’, which chronicled the forgotten history of a freewheeling summer camp called Camp Jened in upstate New York for teenagers with disabilities in the 1970s,” wrote Edwin Rios of The Guardian.

“Her experience at Camp Jened inspired a groundswell of US political activism and sparked a movement of young activists with disabilities who fought for civil rights protections at a time when they were treated like second-class citizens.”

She also wrote “Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist” and “Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution.”

Brian P.D. Hannon and Heather Hollingsworth of the Los Angeles Times wrote:

“She lobbied for legislation that eventually led to the federal Americans With Disabilities Act [and the] Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

“Heumann also was involved in passage of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, which was ratified in May 2008.

She helped found the Berkeley Center for Independent Living, the Independent Living Movement and the World Institute on Disability and served on the boards of several related organizations, including the American Assn. of People With Disabilities, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Humanity and Inclusion and the United States International Council on Disability, according to her website.

“Judy pushed the international human rights community to focus on issues facing people with disabilities when confronting the world’s challenges — whether it be war, climate change, pandemics, poverty or anything else. She ensured that disability was included in the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices and was the first disabled person to serve on the board of Human Rights Watch,” wrote Rebecca Cokley, program officer for the US Disability Rights program at the Ford Foundation and co-founder and director of the Disability Justice initiative at the Center for American Progress.

“Along with 80 activists, and with a little help from the Black Panthers, Heumann staged a sit-in for 25 days, the longest sit-in at a federal building to date,” according to writer Lester Fabian Brathwaite. “As a result, regulations were passed enforcing the Rehabilitation Act.”

“It also served as a demonstrable show of force by a community previously framed by society and the media as weak, incapable and dependent. They were anything but that,” wrote Cokley.

“She would later serve as an advisor on disability rights to the Clinton administration, the World Bank, and the Obama administration,” added Brathwaite.

~~~~~

In NPR’s article:

Shantha Rau Barriga, disability rights director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Heumman was a “true force of nature”.

“She was a giant in the human rights movement and led with such integrity,” she added. “This loss will be felt far and wide but what a legacy she leaves behind.”

“Beyond all of the policy-making and legal battles that she helped win and fight, she really helped make it possible for disability to not be a bad thing, to make it OK to be disabled in the world and not be regarded as a person who needs to be in a separate, special place,” the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, Maria Town, told the Hollywood Reporter.

Heumman said, “Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives – job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example . . . It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.”

She also said, “I wanna see a feisty group of disabled people around the world…if you don’t respect yourself and if you don’t demand what you believe in for yourself, you’re not gonna get it.”

“Judy is often referred to as the mother of the disability rights movement, and for good reason. Not only did she usher forward sweeping changes for disabled people around the world, she mentored, befriended, inspired, and empowered countless disabled people who now carry on her legacy,” wrote Mizner and Ciesemier.

“Hers was one of the first voices to tell us that we matter and that we are worth fighting for. Now, we continue the fight. Judy lives on in every disabled kid who gets to join their classmates in school and every disabled adult who lives in the community, not an institution. She lives on in every disabled person who is feisty enough to pursue their dreams.”

~ jsr

May her memory be a blessing.

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

#Judith Heumann #mother of the disability rights movement #Disability Rights Activist

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asa-writes · 11 months

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Aphrodite of Old Hall - 05

“Acta, non verba”

Anthony Bridgerton x F!OC / Benedict Bridgerton x F!OC Word Count: 1.5k Warnings: angst (my poor benedict bby :( )

Closing the door gently, Elisabeth turned towards Anthony. He was sitting on his leather chair, a glass of brandy in one hand and a most puzzling look on his face. Seeing the absence of chairs, she did the most unladylike thing that came to her mind and sat down on his table. Looking down at him, she sighed. "You wanted to talk to me, so talk." After another few seconds of him avoiding her eyes, she scoffed. "Or are you thinking of fucking me on the table right now?" He shot up from his chair, slamming his glass onto the table and grabbing her by the waist. "I wasn't. Sounds like you are, though."

She parted her lips in surprise. "I..." Anthony chuckled maliciously and shook his head. "Now she's speechless. Would you look at that. And you wanted Benedict to court you?" She tightened her lips and tried pushing him away. "Whatever do you mean by that? He is kind, romantic, sweet and, most of all, respected my boundaries! You didn't even make an effort of getting to know me, no, you were mad that I contradicted your fantasy of me and then you went off to sulk and do god knows what whith god knows whom." Anthony flared his nostrils, and she could feel his hand pressing harder against her back, before pulling it away again. "Take those stupid accusations back. What I meant was that he would want to live a quiet life in the country. I see that you are passionate - this passion has already been wasted on your dead husband, now you want to waste it on him as well? Yes, he's kind, romantic and all of that, but he himself told me that he wanted a simple life and wife. You are anything but simple! I can give you the life you deserve!" His emotions came out with every word he said and that was just too much for Elisabeth.

She dug her fingernails into his arm and came as close as she could to him without having to touch him. "Prove yourself to me, then. I cannot stand here and believe you when all you do is talk about your affection to me in these wonderful little speeches and then leaving me high and dry for the next few days." Anthony pulled her towards himself and groaned. "Yes, fine, I will do anything that you would like me to do. But what's stopping you from just kissing me? Why, why, why must you say all of the things that you do and yet act as though you were begging to be mine?", He mumbled in her ear and felt a shiver running through her. "I cannot be wooed by actions or words alone. I need to know if you are interested in me, as Ellie, and not the tempting Lady de Gressy. Now please, I wish to go and, if you really think that I should be yours, prove it to me." With that, she gave him the most fleeting of kisses, tore herself free, opened the door and sighed one last time. "And don't you DARE! mention my George to me again! Ever!", She seethed and slammed his door shut, returning to the drawing room, huffing and puffing.

Violet and Benedict seemed to have heard her last sentence and Benedict quickly hurried towards her and hugged her. "You shouldn't have gone, my dear. He can be a real pain sometimes." His scent and soothing words calmed her down greatly. She let go of him and turned to Violet. "Lady Bridgerton, I am ever so sorry for disturbing your morning like this...", She said apologetically. Violet who blinked a few times before smiling. "It is I who should apologize... I shouldn't have asked and maybe closed the door..." Then her whole face lightened up. "Listen, my dear, we were thinking of having a lovely evening with some of our family's friends, a soiree one might call it, and I would love to see you there! Wouldn't that be nice, right, Benedict?", She said gleefully clapping her hands. Benedict agreed and to pass the time, they took some more tea and afterwards Elisabeth had excused herself to get changed and promised to return as soon as possible. For whom though? The sweet one or the passionate one?

Loitering around the entrance, Eloise had caught Elisabeth as she was making her way to the dining hall. She smiled and, in true Eloise fashion, linked her arm with Elisabeth's. "Anthony's finally come out of hiding and I have not a clue what you did, but him and Benedict have both dressed as if they were to meet the queen and are prancing around like flustered peacocks." Elisabeth shot her an amused look. They slowly walked through the halls, giggling away.

Entering the room, a most peculiar sight had greeted her; Anthony running to greet her and Benedict winking at her. "I think that this is going to get interesting", said Eloise and hurried off to Penelope Featherington, who, as it looked like, was trying her hardest to get Colin Bridgerton's attention. Anthony had taken her hand, kissed it ever so softly and handed her a drink. "Good evening, my Lady. I hope to see you enjoying it thoroughly..." He whispered into her ear and re-joined a beautiful couple, whom Elisabeth thought to be the Duke and Duchess of Hastings. Benedict nodded at her and greeted her warmly. "Good evening dearest. You look ravishing tonight." She blushed and took a sip of her drink. By God, that thing was strong... Hopefully she could still walk out of this house at the end of the night.

"You look most handsome indeed.", She said to him. "I wonder what you have told Anthony this morning... He's a changed man and has even asked for Mama's forgiveness for the way he had barged in." Benedict took a nervous look at his brother, whose eyes never seemed to leave the both of them. "He still pulled me to the side, before the guests had arrived and told me to forget you, that impetuous little ... you know."

Elisabeth rolled her eyes and gave Benedict's hand a reassuring squeeze. "He's jealous, that's all." With that, Benedict's eyes widened, and people had started taking their assigned seats.

Sitting between the shy Penelope Featherington and Daphne Bridgerton, the Duchess of Hastings, was to be the saving grace for Elisabeth's evening. She would not have been able to bear sitting between the Bridgerton brothers, and to be able to show them the same amount of attention... Yet still, she sat across from Anthony, who by any means seemed to enjoy watching her blush at every second she looked up from her plate. As the footmen brought out the food, Elisabeth raised an eyebrow. Anthony smirked. All of the food served were her favourite dishes. How sneaky could one be, she wondered.

Daphne leaned over to her and, with the pretence of quickly fixing a small ribbon in Elisabeth's hair, she whispered: "Jesus Christ, Elisabeth, I have never seen my brother behave like that. Has he proposed already?" Trying to giggle as quietly as possible, Elisabeth blushed. "Which one?" Shocked, Daphne put a piece of asparagus in her mouth. "What do you mean, which one? Anthony of course! Are you trying to tell me that Benedict has also set his sights on you?" Trying to swallow as fast as she could, Elisabeth nodded as lightly as she could. Both of them simultaneously looked over at Benedict, who smiled sweetly at them, looked like he was enjoying his Lady's attention. When they turned back towards their plates, Elisabeth could see Anthony's eyes piercing her.

He stood up, clinked his knife against his glass and stood up. Daphne gasped. "What's his plan?" Smiling broadly, especially at Benedict (who, by now, was starting to get annoyed at his brother's antics) he gestured a footman to come forward with a bouquet of flowers, which were placed on the table, blocking Penelope's view of Colin and transforming the room into the smell of Asters, Camellias, Heliotropes, Red Roses and Tulips. What these flowers meant, everyone knew immediately: love, love, love... Elisabeth's heart beat so fast, she was afraid to pass out. He understood perfectly well what she had meant today and was pulling it off in the grandest possible way. "To you, my petite fleur, I shall dedicate this toast to. Let us drink to the perfection that is Lady de Gressy." Everyone clinked their glasses and was wiggling around, trying to catch a glance of the woman who had put Lord Anthony Bridgerton under a spell. A deep crimson blush spread across Elisabeth's face, as she thanked him quietly. It wouldn't have mattered it she had mouthed it; everyone would have heard anyways. She had seen the worried glance that Violet gave her second son and as soon as she had turned around to look for him, she could see that he was gone.

One might think that the evening is finished for the Ton; but not for our besotted Viscount and, as it was evident for everyone to see, his bride-to-be...

“Lady E's secret” <= Previous

#Bridgerton #anthony bridgerton #benedict bridgerton #anthony bridgerton x oc #benedict bridgerton x oc #regency #bridgerton fanfiction #fanfiction #asa writes #asas fics #bridgerton smut #anthony bridgerton smut #benedict bridgerton smut #bridgerton angst #bridgerton fluff

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vulnerary-prince · 2 years

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Agreed that the monarchy is an outdated tradition that's largely been reduced to ceremonial role and source of tourism, but there are reasons why the Queen is respected and beloved:

- pushed for the transition from the British Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations, which replaced the old colonial power structure to a political union where members are self-governed and equal (not unlike the EU, ASEAN or the UN). It's been so successful that even countries that were never even part of the British Empire have voluntarily joined since it was created

- worked behind the scenes (using what limited power she had, and despite opposition from the British (and US) government) to push South Africa to end the Apartheid

- was a patron for over 600 charities and helped raised ~£1.5 billion for them over the course of her reign, and was hugely passionate about ending inequality of all kinds

- was the first British monarch to visit Ireland since their independence, and in her speech admitted the mistakes the British had made in the past and gave her condolences to the Irish for the atrocities commited, a highly unusual move which shocked the world and greatly improved the relationship between the two countries

- least significant, but the reason why she is so well adored, is because she was the one responsible for making the royals accessible to everyday people. Rather than sitting in a castle unseen by the common peasants, she was out on the street greeting people, making televised addresses to the public every Christmas, and just generally allowing the media to show the life of the Royal Family, something that was always kept secret previously

Is the Monarchy stupid and outdated in this day and age? Yeah, most definitely. But Americans don't seem to understand that the Monarchy hasn't actually been responsible for any political decisions for a large part of the last century, and the Queen isn't personally responsible for any of the bad shit that governments are doing - that's on the shoulders of old men and megacorporations, same as everywhere else. She's really nothing more than a kind grandma that loves her people, and THAT is why people love and respect her.

Funny that you would mention that horrid political decisions rests on the shoulders of old men and megacorporations since that’s precisely where the wealth of the royal family comes from, I mean of course aside from taxpayer dollars.

See the Sovereign Grant, collected via taxes and payed back to the royal family, amounted to around £82.2 million in 2019. Granted this grant is only afforded to the royal family should the surrender any profits made from the Crown Estate, but this is still £82.2 being shilled out for what equates to LARPing as an actual human being and not some financial leech and her little family of smaller more terrible leeches. This fund is only used to maintain upkeep on the royal families exorbitant estates, cover the entire families travel expenses, and pay for the royal employee payroll.

Expenses outside of that can be payed by the Duchy of Lancaster- a portfolio of lands and assets that is made up of residential, commercial, and agricultural properties. This brought in £20.7 in 2019 and is used to pay “expenses incurred by other members of the royal family.” This on top of personal assets of the Queen which make up for an unknown portion of wealth, but includes an expansive art collection (wonder who’s money paid for that art too), a couple of estates of her own, and assets passed down to her by previous monarchs (wonder how much of that is stolen from the lands Britain colonized).

Why yes I’m sure it’s very easy to donate and raise funds while sitting atop a pile of unearned generational wealth, much of which was inherited by a history of bloody colonialism, in your massive free palace courtesy of the people you love ever so much. All the while your shit stain of a royal family engage in so much bullshit that every few years you have to come out of your little hole and apologize for the abuse and ostracizing of another beloved spouse of one of your shitty shitty children while we all watch on in disbelief at our favorite government sponsored reality TV show. And sure I get it the royal family are millionaires not billionaires, they could be worse! They could be even more filthy rich for doing absolutely nothing!

As an American I can agree with you that I truly do not understand the monarchy or the role it plays in the lives of the British people. But as an American I can also spot a filthy governmental leech from a lightyear away. Generationally wealthy, holder of dozens of properties, and never truly working to hard for anything a day in her little life. Sounds like every single one of the men I hate most in this world.

With the monarchy Elizabeth and her rotted little family are England’s biggest celebrity spectacle of incest freaks including good ole king tampon. The Kardashians if they were less entertaining to watch be horrible people and funded by the American Government. Without the monarchy good ole Lizzie and her dear family are just every other generationally wealthy millionaire alive in the world today generating wealth that they put a pittance of back into their community, hoard the rest, and call it a day then head out to the golf course. And yes she has done some good, but whether she was actively leeching off the British people intentionally or not she was still complicit in profiting off the British people and inherited (from you know the gross colonial regime) generational wealth that let’s be honest was probably stolen in the first place.

It’s very cute that the parasite tried to pretend it wasn’t a parasite and did such a good job of it, but no matter how you slice it or however many christmases it’s there for a leech is still a leech. And now we’re left with king tampon and his gross little Vienna sausage fingers to continue the legacy of mooching off the government. People who love and respect this woman have been misguided into believing she’s one of the people in the same way Americans are tricked into believing a guy like Bezos ever pulled himself up by his bootstraps to do shit, and that’s that.

Tl;dr Queen Elizabeth is shit and you are not immune to propaganda

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chocolate-teapots · 2 years

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Testing Us: Ren McCormack

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In which Rusty gets the wrong sister.

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My father's authority rained over the crowd of grey and beige with his spit and I wasn't talking about the guy upstairs.

"Every, every day, our Lord is testing us!"

You could hear my restless gaze in this quiet little church in our conservative little hometown.

"If he wasn't testing us, how would you account for the sorry state of our society..."

This was Sunday for the teenagers thrown in her to wipe them of sin by their parents but for me and my sister, this was life.

"For the crimes that plague the big cities of this country..."

A life where you wouldn't even dare dance in case your own blood would burn you at the stake.

"When he could sweep this pestilence from the face of the earth with one mighty gesture of his hand?"

It wasn't a question, religion was never up for discussion in Bomont.

"If our Lord wasn't testing us, how would you account for the proliferation these days of this obscene rock and roll music..."

My sister and I share a guilty look as we had more than one life in this tiny town and only one of them we could project to our father.

Not only was the arrow pointing to us obvious but there was another head at the other side of the room that hung low at the mention of something as normal and harmless as music. There must be a new boy in town as his reactions were not yet trained to hide away from the sea of judging eyes all doing God's work.

He was exciting, the same disinterest in the twinkle of his eye and fluffy hair and a striped suit that screamed big city. It was the place I wanted to go so I wanted to find out more about this guy. His eyes crawled the room at the mention of sexuality and he rubbed his tired eyes into his hand.

He must've had a long journey.

"If our Lord wasn't testing us, why, he could take all these pornographic books and albums and turn them into one big fiery cinder like that!"

I snickered a little at the mention of things such as these from my father, the hesitation on his lips was comedic and the way he said these words were like as if he tried speaking german for the very first time. It just sounded weird, wrong.

My little snicker made the spark on the other side of the fence turn towards me and hold a little grin everywhere but his lips that remained stoic. Seems he had this town figured out a little better than I thought...

He held my gaze there, challenging me to ignore these words of wisdom and turn to sin until a hand came smashing down from wood that made us jump higher than a terrified cat. I thought it was the big G until I saw the shame and passion in front of me continuing his weekly speech.

It was God's day after all.

That didn't stop him from turning his head once more, I grin with a lifted eyebrow as to portray my intrigue but I never turned to face him again. I let him study me as I pretended to care at the same old words that got shouted my way whenever I gave in to 'sinful actions'.

There was a teeny tiny gasp near me as Rusty spotted the gaze of the new guy lasering this way and nudged Ariel with a girly whisper. She turns to him with the same arrogant intrigue, her bouncy curls flicking in my face in slow motion and her baby blues sizing him up. Her lips, painted only slightly curled up only slightly.

Rusty's long ponytail continued to wiggle about like a real horse's tail as they chuckled together at the cute boy looking their way, not in a million years thinking that he could be possibly looking at me, the one who never really existed in this town hidden by the wingspan of queen Ariel.

"I welcome his test!"

Ariel was beautiful, attractive, intelligent and charming with enough power to mould herself into whatever shape she wanted based on who she was talking to. Me, however, I didn't really talk to anyone and had only a handful of friends that wouldn't nudge my side when a guy looked at me because it never happened.

It never happens.

"I welcome this challenge from my Lord..."

She could poke and poke and poke but it was only a matter of time that he burst. He would eventually fall for her and I would just be a name in registration. Anyway, it was nice to know that I was first for a change.

I don't know if God gave me this challenge but the day that Rusty got it all wrong was the day that the world went all wrong like watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

#80s movie #80s imagines #footloose #kevin bacon #ren mccormack

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thatarab-american · 2 years

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Community

animation can change your life.

ever since i watched emirichu’s video, “ My Asian-American Identity Crisis”, my viewpoint on well, everything, has changed (at least, when it comes the ethnic identity crisis’).

a little before i turned two years old, i moved to good old america with my mom and dad, the latter who’s job gave him an opportunity to work for the same company, just in another country. he took it — and here we are.

do i like it here? i’d say yeah. this country definitely has issues, but i can live a really good life here. although, i’m not just american. hell, up until a few years ago, i wasn’t even an american! (my american-born sister was always a citizen however) i mean, i have a whole other culture, with different foods, languages, traditions, holidays, religions, and wayy more.

emirichu is an asian-american. in her video, she talks about her racial identity crisis, and how hard it is to feel like you fit anywhere. watching that video made me realize that i felt the same way! and we weren’t alone. tons of people in the comments shared their stories, and thousands of people could relate.

you don’t even have to be an immigrant like me to understand where we’re coming from. maybe your parents were immigrants, or your grandparents, or great-grandparents, whatever. point is, you aren’t from here. and no, i don’t mean the europeans who colonized america in the first place. i mean people like me, who don’t know where they belong.

i’m too arab to be american. i’m too amercian to be arab. i don’t fit. i don’t belong anywhere. THAT identity crisis. the age old “who am i?” leaving you wondering what the hell you’re doing.

i’m arab but my arabic is broken and shitty. i’m american but my food is weird and gross. i’m arab but my clothes don’t represent that. i’m american but my traditions don’t represent that.

i can’t be just american, or just arab. i’m both, and i’ve come to not only accept, but love that about myself!!! still, it’s so, so lonely. and though TONS of people online relate, it’s like, do you people actually exist??? no one ever talks about it IRL, because let’s be real, it’s scary. race, ethnicity, whatever — people are still afraid to talk about it. and i get that. i’m afraid too. but fear won’t get you anywhere.

around six months ago i wrote a speech for a school assignment (which if you won, you could go up and compete professionally — i, and others, won the first round, but i didn’t go up any further) relating to this exact topic. MY arab-american identity crisis. i had my own personal experiences to add, but emirichu inspired me a LOT.

ever since then, i’ve wanted to share my stories with the world. like, we can do something about this, you know? it’s not fair, to live your whole life thinking your this weird freak who doesn’t belong anywhere. we have two homes, two cultures!! that’s sick. it’s hard to un-learn and re-learn literally everything you’ve been taught about social norms and shit, but it’s just not okay to be embarrassed about your culture, or change yourself to be more “american”, or be too scared and lonely to reach out, because this fucks with you. and this is something i’m so incredibly fucking passionate about, and i want to get my voice out there. i love writing. and i love my culture. and i know so many people relate.

this mini-essay is lowkey rlly messy, and it doesn’t tell everything i wanted to say, so basically: it sucks. it sucks to feel like you aren’t truly welcomed anywhere, that both of your homes don’t really accept you, you know, that stuff. it’s hard to learn a whole new language, or embrace your ethnic foods and traditions. but i promise you, you’re never alone no matter what you go through, and loving both sides of you is so worth it, and so fucking cool.

over and out.

youtube

#Youtube #arab #culture #human rights #identity #identity crisis #american #immigrants #who am i #crisis #essay #writing #activisim #emirichu

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yatesmayjou4500blog · 1 year

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Post XR Speech Reflection

I truly was amazed by all the amazing projects and accomplishments Michaela has under he belt at such a young age. As someone who even gets confused adjusting the aperture on a camera, I was shocked at what she is able to accomplish with XR/AR, etc. As being someone who is not the best with cameras and such, if I try to understand complex material like that, it tends to go over my head and in through one ear and out the other. Journalism is not a path I would like to go down and quite honestly, I probably will never be in a place in which I have to utilize this type of technology. Something I did gain from Michaela’s talk however was grit. She has not been able to find financial stability in an easy manner. She worked many side jobs to stay afloat while also working towards her passion. This was very inspiring to me. To see someone so young who hustled her way into the industry can apply to all careers and aspects of life. Sometimes, you have to do odd jobs to stay afloat to chase your passion and that is okay. I also really appreciated when she was talking about working in a different country and instead of bringing people from the US into this country to work, her team hired people in said country. I love that her team gave people in this country an opportunity to work alongside her and create something amazing. Talent could have simply been brought over from the US, but in actuality made the piece so much more meaningful and touching. This also ties into the importance of hiring a diverse workforce to spark creativity and difference in culture/background/opinion.

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talabib · 1 year

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Get An Handle On Your Finance and Become Financially Free

A declaration of financial independence.

“Money is the most important thing in the world.” It’s a startling and borderline heretical claim. After all, we’re told time and again that you can’t buy happiness.

Well, sure – you can’t spend your way to Earthly bliss. But here’s the flipside: poverty is pretty sure to make you miserable. Far from being the root of all evil, money is the most important tool we have to improve our quality of life.

If you want to look out for the people you love, you’ll need money – the more, the better. Want to spend more time with your kids? Ditto. How about creating time for leisure, reading, going to the theatre and discovering new cultures and countries through travel? You’ll have guessed the answer by now: money.

That’s the philosophy of Kristy Shen, a self-made millionaire who retired at 31. In this post, we’ll be exploring how she did it. Expect plenty of unashamedly contrarian takes, left-field strategies and novel concepts. More to the point, expect to find a roadmap to wealth creation, debt eradication and financial independence.

You’re more likely to make sound decisions if you follow the math rather than your passions.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University. His advice to the students? “Follow your heart.” That feel-good mantra rippled around the world. Endorsed by the great and good, it soon came to feel commonsensical – why on Earth wouldn’t you follow your passions and do something you love?

Here’s one reason: it’s often the wrong choice.

Take the often life-defining decision students make every year about what they’re going to study. That was just what Kristy was mulling over back in 2000. She had a shortlist of three possible majors – creative writing, accounting and computer engineering. Her heart told her to go with writing; math told her to go for engineering. Kristy followed the latter’s advice. It was a good call.

Let’s look at that math. A four-year program in Canada costs about $40,000. Professional writers fall on a spectrum between the unpublished newbie who earns zilch and established pros like Stephen King who earn millions. The average income, however, is $17,000. In 2000, the minimum wage was $6.85 an hour or $14,248 a year. That’s what anyone without a degree could expect to earn, so subtracting that sum from $17,000 told Kristy how much a writing degree was worth: a measly $2,752.

An accounting degree, by contrast, was worth around $24,000 more than the minimum wage. Computer engineering meanwhile netted you a whopping $40,000 more every year.

But hold up. You can’t put a price on happiness – surely dreams are worth pursuing whatever the bottom line says, right? Well, not necessarily. After all, if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re unlikely to wake up excited about your work, especially if it calls for creativity. Passions also change over time; a 2013 study published in Science found that the dreams of nearly all of the 19,000 participants had changed significantly over the previous decade.

And that’s why it pays to follow the math. Just ask Kristy. Today, she’s a professional writer. The reason she got there is simple: her well-paying engineering job meant she wasn’t reliant on writing to make the rent. Money, in other words, provided her with the foundation which eventually allowed her to pursue her true dream.

Kristy’s Chinese heritage taught her that debt is a trap to be avoided at all costs.

Did you know that on average Chinese citizens save 38 percent of their income? Americans, by contrast, squirrel away 3.9 percent of what they earn while the Japanese keep just 2.8 percent for a rainy day. So what’s going on – are the Chinese just inherently frugal?

Not really. Even before the communists came to power in 1949, corruption was endemic in China. Combine that with the absence of official credit channels like bank loans and you had the makings of a culture which ran on favors. When folks wanted to buy something big, they had a simple choice: take on an onerous personal debt and put themselves in someone else’s power, or save up until they had enough cash to buy it outright. That’s why, historically, debt in China is understood not so much as an “IOU” but an “I own you.”

If you’re Chinese like Kristy, that history means you’re basically programmed to avoid debt like the plague. But here’s the thing: when you crunch the numbers, it turns out that’s a pretty good attitude to adopt wherever you live.

Take the Rule of 72, an insight first formulated by a fifteenth-century Italian mathematician called Luca Pacioli. Here’s how it works. To work out how long it takes for your investment to double, divide 72 by the return rate of your investment. So let’s say you’re getting six percent on your $1,000 investment. Seventy-two divided by six equals 12. This last number is the number of years you’ll need in order for that grand to compound into $2,000. Over time, the balance increases. The money you make makes more money.

If you’re an investor, the Rule of 72 is your friend; if you’re a debtor, it’s your worst enemy. Say you buy a $1,000 TV on credit. Typically, the interest rate will be around 20 percent. Divide 72 by 20 and you get 3.6 – that’s how long it’ll take your debt to double! After seven years, it will have almost quadrupled.

When you put it like that, the Chinese custom of paying off personal debts during the New Year on pain of being cursed with 12 months of misfortune starts to make a lot of sense. But don’t worry – the idea here isn’t to scare you.

Consumer debt is a financial crisis which needs to be addressed immediately.

Debt is a blood-sucking vampire. It bleeds you dry. Worse, it leaves you terrified of the sunlight, trapping you indoors in an endless cycle of work and repayment. If you want financial independence, you’ll have to put a stake through this bad boy’s heart.

Consumer debt has the highest interest rates, so that’s where you should start. The first thing you’ll need to do is cut your expenses to the bone. It’s painful but essential. As we’ve seen, the Rule of 72 means your debts grow at an ungodly rate. If you’re saddled with a 10 or 20 percent interest rate, there’s no point trying to save or invest your hard-earned cash – there’s no getting in front of debt. Do whatever it takes, whether it’s finding a side hustle, renting out a spare room, or saying “no” to dinners out.

Next, you’ll need to prioritize how you repay your loans by putting them in order based on interest rate, from highest to lowest. When you’re surrounded by hungry vampires, it’s always a good idea to kill the one with the biggest appetite first. That means paying the minimum monthly repayment on all your cards to avoid defaulting and throwing everything that you don’t need for essentials like rent at the nastiest bloodsucker. Paying off your smallest loan might make you feel good, but you’re not trying to massage your ego here – you’re fighting for your freedom.

The final step is refinancing your loans. Lots of credit card companies allow you to transfer balances between different cards and pay zero percent interest for a certain amount of time. That’s usually a year. If you’re sure you can use these so-called “grace periods” to pay off a loan completely, use this option. Bear in mind, however, that these companies are gambling on you failing to do so, which will allow them to jack up the interest rate and screw you.

Remember, trying to gain financial independence while carrying around debt is like running a marathon with a backpack full of bricks – it’ll sap your strength before you’ve even run a mile. If you want to grow your assets, you need to kill that vampire!

If you want to buy happiness, spend your cash on experiences rather than stuff.

What does cocaine have to do with shopping? Surprisingly, quite a lot. Understanding that connection holds the key to getting the most out of the money you decide to spend on luxuries.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the brain. When something good happens, the “pleasure chemical” dopamine surges through your mesolimbic pathway, essentially your brain’s main highway, to the nucleus accumbens – a kind of dopamine processing plant. A substance like cocaine triggers this surge – but so does splurging on a Gucci handbag. In both cases, the reward is a massive neural high.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As a 2006 article in the journal NeuroImage demonstrated, the nucleus accumbens doesn’t just react to positive stimuli – it also reacts to the expectation of those stimuli. In other words, pleasure isn’t just about absolute dopamine levels but how much dopamine our brains expect is on the way.

Unfortunately for cocaine addicts and shopaholics, the brain keeps ratcheting its expectation levels upwards. That’s why people need ever-larger amounts of cocaine and ever-more expensive handbags – they’re forever chasing that unrepeatable first high.

That means you’re not going to enjoy yourself even if you’re wealthy enough to fund your shopping habits. This might sound like the preamble to an old-fashioned moral lecture about how money can’t buy happiness, but it’s really not. Truth be told, it can. It just boils down to what you’re spending it on.

Not all spending is created equal; some kinds go further than others. When Kristy started her blog and began receiving emails from her readers, she noticed a trend. The more stuff people owned, the unhappier they were. Folks who owned less and used their money to buy experiences, by contrast, were pretty happy with their lot in life.

That’s because possessions give you an initial burst of dopamine which fades as your nucleus accumbens acclimatizes. The pleasure that comes with learning new skills or traveling doesn’t fade nearly as quickly. As long as you practice now and again, you’ll always be able to play the piano, and those holiday snaps from Rome will always take you back to that week you spent in the Eternal City with your husband.

Buying property isn’t the failsafe investment it’s made out to be.

Lots of folks are cautious about borrowing money, but they usually make one big exception: a mortgage. Conventional wisdom says buying a house isn’t just a rite of passage into adulthood but a wise investment in the future. After all, you can always sell at a profit, right?

Well, no. In reality, property comes with all sorts of hidden costs. Let’s talk numbers.

According to the US Census Bureau, the average family stays in their home for 9 years. Typically, these families invest in brick and mortar in the expectation that property prices will rise. Historically, that rate rises and falls with inflation, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume here that prices increase by a steady 6 percent every year.

Our family – let’s call them the Smiths – buy their house for $500,000. Add 9 times 6 percent – 9 years at 6 percent inflation – to that and you get $844,739. That leaves a tidy profit of $344,739.

Not so fast. To buy the property, the Smiths need a title search from the land registry office. That’s $1,000. The title recording fee costs $150. The lawyer who processes those documents charges another grand.

Then there’s insurance. Rates vary across the US, but 0.5 per cent of the house’s value is pretty common. Paid annually for 9 years, that comes to $22,500. A property tax of 1 percent per annum adds another $45,000 to the bill. Meanwhile, realtors advise setting aside at least one percent of a home’s value every year for maintenance, which is what the Smiths do. That’s another $45,000.

Selling isn’t cheap either. A commission of 6 percent of the final sale price clocks in at $50,684. The land transfer tax is 1.2 percent, so that’s $10,137. Oh and there’s another lawyer, who also bills for $1,000.

That brings us to $175,571 – 51 percent of the Smiths’ profit. But we haven’t talked about interest yet. Like most families, the Smiths paid a ten percent down payment in cash and borrowed the rest from their bank. Over 9 years, they have paid $162,033 in interest.

That’s a whopping 98 percent of the sale price. And remember, we started by assuming that the value of the Smiths’ house would grow by 6 percent every year. That’s well above the actual inflation rate in the US, which is about 2 percent. In the real world, the Smiths would have lost money!

Use the “Rule of 150” to decide whether to buy a house or use your money for something else.

Previously, we crunched the numbers and saw that the cost of buying, owning and selling a house outweighed the returns in the case of a fictional American family. The moral of the story, however, isn’t that you should never buy a house – it’s that you need to work out if that’s a good call in your situation.

Ask a realtor and they’ll swear it’s all very simple. If the monthly mortgage payment equals the rent on a similar house or apartment, you’re better off buying rather than giving your money to a landlord. Look more closely, however, and you’ll find it’s a little more complicated.

That’s where the Rule of 150 comes in. This is a tool to help you compare the true cost of owning a home with what you would be saving by not renting. Here’s how it works:

Over the first 9 years of a standard 30-year mortgage, only about 50 percent of your payments go towards the actual loan; paying off interest on that loan accounts for the other 50 percent. Now, additional ownership costs like maintenance and insurance are roughly equal to the interest on a standard mortgage during those first 9 years, so that’s another 50 percent. So to calculate your actual monthly payments, you’ll need to multiply your monthly mortgage payment by 150 percent.

That’s how much your home will actually cost per month once you’ve accounted for all your expenses. So say you’re looking at a monthly mortgage bill of $1,500. When you multiply that by 150 percent, you get your true cost – $2,250. If your Rule of 150 monthly cost is higher than your rent, it makes sense to stick it out in the rental market; if it’s lower, you might want to think about buying.

When Kristy first considered buying a house, she was living in Toronto, Canada’s most expensive city. Prices were out of control and one-person apartments were going for a million dollars apiece. After applying the Rule of 150, she quickly realized that there was no way she was going to be able to buy her own home.

Index investing is less risky than betting on individual companies.

The American business guru Robert Kiyosaki once remarked that poor people buy stuff, the middle class buys houses and rich people buy investments. What he meant is that rich people put their money into things that make them more money. But you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire to follow their lead.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of investing. The first is to do what Wall Street whizzes do – spend a ton of cash on research and fancy algorithms to pick the best companies. The second variant is cheaper, simpler and, most importantly, less risky.

That’s called index investing. Think of it as betting on the casino rather than individual horses. It doesn’t matter who wins the race – the house always makes money. Let’s unpack that.

An index is a list of companies ranked by market capitalization, or the overall value of their public shares. When you invest in an index, you’re effectively betting on every one of those listed firms. Because the index contains the stock of multiple high-performing companies, a single failure won’t wipe you out. The only way you can go bust is if every name on your index simultaneously files for bankruptcy.

That’s highly unlikely. Why? Well, index investing has an elegant built-in barometer. If a company is worth more, the index automatically picks up more shares in that company, and vice versa. If a tech giant releases a world-beating smartphone and its stock soars, the index buys more shares. If a car company runs into trouble and their stock plummets, the index dumps shares. And when a company drops in value from number 500 to number 501, it’s kicked off the index entirely.

This is a highly intuitive way of gauging the stock market as a whole, which is why major indexes like the S&P 500 – a list of the 500 biggest companies – work like this.

Index investing is also good for your wallet. The simplicity of the concept means there’s no need to pay for a hands-on fund manager. In the US, for example, a typical index fund charges fees of just 0.04 percent – 25 times lower than what you’d pay for an actively managed fund. The sales commission? $0. If you ever want to see your bank manager sweat, head to your local branch and ask to have your savings put into index funds!

Early retirement doesn’t depend on how much you make – it’s all about how much you save.

Chances are you’ve idly daydreamed about early retirement. Most folks quickly shelve that idea when they take a look at their bank balance, though. If you’re not raking it in, you just can’t afford to stop working before your mid-sixties, right?

Wrong. Your time to retirement doesn’t depend on how much you earn but how much you save. If you’re making and spending a million bucks a year, you’re entirely dependent on your job and won’t ever be able to retire. If you make $40,000 a year and spend $30,000, on the other hand, you already have a healthy savings rate of 25 percent.

The “normal” retirement age is 65 because most people save between five and ten percent of their salaries and have investment portfolios yielding an average of six to seven percent annually. Plug those numbers into a spreadsheet and you’re looking at 40 to 45 years of work.

The way to reduce that time is to up how much you’re saving. This does two things. Firstly, it cuts your living expenses, which in turn cuts the size of your target portfolio – the amount of cash you’ll need to retire. Secondly, it pumps more money into that portfolio. Think of it as a race: you’re moving the finish closer while also running faster. Even relatively small changes have a big impact. Boosting your savings rate from ten to 15 percent, for example, shaves 5 years off your working life!

Still not convinced? Well, okay, let’s take a look at the case of a fictional couple we’ll call Paul and Jillian. Together, their annual earnings come to $62,175. That’s the median family income in the US. Deduct 15.2 percent for taxes and you’re left with $52,724.40.

Now imagine Paul and Jillian decided to turbocharge their savings rate. They rent a small apartment in an affordable city, cook at home and use car-sharing services like Zipcar. All in all, they pay $40,000 to cover their costs and put $12,724.40 into their portfolio every year.

Let’s lowball the interest rate they’re getting on that and say it’s 6 percent. Even if they never get promotions or better-paying jobs, Paul and Jillian would have a million dollars in 30 years. If they started at 24, they could retire at 54 – 11 years ahead of schedule!

Reducing the size of your target portfolio makes early retirement more manageable.

How much do you need to save to retire early? That’s exactly what researchers asked in a landmark study published in the investment journal AAII in 1998.

They used stock market data to simulate what would happen to a group of fictional retirees who withdrew different percentages of their portfolios every year after retirement. Would “Alan,” for example, make it over the line or run out of cash if he withdrew 10 percent of his $500,000 nest egg every year?

Here’s the answer: Your portfolio is self-sustaining when your annual living expenses are no greater than 4 percent of its total value. Economists call that a safe withdrawal rate. This number allows you to determine the size of your target portfolio – simply multiply your annual expenses by 25. If you need $40,000 a year, you’re looking at a $1,000,000 portfolio.

That’s a lot of cash, right? Sure, but don’t let that put you off – there are also alternative strategies. Take partial financial independence. This gives you the benefits of financial independence, such as flexibility and having more free time, and it’s achievable with a smaller portfolio.

Say you earn the US median family income of $62,175 and need $40,000 a year to cover your living costs. If you shift to part-time work and earn $28,000 after tax, you’ll have an annual shortfall of $12,000 in your budget. Multiply that number by 25 and you have your new target portfolio – $300,000. Save that amount and you can enter semi-retirement!

Then there’s geographic arbitrage. This is the idea that you can earn income in a country with a strong currency like Germany or the US and retire in a country with a weaker currency like Mexico or Thailand. When Kristy and her husband Bryce visited Vietnam, for example, they realized that you can live a luxurious life there for around $1,130 a month.

If you’re earning the local average salary of $150 a month, that’s unaffordable; if you’re earning the average US monthly salary, however, it’s well within your reach. So what does your target portfolio look like now? Multiply $1,130 by 12, which gives you $13,560. Then multiply that by 25 and you have $339,000.

So there you have it – a ton of tricks to help launch your journey to financial independence. All you have to do now is ask yourself a simple question. What’s more important – accumulating expensive things or your freedom? Answer that honestly and your money decisions will become clear.

Getting a handle on your finances comes down to one basic principle: follow the math. That means ignoring feel-good advice like choosing to study a subject you love rather than one that will bring in a salary you can actually live on. It also means bucking social trends if they’re not right for you. Crunch the numbers and you might just discover that you’re better off investing your savings in the stock market rather than buying a house and saddling yourself with a lifetime of debt. Why? Well, if you’re growing your money while avoiding ruinous interest rates, you’re setting yourself up for financial independence. And that means you’re one step closer to the ultimate dream: early retirement.

Action plan: Make invisible waste visible.

Consumerism promises happiness but it’s usually little more than a temporary fix. What it does generate is waste. A lot of waste. Take clothing. According to the Guardian, Americans throw away 11 million tons of clothes every year. So here’s how to eliminate waste in your own wardrobe: make it visible. Simply push all the clothes in your closet to the left, and place an empty hanger with a piece of masking tape in the middle. Everything you wear from now on goes on the right of the marked hanger after it’s been washed. Over time, this reveals how often you use different items. On the right, are the superstars of your wardrobe; in the middle, pieces you do wear but infrequently; and on the left, clothes you never take out at all – the waste.

#Get An Handle On Your Finance and Become Financially Free

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transgenderteensurvivalguide · 3 years

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“Elliot Page doesn’t remember exactly how long he had been asking.

But he does remember the acute feeling of triumph when, around age 9, he was finally allowed to cut his hair short. “I felt like a boy,” Page says. “I wanted to be a boy. I would ask my mom if I could be someday.” Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Page visualized himself as a boy in imaginary games, freed from the discomfort of how other people saw him: as a girl. After the haircut, strangers finally started perceiving him the way he saw himself, and it felt both right and exciting.

The joy was short-lived. Months later, Page got his first break, landing a part as a daughter in a Canadian mining family in the TV movie Pit Pony. He wore a wig for the film, and when Pit Pony became a TV show, he grew his hair out again. “I became a professional actor at the age of 10,” Page says. And pursuing that passion came with a difficult compromise. “Of course I had to look a certain way.”

We are speaking in late February. It is the first interview Page, 34, has given since disclosing in December that he is transgender, in a heartfelt letter posted to Instagram, and he is crying before I have even uttered a question. “Sorry, I’m going to be emotional, but that’s cool, right?” he says, smiling through his tears.

It’s hard for him to talk about the days that led up to that disclosure. When I ask how he was feeling, he looks away, his neck exposed by a new short haircut. After a pause, he presses his hand to his heart and closes his eyes. “This feeling of true excitement and deep gratitude to have made it to this point in my life,” he says, “mixed with a lot of fear and anxiety.”

It’s not hard to understand why a trans person would be dealing with conflicting feelings in this moment. Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans—1.8% of Gen Z compared with 0.2% of boomers, according to a recent Gallup poll—yet this has fueled conservatives who are stoking fears about a “transgender craze.” President Joe Biden has restored the right of transgender military members to serve openly, and in Hollywood, trans people have never had more meaningful time onscreen. Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling is leveraging her cultural capital to oppose transgender equality in the name of feminism, and lawmakers are arguing in the halls of Congress over the validity of gender identities. “Sex has become a political football in the culture wars,” says Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU.

(Full article with photos continued under the “read more”)

And so Page—who charmed America as a precocious pregnant teenager in Juno, constructed dreamscapes in Inception and now stars in Netflix’s hit superhero show The Umbrella Academy, the third season of which he’s filming in Toronto—expected that his news would be met with both applause and vitriol. “What I was anticipating was a lot of support and love and a massive amount of hatred and transphobia,” says Page. “That’s essentially what happened.” What he did not anticipate was just how big this story would be. Page’s announcement, which made him one of the most famous out trans people in the world, started trending on Twitter in more than 20 countries. He gained more than 400,000 new followers on Instagram on that day alone. Thousands of articles were published. Likes and shares reached the millions. Right-wing podcasters readied their rhetoric about “women in men’s locker rooms.” Casting directors reached out to Page’s manager saying it would be an honor to cast Page in their next big movie.

So, it was a lot. Over the course of two conversations, Page will say that understanding himself in all the specifics remains a work in progress. Fathoming one’s gender, an identity innate and performed, personal and social, fixed and evolving, is complicated enough without being under a spotlight that never seems to turn off. But having arrived at a critical juncture, Page feels a deep sense of responsibility to share his truth. “Extremely influential people are spreading these myths and damaging rhetoric—every day you’re seeing our existence debated,” Page says. “Transgender people are so very real.”

That role in Pit Pony led to other productions and eventually, when Page was 16, to a film called Mouth to Mouth. Playing a young anarchist, Page had a chance to cut his hair again. This time, he shaved it off completely. The kids at his high school teased him, but in photos he has posted from that time on social media he looks at ease. Page’s head was still shaved when he mailed in an audition tape for the 2005 thriller Hard Candy. The people in charge of casting asked him to audition again in a wig. Soon, the hair was back.

Page’s tour de force performance in Hard Candy led, two years later, to Juno, a low-budget indie film that brought Page Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and sudden megafame. The actor, then 21, struggled with the stresses of that ascension. The endless primping, red carpets and magazine spreads were all agonizing reminders of the disconnect between how the world saw Page and who he knew himself to be. “I just never recognized myself,” Page says. “For a long time I could not even look at a photo of myself.” It was difficult to watch the movies too, especially ones in which he played more feminine roles.

Page loved making movies, but he also felt alienated by Hollywood and its standards. Alia Shawkat, a close friend and co-star in 2009’s Whip It,describes all the attention from Juno as scarring. “He had a really hard time with the press and expectations,” Shawkat says. “‘Put this on! And look this way! And this is sexy!’”

By the time he appeared in blockbusters like X-Men: The Last Stand and Inception, Page was suffering from depression, anxiety and panic attacks. He didn’t know, he says, “how to explain to people that even though [I was] an actor, just putting on a T-shirt cut for a woman would make me so unwell.” Shawkat recalls Page’s struggles with clothes. “I’d be like, ‘Hey, look at all these nice outfits you’re getting,’ and he would say, ‘It’s not me. It feels like a costume,’” she says. Page tried to convince himself that he was fine, that someone who was fortunate enough to have made it shouldn’t have complaints. But he felt exhausted by the work required to “just exist,” and thought more than once about quitting acting.

In 2014, Page came out as gay, despite feeling for years that “being out was impossible” given his career. (Gender identity and sexual orientation are, of course, distinct, but one queer identity can coexist with another.) In an emotional speech at a Human Rights Campaign conference, Page talked about being part of an industry “that places crushing standards” on actors and viewers alike. “There are pervasive stereotypes about masculinity and femininity that define how we’re all supposed to act, dress and speak,” Page went on. “And they serve no one.”

The actor started wearing suits on the red carpet. He found love, marrying choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. He asserted more agency in his career, producing his own films with LGBTQ leads like Freeheld and My Days of Mercy. And he made a masculine wardrobe a condition of taking roles. Yet the daily discord was becoming unbearable. “The difference in how I felt before coming out as gay to after was massive,” says Page. “But did the discomfort in my body ever go away? No, no, no, no.”

In part, it was the isolation forced by the pandemic that brought to a head Page’s wrestling with gender. (Page and Portner separated last summer, and the two divorced in early 2021. “We’ve remained close friends,” Page says.) “I had a lot of time on my own to really focus on things that I think, in so many ways, unconsciously, I was avoiding,” he says. He was inspired by trailblazing trans icons like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, who found success in Hollywood while living authentically. Trans writers helped him understand his feelings; Page saw himself reflected in P. Carl’s memoir Becoming a Man. Eventually “shame and discomfort” gave way to revelation. “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.”

This led to a series of decisions. One was asking the world to call him by a different name, Elliot, which he says he’s always liked. Page has a tattoo that says E.P. PHONE HOME, a reference to a movie about a young boy with that name. “I loved E.T. when I was a kid and always wanted to look like the boys in the movies, right?” he says. The other decision was to use different pronouns—for the record, both he/him and they/them are fine. (When I ask if he has a preference on pronouns for the purposes of this story, Page says, “He/him is great.”)

A day before we first speak, Page will talk to his mom about this interview and she will tell him, “I’m just so proud of my son.” He grows emotional relating this and tries to explain that his mom, the daughter of a minister, who was born in the 1950s, was always trying to do what she thought was best for her child, even if that meant encouraging young Page to act like a girl. “She wants me to be who I am and supports me fully,” Page says. “It is a testament to how people really change.”

Another decision was to get top surgery. Page volunteers this information early in our conversation; at the time he posted his disclosure on Instagram, he was recovering in Toronto. Like many trans people, Page emphasizes being trans isn’t all about surgery. For some people, it’s unnecessary. For others, it’s unaffordable. For the wider world, the media’s focus on it has sensationalized transgender bodies, inviting invasive and inappropriate questions. But Page describes surgery as something that, for him, has made it possible to finally recognize himself when he looks in the mirror, providing catharsis he’s been waiting for since the “total hell” of puberty. “It has completely transformed my life,” he says. So much of his energy was spent on being uncomfortable in his body, he says. Now he has that energy back.

For the transgender community at large, visibility does not automatically lead to acceptance. Around the globe, transgender people deal disproportionately with violence and discrimination. Anti-trans hate crimes are on the rise in the U.K. along with increasingly transphobic rhetoric in newspapers and tabloids. In the U.S., in addition to the perennial challenges trans people face with issues like poverty and homelessness, a flurry of bills in state legislatures would make it a crime to provide transition-related medical care to trans youth. And crass old jokes are still in circulation. When Biden lifted the ban on open service for transgender troops, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che did a bit on Weekend Update about the policy being called “don’t ask, don’t tuck.”

Page says coming out as trans was “selfish” on one level: “It’s for me. I want to live and be who I am.” But he also felt a moral imperative to do so, given the times. Human identity is complicated and mysterious, but politics insists on fitting everything into boxes. In today’s culture wars, simplistic beliefs about gender—e.g., chromosomes = destiny—are so widespread and so deep-seated that many people who hold those beliefs don’t feel compelled to consider whether they might be incomplete or prejudiced. On Feb. 24, after a passionate debate on legislation that would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people, Representative Marie Newman, an Illinois Democrat, proudly displayed the pride flag in support of her daughter, who is trans. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, responded by hanging a poster outside her office that read: There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE.

The next day Dr. Rachel Levine, who stands to become the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate, endured a tirade from Senator Rand Paul about “genital mutilation” during her confirmation hearing. My second conversation with Page happens shortly after this. He brings it up almost immediately, and seems both heartbroken and determined. He wants to emphasize that top surgery, for him, was “not only life-changing but lifesaving.” He implores people to educate themselves about trans lives, to learn how crucial medical care can be, to understand that lack of access to it is one of the many reasons that an estimated 41% of transgender people have attempted suicide, according to one survey.

Page has been in the political trenches for a while, having leaned into progressive activism after coming out as queer in 2014. For two seasons, he and best friend Ian Daniel filmed Gaycation, a Viceland series that explored LGBTQ culture around the world and, at one point, showed Page grilling Senator Ted Cruz at the Iowa State Fair about discrimination against queer people. In 2019, Page made a documentary called There’s Something in the Water, which explores environmental hardships experienced by communities of color in Nova Scotia, with $350,000 of his own money. That activism extends to his own industry: in 2017, he published a Facebook post that, among other things, accused director Brett Ratner of forcibly outing him as gay on the set of an X-Men movie. (A representative for Ratner did not respond to a request for comment.)

As a trans person who is white, wealthy and famous, Page has a unique kind of privilege, and with it an opportunity to advocate for those with less. According to the U.S. Trans Survey, a large-scale report from 2015, transgender people of color are more likely to experience unemployment, harassment by police and refusals of medical care. Nearly half of all Black respondents reported being denied equal treatment, verbally harassed and/or physically attacked in the past year. Trans people as a group fare much worse on such stats than the general population. “My privilege has allowed me to have resources to get through and to be where I am today,” Page says, “and of course I want to use that privilege and platform to help in the ways I can.”

Since his disclosure, Page has been mostly quiet on social media. One exception has been to tweet on behalf of the ACLU, which is in the midst of fighting anti-trans bills and laws around the country, including those that ban transgender girls and women from participating in sports. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves says he will sign such a bill in the name of “protect[ing] young girls.” Page played competitive soccer and vividly recalls the agony of being told he would have to play on the girls’ team once he aged out of mixed-gender squads. After an appeal, Page was allowed to play with the boys for an additional year. Today, several bills list genitalia as a requirement for deciding who plays on which team. “I would have been in that position as a kid,” Page says. “It’s horrific.”

All this advocacy is unlikely to make life easier. “You can’t enter into certain spaces as a public trans person,” says the ACLU’s Strangio, “without being prepared to spend some percentage of your life being threatened and harassed.” Yet, while he seems overwhelmed at times, Page is also eager. Many of the political attacks on trans people—whether it is a mandate that bathroom use be determined by birth sex, a blanket ban on medical interventions for trans kids or the suggestion that trans men are simply wayward women beguiled by male privilege—carry the same subtext: that trans people are mistaken about who they are. “We know who we are,” Page says. “People cling to these firm ideas [about gender] because it makes people feel safe. But if we could just celebrate all the wonderful complexities of people, the world would be such a better place.”

Even if Page weren’t vocal, his public presence would communicate something powerful. That is in part because of what Paisley Currah, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, calls “visibility gaps.” Historically, trans women have been more visible, in culture and in Hollywood, than trans men. There are many explanations: Our culture is obsessed with femininity. Men’s bodies are less policed and scrutinized. Patriarchal people tend to get more emotional about who is considered to be in the same category as their daughters. “And a lot of trans men don’t stand out as trans,” says Currah, who is a trans man himself. “I think we’ve taken up less of the public’s attention because masculinity is sort of the norm.”

During our interviews, Page will repeatedly refer to himself as a “transgender guy.” He also calls himself nonbinary and queer, but for him, transmasculinity is at the center of the conversation right now. “It’s a complicated journey,” he says, “and an ongoing process.”

While the visibility gap means that trans men have been spared some of the hate endured by trans women, it has also meant that people like Page have had fewer models. “There were no examples,” Page says of growing up in Halifax in the 1990s. There are many queer people who have felt “that how they feel deep inside isn’t a real thing because they never saw it reflected back to them,” says Tiq Milan, an activist, author and transgender man. Page offers a reflection: “They can see that and say, ‘You know what, that’s who I am too,’” Milan says. When there aren’t examples, he says, “people make monsters of us.”

For decades, that was something Hollywood did. As detailed in the 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, transgender people have been portrayed onscreen as villainous and deceitful, tragic subplots or the butt of jokes. In a sign of just how far the industry has come—spurred on by productions like Pose and trailblazers like Mock—Netflix offered to change the credits on The Umbrella Academy the same day that its star posted his statement on social media. Now when an episode ends, the first words viewers see are “Elliot Page.”

Today, there are many out trans and nonbinary actors, directors and producers. Storylines involving trans people are more common, more respectful. Sometimes that aspect of identity is even incidental, rather than the crux of a morality tale. And yet Hollywood can still seem a frightening place for LGBTQ people to come out. “It’s an industry that says, ‘Don’t do that,’” says director Silas Howard, who got his break on Amazon’s show Transparent, which made efforts to hire transgender crew members. “I wouldn’t have been hired if they didn’t have a trans initiative,” Howard says. “I’m always aware of that.”

So what will it mean for Page’s career? While Page has appeared in many projects, he also faced challenges landing female leads because he didn’t fit Hollywood’s narrow mold. Since Page’s Instagram post, his team is seeing more activity than they have in years. Many of the offers coming in—to direct, to produce, to act—are trans-related, but there are also some “dude roles.”

Downtime in quarantine helped Page accept his gender identity. “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” he says.

Page was attracted to the role of Vanya in The Umbrella Academy because—in the first season, released in 2019—Vanya is crushed by self-loathing, believing herself to be the only ordinary sibling in an extraordinary family. The character can barely summon the courage to move through the world. “I related to how much Vanya was closed off,” Page says. Now on set filming the third season, co-workers have seen a change in the actor. “It seems like there’s a tremendous weight off his shoulders, a feeling of comfort,” says showrunner Steve Blackman. “There’s a lightness, a lot more smiling.” For Page, returning to set has been validating, if awkward at times. Yes, people accidentally use the wrong pronouns—“It’s going to be an adjustment,” Page says—but co-workers also see and acknowledge him.

The debate over whether cisgender people, who have repeatedly collected awards for playing trans characters, should continue to do so has largely been settled. However, trans actors have rarely been considered for cisgender parts. Whatever challenges might lie ahead, Page seems exuberant about playing a new spectrum of roles. “I’m really excited to act, now that I’m fully who I am, in this body,” Page says. “No matter the challenges and difficult moments of this, nothing amounts to getting to feel how I feel now.”

This includes having short hair again. During our interview, Page keeps rearranging strands on his forehead. It took a long time for him to return to the barber’s chair and ask to cut it short, but he got there. And how did that haircut feel?

Page tears up again, then smiles. “I just could not have enjoyed it more,” he says.”

#suicide m #transphobia m #Elliot Page #transgender #representation #celebrities #actors #tv #movies #rep #trans #transmasculine #nonbinary #queer #long post

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randomshyperson · 3 years

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Wanda Maximoff x Reader - Seven minutes of truth and dare

Summary> You and Pietro have been friends since elementary school. On his 18th birthday, you try to socialize with his twin sister, Wanda Maximoff, who never seemed to like you very much.

Warnings> (implied) Enemies to Lovers/ Fluff and Smut/ Vaginal Fingering/ Boys Kissing/ Girls Kissing/ Underage Drinking/ 18+/ implicit sex/ swearing

Words> 3734k (Oneshot)

Read on AO3

It took little time to get to Maximoff's house, considering that you had to walk to the residence, since your ride - Natasha Romanoff, best friend, currently on the run together with her boyfriend Bruce Banner - just stood up to you. You were lucky to live only a few blocks away.

The noise of the party could already be heard from around the corner, and you wondered how long it would take for one of the neighbors to call the police. At least it was the weekend, and you remembered that Pietro had commented that the Parkers would be traveling on their honeymoon, being the only neighbors of the house. Pietro was always lucky for things like this.

When you finally arrived at the house, the sound of some electronic music was much louder. You greeted a few people with a nod, the vast majority classmates, who were actually more Pietro's friends than yours, and then you went inside.

The Maximoff residence was very nice, but at this moment it was full of teenagers drinking and dancing, many glasses and bottles lying on the floor.

Looking for Pietro, you found him upside down, drinking directly from a beer tank that was set up in the outside yard past the kitchen. You frowned slightly, hoping your friend didn't have an alcoholic coma, as you walked up to the group of teenagers who cheered and encouraged the challenge.

When he finished, the two boys holding him by the ankles helped him to balance again, laughing and patting Pietro on the back. Your friend staggered a bit, but then he saw you, flashing a smile before hugging you.

- You stink, birthday boy. - You teased, and Pietro just rolled his eyes humorously.

- You took your time. - He remarks as you release from your embrace. You shrug.

- You know this isn't my thing. - You remark, referring to the party. Pietro smiles.

- Yes, yes. But I'm glad you're here. - He replies and then takes your hands, lifting them a little and looking down your entire body. - And look at you, you even dressed up to come! Are you trying to have sex with someone?

You laughed, letting go of Pietro's hands to push him gently, which made Pietro laugh too. Soon you were surrounded by other friends, but not being very good with crowds, you said you were going to get something to drink before you left.

In the kitchen, you tried to find something that didn't have alcohol in it. You ended up grabbing one of the bottles of soda from the refrigerator, hoping that none of the Maximoffs would mind.

Someone changed the music and turned up the sound, so you heard the excited shouts of several people, who began to move into the room and dance around each other. You laughed at the image, walking upstairs.

A few people were scattered on this floor, mostly trying to smoke pot in hiding, or to have some privacy from the noise. A few others were just making out in the corners. You walked to Pietro's room, checking his present in your pocket.

He would be too busy being the popular extrovert he was tonight, so you thought it best to leave the small gift you bought for him on his bedside table, he could appreciate the gift when the party was over.

You closed the door on your way out, and frowned as you looked down the hall, a couple of strangers kissed passionately while one of the boys groped the walls for somewhere to go, you watched as he found one of the unlocked doors and went inside. You sighed, hesitating to make a move. You knew very well that this was Wanda's room. You figured that no one would want to know that strangers were screwing in their bed.

Hurrying inside, you opened the door.

- Sorry, boys, this one's off limits. - You warned them as you entered, noting that they were already almost naked. Grabbing the fallen clothes from around the room, they looked at you angrily, but then left the room.

You shifted the weight of your feet, realizing where you were at last. Looking around, you bit your lower lip as you observed how everything was just so Wanda.

The color of the walls, the sheets, even the way she organized the books and records. You ran your finger between the shelves on the wall, smiling at the collection of music she had in vinyl record format. And then you looked at the collection of dvds, compilations of old American sitcoms.

You walked over to the study table, a picture of Wanda and Pietro as children caught your eye. It was Halloween, and they were dressed up adorably, Wanda as a witch, with horns and a red cape, and Pietro as a superhero. You put the photo back, running your fingers through Wanda's notes displayed in the notebooks she left open on the table. On the few occasions you saw her at school during the past year, she was studying. Pietro had commented that she was going to apply to the best colleges in the country.

- What are you doing here? - A female voice sounded behind you, and you stumbled with fright, turning around quickly.

- God, Wanda, you scared the hell out of me. - You grumbled, but she continued with a look of mixed annoyance and curiosity. You looked away before speaking. - Sorry for snooping. I just came here to keep some boys from having sex in your bed.

Wanda blinked with confusion, but her expression softened. You noticed how beautiful she looked, and scolded yourself for thinking that the next second.

- Oh right. Thanks, I guess.

You nodded slightly, not being used to being alone with her.

- I didn't know you liked sitcons. - The words escape your anxious brain, and Wanda blinks in confusion. You thought she would throw you out of the room right away, but she just smiles, shrugging.

- You never asked. - She says, and you bite the inside of your cheek.

- Yeah, I didn't know you wanted me to ask. - You retort, your voice coming out almost in a whisper. Wanda looks away, twiddling her fingers.

You were silent for a moment, and Wanda looked like she was about to say something, but then the door opened again, and you raised your eyebrows as you watched two girls snuggled up to each other and stumbled into the room, unaware of your presence. Wanda made an impatient expression.

- Get out, now! - she warns, and the girls part in shock. You raise your eyebrows as you realize that you knew them.

- Damn, we didn't know it was taken. - Carol grumbled, and when she looked at you her expression changed from embarrassment to happiness. - Y/N! I didn't know you were coming.

You nodded at her clumsily, and she just smiled, apologizing again as she dragged Maria out of the room, closing the door. You didn't even want to think about what you two were going to do.

- Maybe you should lock the door. - You said, and Wanda looked at you with a raised eyebrow, a tone of surprise and malice in her gaze. You blushed as you realized what your speech implied. - I-I mean when we get out of here.

Wanda laughed, and you tried to cope with the butterflies in your stomach that seeing her laugh gave you.

- I think I will stick around here anyway. - She comments after a moment, sitting up in bed. - Parties aren't really my thing.

- Yeah, I know how it is. - You add, a little awkwardly. - I only agreed to come because Pietro really wanted me to.

- You stopped coming here at home. - Wanda says with an expression you don't understand, it was as if she wanted to read you. - Are you two all right?

You look at her with mild surprise, not really expecting her to have noticed you anyway.

- Me and Pietro? Yes, we're fine! - you affirm, putting your hands in your pockets. - I guess the exams have been keeping me busy. And well, Pietro has lots of friends now, it's not like I'm missed that much.

You looked at the floor, not noticing Wanda's frown. You didn't want to think too much about Pietro replacing you, not today.

- I don't think that's true. - Wanda says after a moment. - Pietro likes you very much.

Wanda's tone is almost hurt. At first you thought that maybe she was thinking that Pietro enjoyed your company more than hers, which was absolutely ridiculous, but then you understood the tone of the insinuation, and laughed lightly, attracting the other girl's attention.

- You know we're just friends, right? - You start to explain, the idea of dating Pietro is so absurd that your voice comes out in a tone of debauchery and humor. - He has never looked at me like that! And I always thought he was like a little brother.

You laugh at the possibility, but Wanda looks at you intently.

- Would I be like your little sister too? - She replies in a low tone, and you feel your smile drop and look away, completely embarrassed.

- No. - You deny it, a little breathlessly. - I don't see you as a sister.

- And how do you see me?

Feeling your heart race, you force yourself to look up, looking at Wanda. She has a glint in her eyes that makes you want to kiss her.

Before you can answer, the door opens again, and Pietro stumbles inside.

- Great, I found you two! - He looked drunk. - We're going to play seven minutes in heaven, come on, come on!

Giving you two absolutely no chance to respond, he pushed you through the house, leading you to the basement, where your group of friends were waiting for you.

- Hey guys. - You greeted awkwardly seeing everyone standing there.

- No fucking way you two are at a party together! - joked Tony Stark, smiling at you. Despite the teasing, the others were genuinely happy with your company. - And they're still going to play with us? This is legendary.

- Why don't you just fuck off, Stark? - retorted Wanda as she entered. You knew they didn't get along very well, but Tony just shrugged, laughing at the other girl's aggressiveness.

- Come on, guys, do the circle! - asked Steve, who was already sitting in one of the armchairs. He put a bottle in the middle of the group. - Are you sure you want seven minutes?

- We start with truth and dare, Rogers. - said Tony as he sat down next to Thor, one of Pietro's soccer teammates.

- All right, all right, let's just play this game once and for all, - said Pietro impatiently. When everyone was sitting in a circle, Steve touched the bottle, smiling at the group.

Turning the bottle, everyone looked forward in anticipation. The tip stopped at Sam, one of his closest friends, who seemed confident to respond to anything.

- Truth or dare, Wilson? - Steve asked.

- I'll go for truth.

- Boring. - Grumbled Tony, but Steve just laughed, and assumed a thoughtful expression.

- Who was the last person you kissed?

Sam bowed his head, a smile on his lips. You frowned, he was not the type to be shy. Tony noticed as well and assumed a curious posture, looking at Sam intently.

- The last person I kissed... - Sam began, pausing, as if wondering if he was really going to say it - Was Bucky.

The whole group exclaimed in surprise, and Tony burst out laughing. You looked at Bucky, who just seemed too embarrassed to respond to the jokes.

- Okay, let's pretend this isn't the biggest sex scandal in school, and move on. - Pietro said in an amused tone. Sam laughed at his comments, and turned the bottle, which stopped at Thor.

- Dare. - Said the blond man without even waiting for Sam to ask. Sam laughed and thought for a few seconds before saying:

- Okay, everyone will need to put their cell phones on speaker for this one. - Sam said and nodded, waiting for everyone to obey. The group laughed, but followed his lead. - Well, my challenge is very simple. Send a message to the person you want to make out with from here. Everyone will know who.

- You are terrible, Wilson. - Thor commented, ignoring the sighs of excitement that the group shared.

It took a moment for Thor to pick up his cell phone, and type something. He took a sip of his beer before pressing enter, and the next second, Valkyrie's cell phone rang.

- This is not at all surprising, actually. - Steve joked, making everyone laugh.

Valkyrie gave Thor a surprised and mischievous look, but said nothing. Thor looked slightly flushed.

- If you guys are lucky, you can win seven minutes. - Sam teased.

Thor laughed but said nothing. He stepped forward to spin the bottle. Tony let out a pleased exclamation when he saw the bottle stop on him.

- Fuck, finally! - He said, and raised his hand to interrupt Thor, who was probably about to ask the choice. - No need, darling. Of course I want a dare, this game is no fun without it.

- Fine, Stark. - Thor laughed. - Since you love to show off, I dare you to give Rogers a lap dance.

The group burst into laughter, but Steve seemed considerably anxious. Tony laughed, a little awkwardly, and then stood up.

Thor was quick to get some music playing, and everyone was quiet in anticipation. When Tony started to perform, you blinked awkwardly. You had no desire to see Anthony Stark do a lap dance on someone's lap. You pulled your cell phone out of your pocket checking for messages, and smiled when you saw that there was a message from Nat, just a picture of her and Bruce, smoking together in what you thought looked like the Skateboard Court near the school.

The group laughed again, and you lifted your head to see that Tony was riding on Steve's lap, with his shirt off. Steve was very red.

- Okay guys, I think that's good enough! - Thor laughed, and Tony stood up. The group laughed at the visible erections on both of them, before continuing the game.

- Can you keep up, Stark? - Thor sneered, pointing at Tony's pants. He gave a lopsided smile, and pointed a middle finger at Thor before picking up the bottle.

You felt your stomach flip with nervousness when the bottle stopped on you.

- Well, well, this should be interesting. - said Tony looking at you mischievously. - Tell me, kitten, truth or dare?

You considered your options for a few seconds. If you asked for truth, Tony would not only tease you, but also find a way to make you confess something embarrassing. At least with dare, it would be quick and without much impact on your post-party life.

- Dare. - You say simply, and Tony looks surprised.

- It's been a night of surprises. - he scoffed. - And I think it's time for us to start the seven minutes in heaven.

- Damn it, Tony. - You mumble clumsily. Tony laughs and then flashes you a smile of fake kindness.

- I'll be nice to you. The bottle will choose your partner. - He says, and you cover your face with both hands for a moment before grabbing the bottle.

- I hate you, - you mutter to Tony before swirling the bottle around. With luck it would stop at one of your friends, and you would spend seven minutes talking.

- No fucking way! - shouted Tony excitedly as the bottle stopped at Wanda. You felt your stomach drop. - I always knew you'd end up with a Maximoff, I never thought it would be with the most gothic of them.

The group laughed, but you were feeling extremely anxious. You felt your legs tremble slightly when Tony pulled you off the couch, seeing your lack of reaction. You tried to smile, but it must have come out as a grimace, since Tony laughed.

- Remember girls, no cheating. - he warned, opening the closet door. You went in first, and then Tony closed the door when Wanda came in.

The closet was completely dark, and you could only distinguish Wanda's silhouette by squinting your eyes. You leaned your body against the wall, your breaths were the only sounds in the room, since the noise of the party was muffled.

- That's awkward. - You said trying to ease your nerves.

- Why is it awkward? - Wanda replied. The closet was small, and looking at the floor, you noticed that your shoes were only inches from touching.

- I don't know, I guess I never thought I'd be in a closet with you. - you confess humorously. But with Wanda's lack of response, you bite the inside of your cheek, not knowing what to say next.

- Who did you think you would be stuck with? - She says after a moment, sounding as if she is trying to prolong the subject.

- I don't know. - You say, looking at your shoes again. You think you're imagining that the distance between you has decreased. - I don't really think about being stuck in closets.

Wanda laughs at your statement, and you feel your heart race at the sound. You count twelve seconds in silence before she speaks again.

- I never understood why we didn't become friends. - Wanda confesses, and you look up at her silhouette.

Because I've been a gay disaster in your presence since I met you. You think, but think it best to just shrug. Then you remember that she can't see the gesture, and try to think of something to say.

- Different political views. - You joke, and Wanda giggles.

- I like your humor. - She says next, and you feel your cheeks heat up, and look down, only to see Wanda's shoes signaling that she has taken a step toward you. You press your back against the wall, watching her move closer in the dark. - And honestly, I've always liked you a lot.

- W-what? - You ask breathlessly, feeling Wanda's presence right in front of you, your noses touching.

- I always noticed you, you know. - She says, drawing her face closer to your neck, inhaling the scent of your hair. You were thankful that there was a wall behind you, serving as a support. - I would see you around the house. Playing in my yard. And the jokes at the dinner table. Always so quiet and shy at school, so behaved and obedient. - Wanda whispered, and then she brought her mouth close to his ear. - Tell me, did you notice me too?

- Yes. - You confess breathlessly. And ignoring the uneven beating of your own heart, you continue. - I have always noticed you. Ever since middle school, when you started wearing leather boots, and painting your fingernails. Or when I was at your swimming pool and you sat quietly with a book. I noticed you.

Wanda lets out a sigh, bringing your foreheads together.

- Tell me to stop if you don't want this. - She whispered against your lips. You would have laughed if you weren't so anxious.

You didn't answer, and wanting her to know how much you wanted her, you moved forward, pressing your lips together in a tender kiss.

Wanda took a step back in surprise, separating your mouths. You were about to apologize, thinking that maybe you had got it all wrong, but the next second she moved against you, her hands on your neck as your mouths joined in a firm, passionate kiss.

Bringing your hands to her waist, you pressed her against your body, and you gasped against each other's mouths. Wanda asked for passage with her tongue running over your lower lip, and you opened your mouth, gasping as you felt your tongues come together.

Kissing like this for a moment was enough to warm your whole body, a familiar discomfort forming below your belly. Having Wanda moaning against your mouth was not helping.

You slowed the kiss, stroking her tongue with yours slowly. Wanda pressed herself against you, one knee coming up between your legs. With the new friction, you felt your body tremble in anticipation, delighting in pleasure.

You were startled when you heard a noise, someone must have knocked something over outside the closet. And then you remembered that you were in a closet, with your best friend's sister, who was in the next room with six other people, with no idea that you were about to fuck Wanda.

You began to slow the kiss until you separated the two of you. Your chests were rising out of rhythm as you were breathing heavily

- We only have seven minutes. - You whispered out of breath, feeling Wanda nod her head slightly as you stood there with your foreheads pressed together.

- We can go to my room. - She spoke in the same tone. You nodded in agreement, beginning to miss the taste of Wanda in your mouth.

- Should we wait until the party is over?

Wanda let out a breathless giggle.

- Tell me. - She whispered, and removed her hands from your neck. With one hand she lifted her skirt, while with the other she took your hand from her waist and guided it down between her legs. You trembled as you touched her, pushing the fabric of her panties aside to feel her wet pussy. - Do you think I can wait?

- Fuck, Wanda. - You spoke breathlessly, and felt her moan as your finger moved against her clitoris. She squeezed your shoulder, closing her eyes. - You're so wet. So fucking wet for me.

You began to move your finger, penetrating her shallowly. Wanda buried her head in your neck, moaning against your skin.

It takes all your mental and physical control, but you withdraw your finger from inside her, while with the hand that was still on her waist you move up and down her back, stroking to calm her down.

- I want to feel you in my mouth. - You whisper to her. - I want you to come for me with your legs spread wide open on your bed.

Wanda nods against your neck, trembling slightly. And then the door opens. You barely catch Tony's joke, feeling disconnected from everything that isn't Wanda.

And before you can say anything, Wanda grabs your hand, pulling you out.

- Where do you think you're going? - You hear someone shout, but neither of you even bother to answer.

You can't help but smile when you reach the second floor, and Wanda pushes you into the room, locking the door as she brings your mouths together.

#wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff x you #wanda imagines #high school au #marvel imagines #oneshot #wanda x reader #wandaxreader

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mahou-furbies · 2 years

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Closing thoughts on Tropical-Rouge! Precure Movie: Yuki no Princess to Kiseki no Yubiwa!

(spoilers)

I had low expectations for this due to the inclusion of the Heartcatch girls and matching idol costumes. Like, is this going to be yet another time where more Precure are thrown in just for the sake of a promotional crossover even when they have nothing interesting to contribute, and an idol dance scene is shoehorned in at a climactic moment because little girls like idol shows?

Thankfully that turned out to not be the case. The Heartcatch girls fit in surprisingly well, and have good chemistry with the Tropical Rouge girls beyond “everyone becomes insta-friends and has generic personality-less chatter with each other”. And while a song is an important part of the plot, it’s pretty slow and quiet and the 3d dance party pop version is relegated to the ending credit where it belongs. Overall there was a lot of really good character stuff and I especially liked the scene during the opening song where the girls decide on train seats. And of course I liked the fact that the film was centered around Best Girl Laura, obviously because she’s one of my faves but also because I think you get more varied stories if they’re not always about the pink heroine (meanwhile I found Manatsu far more annoying than in the show).

Aside from the good character stuff I really liked the ending. It turns out the magical snow kingdom is an illusion and the real one was destroyed ages ago, and now the princess as the sole survivor tries to force her guests to remain there with her. The whole time I was hoping, “will they dare to go for a sad ending?? or will the kingdom and its residents just be restored through magic” And since the people had been dead for ten thousand years I dared to hope that they’re far beyond the point of revival. And hope springs eternal! Not only does the kingdom disappear, but they also kill off the princess! Tsubomi gave a speech on how the princess’ theme flower means hope in flower language and for once I was there with the theme of a Precure film, though probably not in the way it was intended.

Homicidal tendencies towards characters in a children’s film aside, I really liked the princess and would not have minded if she survived with a “you can rebuild your kingdom with new friends” message either. And she had a lovely soft voice. A little mixed feelings towards how stories like this tend to trivialise side characters’ trauma, like sorry everyone you knew died, we’ll sing you a song! But since she was dying anyway might as well comfort her with her country’s national anthem since her relationship with the kingdom really was the crux of her character.

Final notes: there were a lot of new clothes which is great, but the animation wasn’t very good for a movie. Also a special mention to the fact that there was no sign of the audience participation light sticks that I hate with a passion. Hooray! Overall I rank this with the Star Twinkle movie as a top tier Precure movie that I recommend you to check out if you have any interest in children’s magical girl stories.

#review I guess #precure #tropical rouge! precure

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i-donot-forget · 3 years

Text

Eldarya Ep 7 (opinion)

Episode 7!!!! They gave us a nice ball, a nice dress and a nice moment with our LI (Discounting some details in the illustrations that I already mentioned before) the episode was very good, it is a clear transition, that little respite before everything goes wrong again.

Eldarya has always been a different otome, because the story does not revolve around the protagonist and her love story, it is about the protagonist saving the fucking world, the moments with our route have always been scarce and interrupted, remember that in TO until episode 17 we have the first date, from then on things go too fast and finally it cannot be said that we really got to know any of our romantic interests, an exception for Valkyon but I think it's obvious why. New Era has a great advantage, we already know these guys (except Mathieu but we have that connection of "hey we are both from earth"), we already know who they are, we already know this world, now falling in love will be "faster" than in a way it's good because we already saw that when Erika realizes that she feels something for someone, she goes after him (I love her for that, I couldn't ahahaha) and so we come to this episode, after the beautiful moment on the boat where we realize that we feel something for that special boy.

But this is Eldarya so...

the damn world is going to end again and Nevra is ready for war, I know it sounds ugly but I find it absolutely correct, if the earth is going to absorb Eldarya... They are lost, I cannot imagine any scenario in which the humans of the earth welcome all of Eldarya with open arms, that is, let's face it, how many countries are there where immigrants are a plague for a certain portion of the population? I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying it's like that and with the Eldaryans it will be worse. People like Huang Hua, Huang Chu, might go unnoticed, but Koori??? Lance???? What will humans think when Chrome is in trouble and can't control himself with Earth's Moon, how are Nevra and Karenn going to live with Earth's Sun that is lethal to them??? I can only think it's going to be a disaster, besides, how does this "absorption" work? Will the portals get bigger and bigger until eldarya disappears? Will everything fall from the sky? because clearly earth will not be the most affected... Humans are dangerous, our history of clash between cultures is always to exterminate the unknown and in this case it will be fatal for both factions but if you ask me, humans are not going to become extinct...

With all of that in mind, I'm not surprised that Lance had his head elsewhere and forgot about his clothes... but hey, it was a funny moment that made me think that we still don't know the real Lance and that attitude is just the same one that Valkyon adopted after Lance's "death"...

The moment of meditation with Leiftan was painful… now I understand many things, and I believe that all his sufferings and the loss of his powers is something mental. All the confidence that Leiftan had in himself resided in his powers, in TO he was at the top, he was the most powerful being in Eldarya and he handled everyone like simple puppets, he was confident, capable of everything, the first time we saw him desperate was after losing half his life (for us), now in NE ufff he tells us, he feels vulnerable, helpless, incomplete, without identity, If everything you were was based on your strength and power, who are you without it? Despite everything, I think it started very well, Leiftan tells us the truth, for the first time he trusts something of the utmost importance in us, the fact that he is now defenseless implies many things, Lance remains on the guard because of his power and abilities which is very useful, the same could apply to Leiftan but without his powers he could believe that the HQ would not want him (although in TO nobody knew he was a daemon). He confides in us a secret that is vital to him, reveals his vulnerability and I must say that I love him too much, when he tells us that he feels exactly the same as we do when we talk to him about our powers, he finally opens up to us and then the hug melted my heart. Now that he no longer has (and cannot) protect us, our relationship will be different.

The ball, I am not surprised that Princess Koori organized a ball, Huang Hua's speech was extremely touching, my heart clenched when she mentioned those who had left, I couldn't help but think of Valkyon... Now is the time to dance and I am fascinated by how Erika takes the reins and invites her LI, here we part.

Mathieu: adorable nothing to say, I love them, his route is pure laughter and games and fun, I really like Mathieu, I did not trust him but their moments together are sooo sweet, we see him as the center of attention, something very about him but naturally, it does not attract attention forcibly, they really are standing out for what they are, everything is very nice, a great dance, I think that at the point where they left the scene, I would believe in a kiss, not passionate or anything but a first kiss all cute, nervous and natural.

Nevra: I love that he's waiting for us, I think they already act like boyfriend and girlfriend without wanting to say it hahahaha and I love him, Nevra want us and loves us, he doesn't say it but he shows it only with his actions, I still feel like he's going to scare at the key moment, I feel that he keeps many things that explode in that uncompromising anger, I wait for a very intimate moment between them that makes me cry I want to see him cry, I know he needs it, I know he needs Erika to hug him and tell him that everything it will be fine, he needs someone to be the strong one.

Lance: the moment is very nice I cannot deny it, it is beautiful, Lance's reaction to Erika's invitation is great and again I love her determination, it struck me that Lance does know how to dance, but an old-fashioned dance, that just means that In his previous time in the guard of eel he did dance, I always imagined him as the popular cool boy that everyone follows, I'm still waiting to see that, I already want to break that shell and get the real Lance out.

Leiftan: Ahhhh my beautiful baby I leave him at the end because it is my route and I love him and I can't help but fangirl very hard for him. Erika dragging him to the dance floor imitating Karenn, I loved it, Erika helping Leiftan with his confidence and security, I super loved it, the inevitable attraction between them that is so strong that the moment screams that they will kiss, I cannot express my emotion, I love him I can't stop loving him and I just want they to be alone to see the damn connection in all its glory 7u7

So I wait for the catastrophe in the next episode, I still don't know if it will be a portal opening in the middle of the crystal room or if it will be the crystal itself that does something idk, surprise me beemoov

#eldarya #eldarya new era #eldarya episode 7 #beemoov #eldarya lance #eldarya leiftan #eldarya nevra #eldarya mathieu

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osferth · 3 years

Text

the haunting of cookham house: chapter 1

summary: In the midst of an exhausting flat search, newlyweds Sophia and Anjali Abbot suddenly inherit a large country house miles away in the serene village of Cookham. It proves to be much more than the couple bargained for, however, when they arrive to find it already occupied... by nine ancient ghosts.

tagging: @lauwrite1225 @maggiescarborough @morosemagick @solinarimoon @lannisterdaddyissues @firexfate @93xdiagonxalley @aadmelioraa @emilyhufflepufftlk

“Won’t be long now,” murmured Finan.

The laboured breaths of the elderly woman began to slow as the ghosts grouped around her bed watched over almost reverently.

“She had a good life,” Uhtred said quietly.

“At least she’s comfortable,” Sihtric added.

“Yeah, there are worse ways to go,” Osferth pointed out, gesturing to the arrow lodged in his chest. There was a mumbled chorus of assent amongst the ghosts before Hild shushed them all.

“Quiet,” she hissed.

“I think it’s happening,” said Father Beocca. “Look.”

Silence finally fell as a bright light began to emanate from the woman’s body, Beocca making a sign of the cross as her spirit rose up to face them all. “Who are you?” she asked.

Everyone immediately looked toward Uhtred, who for some reason was still considered their unofficial leader despite being… well, dead.

“I was once the lord of the village you call Cookham,” he began ostentatiously, “true Lord of Bebbanburg and a warrior with great reputation, now forced to wander the lands where I was slain as a ghost for all eterni-”

“And she’s gone,” finished Father Pyrlig unceremoniously.

“This always happens,” muttered Uhtred, staring at the patterned wallpaper before him. “I do not understand.”

Pyrlig shrugged. “Yeah, well, the rest of us do.”

“I have always thought not everyone seems to enjoy your speeches as much as you think,” commented Skade, appearing suddenly behind Osferth and making him jump.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that all the time,” he grumbled.

“Oh, honestly!” snapped Hild suddenly, glaring at all of them. “The woman has barely passed on! At the very least, we should show some respect.”

Father Beocca nodded. “The abbess is right. I shall say a prayer for her soul.” He cleared his throat slightly before beginning. “Our Lord in Heaven…”

Finan leaned across to Sihtric. “Bagsie her room,” he whispered over the prayer, to which the Dane only rolled his eyes.

“Amen,” said Beocca finally.

“Amen,” chorused the ghosts, Finan a little louder and later than the rest. With nothing more to add, silence returned for a brief moment until it was broken by Osferth.

“I wonder what’ll happen to this place once she’s taken away.”

Pyrlig looked sideways at him. “Well, I imagine someone else will move in,” he said dryly.

“All of you!” said Hild exasperatedly. “Please! Her body is still warm, for goodnessʼ sake.”

Looking appropriately chastised, Osferth looked down at the floor. “Perhaps one of us should say a few words,” he suggested.

“I shall do it,” said Uhtred immediately, straightening up. “As the lord of Cookham, I…”

“And he's off again,” muttered Pyrlig, shaking his head as he left the room. The other ghosts quickly followed suit amid murmurs and eye rolls, although Uhtred did not notice as his speech grew more passionate and heartfelt.

“Who will be the one to reclaim this as their home?” he sighed finally, looking through the window at the overgrown front garden.

“Um… let’s take a look at the view, shall we?”

The estate agent led Sophia over to the window with an apologetic look on his face, Anjali trailing slightly behind with about as much enthusiasm as you would expect when buying a cramped, one-bedroom flat in the middle of nowhere.

Peering over Sophia’s shoulder, she was greeted with the scenic image of a local chip shop sandwiched between a defunct barber shop and a Londis. Just on time, an old poster tacked onto the front door swung off one corner and was quickly carried down the street by a gust of wind.

“Well,” began Sophia uncertainly, “at least we won’t have to go far for groceries. Or fish and chips.”

“I don’t like fish or chips,” Anjali muttered.

Sophia squinted at the shop sign. “They also do kebabs,” she suggested, although she did not sound too keen.

“I’ll leave you two to have a chat in here,” said the estate agent tactfully. “Just give me a shout when you’re ready, alright?”

Anjali watched him disappear into the kitchen before turning to her wife. “I do like kebabs, I s’pose,” she conceded. Sophia smiled slightly, but before she could reply, her phone started buzzing.

“Hang on, I’ll just… hello?”

“Hello, is this Sophia Abbot?” asked a slightly-garbled male voice.

“Speaking,” she replied.

“I’m calling about a house.”

“We’re only looking at flats, we can’t afford to buy a house.”

“This one’s not for sale.”

Sophia frowned. “Well then, why are you calling?” she snapped, ending the call. God. Some estate agents really were the worst-

Her phone buzzed again before she could have a chance to think. Still irritated, she picked it up but did not answer.

“Sorry, I think we got off on the wrong foot,” said the same man quickly. “I’m a solicitor at Willard and Phillips and I’m calling to inform you that you have, in fact, inherited a house.”

The moments after that were a blur for Sophia and, after being informed of the news, for Anjali, too. Their estate agent simply seemed relieved to not have to accompany the couple on visits to flats that had, quite frankly, seen better days.

An appointment was scheduled for the very next morning. It all felt wildly surreal to Anjali and particularly Sophia, who was baffled upon being informed that the previous owner of the beautiful Cookham property was actually a distant great-aunt… or something along those lines, anyway. Even the solicitor seemed to be having trouble connecting the two, but as there was no other living relative, the house was legally Sophia’s.

Unable to contain their excitement, they promptly called off the flat search and decided to move in that same afternoon. Neither of them were familiar with Cookham, but the further they drove through the more they grew to love the village. With its gorgeous landscapes and old-fashioned architecture, Sophia and Anjali felt only enthusiastic to be able to call this place home.

“Feels like we’ve gone back in time, doesn’t it?” Anjali sighed, gazing out of the window.

“Yeah,” smiled Sophia, “it’s nothing like Croydon.”

Anjali consulted her phone, reading through the Wikipedia entry on Cookham. “It’s got a lot of history to it,” she said. “Listen to this: ‘By the 8th century there was an Anglo-Saxon abbey in Cookham and one of the later abbesses was-” sorry, no idea how to pronounce that- ‘widow of King Offa of Mercia.’ It’s still there, I think. We could visit at some point!”

“8th century,” repeated Sophia. “Bloody hell, it’s ancient, isn’t it?”

“Ooh, look: ‘It became the centre of a power struggle between Mercia and Wessex. Later King Alfred made Sashes Island one of his-’ er, berrs? Boors? Dunno- ‘to help defend against Viking invaders.’ This is so cool!”

“Is there anything a bit more recent?” Sophia asked.

Anjali rolled her eyes, skimming over the rest of the article.

“Nothing interesting… ooh, except,” she snickered, “a ‘Miss Isabella Fleming in 1869, who wanted to stop nude bathing at Odney.’”

Sophia snorted. “What?”

“Yeah, there is zero elaboration on that one.”

“Shame.”

“That yellow wagon’s given me an awful headache,” Finan complained, rubbing his head.

Brida looked disdainfully at him. “That’s not possible,” she said flatly. “You’re dead. And I believe they called it an ambulance last week.”

“Well, I would’ve had a headache if I was still alive,” muttered Finan.

Beocca sighed. “I am beginning to miss her already.”

Uhtred nodded, although the other ghosts suspected that had more to do with her being an indirect relative of his rather than him having any actual interest in her as a person. It was taken for granted that he continued to behave as though he still had ownership over the cottage - and indeed the village itself - even if he was because he was physically unable to leave it.

A creak sounded from the far corner of the room suddenly, startling most of the ghosts. Skade looked up from her seat by the table, a vase slightly out of place, as she met them all with narrowed eyes.

Thoroughly unsettled, Uhtred and all three of his men turned around without a word. Brida shook her head at all of them and marched off to sit beside Skade. Their relationship had been rocky at first, certainly characterised by animosity while they were still alive, but spending over a millennium together had softened it somewhat. It was more to do with the fact that nobody else, other than Hild and sometimes Osferth, tended to visit the lake she haunted. While Brida spent the most time at the lake, Hild had started venturing out to visit every so often, her hatred of the seer lessening as her curiosity grew. Osferth’s visits were still rare, however, given that he remained wracked with guilt.

“I wonder-”

“Who will come to reclaim this place as their home,” Pyrlig said, interrupting the former Lord of Bebbanburg, “yes, we wonder that too.”

Despite their respect for him, Finan and Osferth snickered.

“Well,” said Hild, “I don’t think we’ll have to wonder for much longer.” She waved all of them over to where she was standing by the window, Brida being the last to get there - the last they looked, Skade remained in her seat.

Standing near the back, Osferth suddenly felt a presence on his left. He jolted upon seeing the seer standing only inches away, smirking.

“Y’know, I’m beginning to think you enjoy this,” he grumbled.

“Looks a bit like that medical wagon, doesn’t it?” Finan commented, watching the car pull into the driveway.

“Ambulance,” Brida supplied flatly.

“I don’t think that’s an ambulance, Brida,” said Uhtred wisely, blind to the dirty look she gave him.

Hild shushed them as two women climbed out. One was considerably shorter and clad in an oversized jumper and jogging bottoms. Her skin was brown and her hair dark and wavy, curling over her shoulders. The other was slightly taller, dressed in jeans and a lilac knitted jumper. She was dark-skinned and her curly hair was pulled back, away from her face. Her arm was around the other woman’s shoulders as both gazed in awe up at the house.

“I think - this is it!” Sophia announced, slowing down as the car bumped over the gravelled drive. “Oh, wow.”

Parking the car, she turned the ignition off and opened the door to let herself out, taking in the sight of the grand house before them.

“It’s even prettier than in the photos,” Anjali sighed dreamily. “And it’s all ours.”

“I still can’t believe it,” said Sophia, breaking her gaze from the house to look at her wife.

Anjali beamed, pressing a little kiss to her lips. “Well, shall we?” she said, offering Sophia her arm. Sophia smiled and hooked her arm in Anjali’s, the two of them making their way over to the door.

As she turned the key in the lock, she felt a strange sensation from above, almost as though she was being watched.

Anjali shook her arm a little. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said quickly, “it’s nothing.” Shaking her head, she pushed the door open.

“Did you see that!” Finan exclaimed, watching the young couple before them briefly kiss before disappearing under the doorframe.

“I think we all did,” said Osferth dryly.

“Times have changed,” Uhtred said thoughtfully.

Sihtric rolled his eyes. “Have they?”

He was the only one who noticed the way Brida had begun looking longingly towards Skade, the seer seemingly having tired of tormenting Osferth for once.

“Well, it’s been a thousand years,” Father Pyrlig pointed out snidely, missing what was going on. “Obviously they have. Jesus.”

Clearly in a rush to get a closer look at the people who had ‘reclaimed his home’, Uhtred quickly left the room - prompting the other ghosts to follow.

“He was never one for patience, was he?” huffed Father Beocca as they descended the stairs.

Hild raised her eyebrows momentarily. “I’m afraid not.”

“How old did they say the actual house was?” Sophia inquired, peering over Anjali’s shoulder at her phone.

“Er… oh, yeah, here! It was built in 1808 and renovated in 1953.”

Sophia grinned. “Reckon it’s haunted, then?”

“Probably,” Anjali said, all-too serious. Out of the two, she was the believer - Sophia was the staunch sceptic. Anything even slightly out of the ordinary terrified Anjali, from flickering lights to objects moving without cause, while Sophia always had a rational explanation handy. Perhaps it was a good thing, then, that this fear did not extend to spiders - those were Sophia’s weakness.

The chess board was what caught Sophia’s eye first. “This is so cool,” she murmured, leaning over to pick up a pawn. Upon seeing that it was coated in a thin layer of dust, however, she pulled away. As she did so, she felt a strange sensation course across her forearm, almost as though a cold breeze had blown its way over. Ever the sceptic, she assumed there was a window open nearby and thought nothing of it.

Finan shuddered, backing away from the chess board. “God, I’d forgotten how awful that feels.”

Pyrlig rolled his eyes from where he was standing a safe distance away.

Just as Anjali was about to collapse onto the couch with the golden-gilded legs she had been eyeing for several minutes, Sophia pulled her away.

“It’s all dusty down here,” she explained, her voice muffled by the hand she was using to cover her nose. “Let’s dump our stuff upstairs and take a look around.”

“Won’t it be dusty upstairs, too?” Anjali dubiously pointed out.

“Nah, they'll have cleaned the bedrooms out at least,” said Sophia, “‘cos the last owner died up there.”

Anjali stared at her. “What?” she exploded. “Which one? I don’t want to sleep in the same room where someone died, what if-”

“It won’t be haunted,” Sophia quickly reassured her, “‘cos we’re not gonna stay in that room, not if it scares you that much. Ghosts aren’t real either way, so... you’ll be alright.”

“Agree to disagree,” mumbled Anjali, letting Sophia lead her upstairs anyway. As she left, she felt the uncomfortable sensation of being watched. It could have been simple paranoia, as Sophia would explain it away as, or it could have been something Anjali did not even want to consider - but either way, she was beginning to understand exactly why old houses gave some people the creeps.

#the last kingdom #tlk #uhtred of bebbanburg #finan #osferth #sihtric #brida #skade #father pyrlig #father beocca #hild #the last kingdom fanfiction #my writing

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just2bubbly · 3 years

Text

Perfect Now

Masterlist

TLC Ship Week 2021!

*written for tlcshipweek2021- kaider for prompt 'Song Day AU'

@kaiderforever

Summary:

He keeps the crown on her head making sure to not disturb her intricate yet beautiful braid.

"Now you, My Queen are perfectly ready!"

...

Last minute panicked thoughts can make a person desperate for escape, a mildly insecure Cinder looks for comfort in her boyfriend- one who is having a trip down his memory lane.

Ship: Kaider

Words: 2k

Genre: Hurt- Comfort, Trip down a memory lane

Prompt: 'Song Day AU'

Song: Perfect Now by Louis Tomlinson

*Post Winter

A/N: Some mild changes are made in the song lyrics to meet the Cinder's characters.

Bold Letters are Song Lyrics

Italics are memories

Plain words are present

Kai's Perspective:

You say to me your jeans don't fit You don't feel pretty and it's hard to miss

"Kai, I don't think this is a good idea- like I feel we should just stay inside..."

"Cinder, you do seem to realize that you are the one hosting the party?" he asked only to receive a nod for confirmation as she examined herself in the mirror.

"I don't think you can ditch your own party, one which has so many international leaders in it at least."

"Can't you just go and tell them I'm sick or something like that?" she lamented.

Now, this took him by surprise, Cinder had put hours and minutes to make the State Dinner cum Lunar Ball a success and seeing how she wanted to last-minute ditch it was strange.

"Hey, everything okay?" he questioned, standing behind her.

"Yeah," she said, offering him a short smile, "Just stressed out to back out last minute."

I wish that you could see my point of view As someone staring back at you

Nudging his head in the crook of her neck, he placed his lips at the base of the collar bone, "Don't worry, you would do good!"

"Easy for you to say- I'm panicking on the inside! This is my first time trying to act like royalty. I'm even wearing a pretty dress hosting a big parade of leaders like the Queen of Luna. I just don't want anyone to think I'm the incompetent Queen who has no idea of what ruling a country is- I really don't want to come out as a fool to anyone," she rambled.

"Cinder, look at me," he asked and stared into her eyes, "You will do fantastic and not come out as an ignorant ruler to anyone. I will be there to help you through it remember?"

"I don't think asking you how to use the cutlery at the dinner table is the best thing to do to make an impression," she sassed him.

"Now that depends on the person sitting near you- you won't want Queen Camilla seeing you be unroyal enough to not know how to hold your spoon now would you?" he retorted.

"Well, I'm worried about that too," she admitted, clearly going back to the same topic from which Kai was trying to drive her away.

Sighing he asked, "Is this because of what happened the day before yesterday?"

Reluctantly she nodded her head, her reflection seen in the mirror before them.

"C'mon no one cares even in the slightest if you hugged me before all the masses of people and journalists, I have heard we are quite trending in today's news-"

"Kai, you are not helping!"

"Maybe you could go for a kiss next time," he suggested.

"Ha, as if I would, after what happened?!" she exclaimed.

"Who cares about what Camilla and Andrea think anyways?"

Cinder had made a nice fuss in her own mind trying to regret her decision of bear-hugging Kai before everyone, which on his part he was delighted about. And maybe Queen Camilla and Prime Minister Andrea had been a bit too loud about speaking of Cinder's rash actions.

"Hmm.. yeah. Obviously, I do," she said, clearly not paying attention to her words.

"Did you sleep yesterday?" he asked.

"A little bit," she hesitantly admitted.

"How long?" he demanded.

"A few hours maybe-" he shot her a glare which did its work as she answered,"- two hours."

"Stars above, if not for this ball. I would have put you to bed."

"What's the hurry, Kai?" she asked, making the tips of his ears flush light pink.

"Okay- okay. I think you are fine now that you want to flirt with me!" he affirmed.

She smirked and moved around to face him, setting her hands on his shoulders and laughed, "Scared of me, are you, Emperor?"

He pulled her closer, holding her in a warm embrace and whispered, "Aren't you wickedly evil, Your Majesty?"

He leaned in closer, capturing her lips with his own, tasting the red lipstick she had put. Before they could initiate anything more intimate, there was a knock on the door followed by Iko's voice, "You two should really come out before someone makes the right assumptions about what you are doing in there!"

Now this made both of them flush with embarrassment as they gave flustered looks towards the door anticipating the arrival of Iko inside. She never came saving them both from a lot of discomforts.

"Well, I think we should get going?" he questioned.

"Yeah, I think I need a moment," she replied.

"Then I would-"

She cut off his words, asking," Would you please stay here?"

"Uh- Sure, Cinder," he replied.

"Thank You, Kai." She said looking relieved.

He decided to sit on the armchair till she picked herself up to look like a regal Queen. With silence for his only companion, his mind wandered around, thinking about the person standing a few feet away from him.

One Friday night when we're all out I turn to you and you're looking down And you don't wanna dance I know you love to dance You never stop given half the chance

"He looked at her only to find her avoiding his gaze. Staying back he asked, "Hey, what happened?"

"Uh- nothing!" she lied terribly.

"Cinder are you going to really make me believe that?"

"I don't know but just buy that lie," she pleaded.

"You don't want to get your hands dirty?"

"I don't feel like myself right now."

Surprised he incredulously asked, "You, a mechanic doesn't want to go under a podship and get your hands dirty?"

"No," she muttered.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"You just seem stranger than usual self."

"Trust me, Kai, I don't want to become dirty before my first diplomat meeting as the Queen while another mechanic is already present there," she insisted.

"Fine then.""

Just keep your head up, love, keep your head up Don't hide away, don't ever change

"Kai, do you think I should get a Garan's device too?"

"Well, I don't think you need to have that device. Like irrespective of what people tell you and what you try to convince yourself- you are a Lunar. The Lunar gift is surely fabulous- like don't get me wrong but you can feel someone's bio-electricity, it's sorta a blessing in disguise unless you decide to use it for the wrong purposes- I know you won't do that. Practically, I think it might help in Earth-Lunar political relations if you have the device but it does not really make much of a difference. Winter has it yet stupid leaders think she is manipulating them with her beauty. I think you should not install it- the gift is a part of you. Being Lunar- It is what you are! Don't change it because some angry citizen calls you a Lunar witch. You are what you are and I love you for that!"

"Kai if I would have been there I would have kissed you senseless!"

"Good, I don't deserve anything less after making such a sentimental speech," he said, smirking.

Keep your head up love, keep your head up Don't look away, don't look away 'Cause everybody's looking at you now My, oh, my

That time when she had addressed the issues on cyborgs and Lunar- discrimination on Earth. Her eyes were ablaze with passion as she happens to look determined to make a difference. To change the wrong-doings around her, to change the age-old prejudices in the society- to change the future of both her nation and her kind.

"-I believe that together we can make a difference. I hope the sufferings of people in the society decline and look forward to the situations changing for cyborgs, Lunars and Earthens. I look forward to a world where we can live together harmoniously. I consider that no one is liable for the nature of misery and treatment that my kind has suffered in the past. I trust we can change the world for every one of us- for the better of my kind."

Even when your tears are falling down Still somehow You're perfect now

""I'm so relieved that I can't cry right now."

"Cinder, I told you it would have been fine and I'm sorry... Besides I care- "

"Kai, they happen to call me names. I did not want to look like a sick crybaby before them who cried just because I was called an 'ugly Lunar slash Cyborg','" she fumed.

Seeing how she needed comfort more than ever, he hugged her, drawing circles on her back- trying to loosen the tension in her shoulders.

"Cinder, even if you were ugly crying right now, you would have been the most beautiful person in the world," he reassured, meaning them.

"You are perfect just the way you are!""

You never do but if you asked me to I'd tell the truth lying next to you 'Cause you're the only one When it's said and done You make me feel like being someone good to you

He wondered if he should tell her how beautiful she was. She was the perfect mixture of strength, compassion and determination. She never fetched compliments, never asked Kai how she looked, if she was pretty. That did not stop Kai from showering her with affections that she had been lost on in her early years.

Even at your worst You steal the scene and it's unrehearsed

"Queen Selene Channary Jannali Blackburn was sighted in the outer sector TC-6 helping a young man of 20 named, Mr. Stiton. He tells that he was facing difficulties when Her Majesty encountered him during her tour to sector LM-14. He states that she helped him fix one of the technical difficulties faced while flying a podship. Her Majesty previously had worked as a mechanic in the city of New Beijing. Sources tell she was the best in town."

Kai wondered who these so-called sources were. Somehow Cinder managed to excel at unexpected works- even when she was not trying, she had everyone's attention.

'Every insecurity as a neon sign as bright as day'

"Kai, I really think I should cover my hand! Just pass me the glo-"

"No! You are not wearing the gloves to cover your hand," he denied, making sure to keep the said pair of gloves away from his girlfriend.

"It's so different, not to mention with the hand being gloveless I feel naked, can't you please give me that glove, please," she begged, with a pout.

"Cinder, I said 'No'. There's no way I'm going to let you wear that. Stars- and Iko wanted you to flaunt your leg!" he exclaimed, dragging his girlfriend out.

How could a person as bold and determined and beautiful as Cinder, ever feel insecure?

If you knew what you were to me You would never try to hide away

Cinder, through her own eyes, was an unworthy soul but if she only knew what she meant to Kai- more than just a lover. Within just a year, she was his everything. She was the one- being with her made him whole, made him feel blissful and lively, like all of sudden his life had found its meaning. She was like the water in a desert, the fire in the cold, the chill in the heat. He would convey the depth of his feelings someday- not today. This was a conversation for another day.

I guess some queens don't need a crown And I know why

She looked too good, even powerful without the Lunar crown and Kai finally understood the meaning of, 'Some Queens don't need crowns.'

Still somehow You're perfect now

He keeps the crown on her head making sure to not disturb her intricate yet beautiful braid.

"Now you, My Queen are perfectly ready!"

A/N: Hurt-Comfort Trope or was that too much insecurity!? This I think is the last of my 'insecure' fics.

It was written for 'Song Day AU' using the song 'Perfect Now' by Louis Tomlinson (If you have not listened it by now you better do it right away!) Just Emperor Kai love in his girlfriend Queen Selene- not going to miss a chance to call her perfect now, is he?

I have short-listed too many songs for this prompt and I'm likely going to try to write for all of them.

Be sure to comment and vote.

I do take requests so if you want you can hit me up (I write for Kaider only.)

Taglist: @cinderswrench @gingerale2017 @linhcinder686 @shellyseashell @ladyvesuvia @shelbylmkaider @levanariddle @cindersassasin @kaider-is-my-otp (Tell me if you wanna be added/removed)

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purrincess-chat · 3 years

Text

Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s Spite Playlist: Remix CH8

You guys have made it! Starting next chapter this story is going to look much different. This chapter also includes a couple never-read-before scenes, and the end of this one changes the course of this story quite a bit. I hope you’re all ...ready for it?

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

Previous First Next AO3

Chapter 8: Say Amen (Saturday Night)

“I’m impressed, Adrikins.” Chloe crossed one leg over the other. “It’s not like you to go on the offensive.”

“I don’t like seeing my friends get hurt,” he said while Jean Luke poured their tea. “Lila has gone too far.”

“I’m so glad you’re seeing things my way. With you on my side, I think we can have her running back to Italy in tears by next Tuesday,” Chloe said with a crooked grin.

“Well,” Adrien drawled in his token wishy-washy tone that Chloe hated. “I want to stop her, but I don’t want to humiliate or hurt her.”

She should have known.

“Adrikins, we have got to do something about that moral compass of yours.” Chloe rolled her eyes and took a sip of her tea.

“Just because she’s mean and selfish doesn’t mean she deserves to be completely mortified. There has to be another way.” Adrien chided.

“What if we send her a fake letter saying she won an all-expense-paid trip to Jamaica for two years?” Chloe suggested. “Then we have our pilot strand her in the middle of the jungle.”

Adrien gave her a disapproving frown.

“What? I’m just brainstorming,” she said. “All I’m saying is that I will spare no expense to make her disappear.”

“No harm, Chloe.”

“I liked you better when you were spineless,” she grumbled. “Where has all this new-found courage come from anyway?”

“I just thought about what you said.” He reached for a madeleine. “…And Lila confronted me.”

“I suppose I give you an A for effort.” She applauded him slowly. “If you could convince that bakery brat to join us, then we might get somewhere.” Chloe’s eyes narrowed when Adrien averted his gaze. “I can smell your guilt from here.”

“I don’t want Marinette to know about this,” he said. “I want her to continue to move on and be happy.”

“Why do you care so much about Dupain-Cheng? I’ve known you two were friends, but I didn’t think you were that close.” Chloe eyed him.

“Lila has caused her enough grief, and she’s my friend.” He shrugged. “She’s important to me.”

His newfound protectiveness didn’t sit well with Chloe. She turned her back for a few days, and now Dupain-Cheng had Adrien eating out of her hands. She would have to keep an eye on them.

“So, that’s why you want to do something about Lila now? To help Dupain-Cheng?” She asked, doing her best not to sound offended. “And here I’d thought you couldn’t stand to see me being unjustly ignored.”

“You’ve known Marinette longer than I have. Do you think she deserved to be treated that way by her friends?” Adrien asked.

Chloe shifted her gaze to her cup, taking a long, thoughtful sip. “No,” she said, “as much as I hate her, she didn’t deserve that.”

Adrien’s eyebrows raised in surprise, but a smile curled on his lips. “You’ve changed.”

“Don’t think for a second that I care about her,” she scoffed. Her cheeks burned when Adrien leaned against his fist with a smug grin.

“I like it. It suits you,” he said. She puffed her cheeks out stubbornly, prompting a laugh from Adrien.

“Well, if you’re not going to let me do things my way, and you don’t want Dupain-Cheng to know about this, then I’m going to need some time to think and pull resources together,” she said, getting back to the matter at hand.

“Thanks, Chlo.” He leaned back and took a deep breath. “Although…”

“Don’t ‘although.’” Chloe groaned.

“I just feel kind of bad for yelling at her like that,” Adrien said.

“Why? She deserved it.” She snatched a bonbon from the tray and popped it into her mouth.

“I know, but…” He clasped his hands together between his knees. “It still feels mean.”

“Your passion was short-lived, Adrikins.” Chloe rolled her eyes.

Adrien pursed his lips, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I’ll talk to her again tomorrow and give her one last chance.” When Chloe shook her head, he added, “If she says no, then we can figure something out. Something safe and not needlessly cruel.”

“You’re such a goody-two-shoes. Always thinking everyone can change and be nice.” She stuck her tongue out with a gag.

“Well, I never gave up on you, and now you’re a superhero,” he said pointedly.

Chloe flipped her ponytail over one shoulder to hide her smile. “Fine. Do whatever you want, but I’m still going to think up plans for revenge for when you inevitably fail.” She waved him away.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He crossed the room to kiss her cheeks in farewell before taking his leave.

Chloe clapped for her butler the moment the door shut behind him. “Jean Rousseau, how quickly can we have a case of live lobsters delivered?”

♪♫♪ Kaleidoscope Eyes ♪♫♪

“Wait, what happened?” Adrien asked that night over video chat. His Chinese notecards were scattered across his desk, abandoned the moment Marinette’s picture flashed on his screen.

“Clara Nightingale wants me to design for her! She came by in person and everything,” Marinette said. She laid prone on her chaise, legs kicking as she chewed her nails. “I’m so nervous, but she thinks I’ve got what it takes.”

“Of course, you do. You’re awesome.” Adrien assured her.

“Thanks.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “So, how was school for you today? Anything exciting happen?”

“Uh, just same old, same old. Lila being Lila.” He averted his gaze. “Nothing noteworthy to report.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Marinette said. “I take it Chloe hasn’t made a move?”

“Nope.”

“Give her time.” Marinette rolled her eyes. “By the way, my new friends still want to meet you.”

“I’d be happy to,” he said, thankful for the change in subject.

“Macy invited me to hang out at her house on Friday. Maybe you could come along if you aren’t busy,” she suggested.

“I’ll beg my father.”

“Awesome!” Her blue eyes sparkled when she smiled. She seemed so relaxed and carefree. Just as she should be.

He tapped his fingers on his desk, his conscience loud in his ears. “You know I’d do anything to help you, right?”

“What? I, uh, yeah I mean, we’re friends, so I’d do anything to help you too,” she stammered, cheeks pink. “Why?”

“No reason, just if you need anyone to bounce ideas off of for Clara, that’s all…” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I should get back to studying.”

“Right, I’m sorry for calling and distracting you!” She scrambled to sit up.

“It’s fine. I’m glad you did,” he said. “Talk to you soon.”

“I’ll let you know how designing goes,” she said. “Good night, Adrien.”

“Yeah, good night…”

♪♫♪ Dancing With a Wolf ♪♫♪

“Did you finish filing those papers Mme. Mendeleiev asked you to do?” Alya asked after school the next day.

Lila suppressed an eye roll, cupping her hands to her cheeks. “Oh no, I didn’t, and I totally forgot that my mom set up a meeting for me with some ambassadors about a new idea I have to help special needs kids in third world countries!” She clasped her hands together. “I know you’re busy, but would you mind finishing that up for me? I will totally make it up to you!”

“No worries, girl,” Alya said. “Go save the world.”

Lila smiled triumphantly as she sauntered toward the locker room, looking forward to her afternoon off. The students here were so gullible. She’d never had such an easy time pushing her work off on others, and now that Marinette was gone, she could do whatever she wanted. Rounding the corner, she found Adrien standing by her locker with a solemn expression.

“Hey, Lila,” he said. “Can we talk?”

“Are you going to apologize for how you spoke to me yesterday?” She crossed her arms over her chest with a humph.

“I am.” He nodded.

“Well, go on then,” she said.

“I’m sorry for yelling at you,” he said.

Her shoulders relaxed, and the smug grin returned to her lips. “Apology accepted. I’m so happy that you see things my w-”

“I’m not finished.” He cut her off. “I’m sorry for yelling at you, but I’m not sorry for what I said.” Her eyes narrowed, so he continued, “If you continue lying to everyone and using them, you’re only going to hurt yourself in the end. People are going to figure it out eventually, and they’re going to be angry with you.”

“These people are blind. I’ll get away with it for as long as I want.” She brushed past him to open her locker.

“I know you think that, but you’re wrong,” he said, and Lila could see where this speech was going. “I’m going to give you one last chance, Lila. Tell everyone the truth.”

She rolled her eyes as she shifted her books. “Or what, Adrien?” She turned to him and cocked a brow. “What are you going to do? Tell everyone that I’m lying? Good luck. You see how well that went for Marinette.”

Her name sparked something in his eyes, and Lila smirked when his jaw clenched.

“I’m not going to expose you.” Adrien shook his head. “You’re going to expose yourself, and I won’t help you when you face the consequences.”

“We’ll see about that.” She reapplied her lip gloss before shutting her locker. “Sooner or later, you’ll see things my way, and when you do, I’ll be waiting.” She strutted past him with a wink, hips swaying.

“Is that your choice?”

She turned over her shoulder with an amused grin. “Oh, Adrien. One day you’re going to learn that not everyone in the world wants to be nice,” she cooed.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Suit yourself.”

At that she rolled her eyes and paced from the locker room. Adrien didn’t scare her because he was all talk and no bite—just one thing that she loved about him. Boys like him were easy to manipulate, and it was only a matter of time before she had him under her spell just like everyone else. All she had to do was wait.

♪♫♪ Cinderblock Garden ♪♫♪

Come to my garden.

When Marinette received the invite from Adrien, she swore she was dreaming, but the gates opening before her were the pinch in the side she needed. This wasn’t a dream. Adrien really invited her to his house! She should have changed schools ages ago.

“Marinette! This way,” Adrien called from the front door, a bright smile warming his face.

“This is the first time I’ve been invited to your house. I’m a little nervous…” Marinette admitted as Adrien’s bodyguard shut the door behind them.

“I had to beg Nathalie, but I think I have something that can help you with your designs for Clara.”

Adrien led the way through the large house, and Marinette soaked in as much of it as possible. It was the first opportunity she had to peek into Adrien’s life, and she wasn’t going to waste it.

Colorless walls and floors were sparsely decorated with lavish couches, untouched from the moment they were placed. Towering portraits spanned the walls, watching over each room with their solemn expressions. Goosebumps trailed up Marinette’s arms. Every object was meticulously placed, and each room resembled a museum display more than a home. She half expected an alarm to go off if she touched anything.

They passed enough tall doors to make anyone dizzy, though all of them were closed, barring Marinette off from what lied beyond. The Agreste mansion hid many secrets, some that even Adrien probably didn’t know. Adrien’s house felt more like a fortress than a home, designed not only to keep the rest of the world out, but to keep the family locked in. It was hard to tell from the outside, but moving through one gray room after another, Marinette started to see the house for what it was: a cozy prison built for a boy. No wonder Adrien was always eager to leave—it was easy to feel alone in a house like this.

She’d never considered what other barriers stood between her and Adrien. How many doors were between them? She liked to think she’d made it through a few, but the tall walls of the mansion with its many locked doors reminded her just how little she knew the boy in front of her. Would those doors ever open for her? And was Adrien even capable of opening them? She didn’t know.

“Your house is very…” Marinette searched for a word.

“Depressing?” He turned to her over his shoulder.

“I wouldn’t say that-”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s true. My father is a brilliant designer… of clothes, but his interior décor makes funeral homes seem cheerful.”

“Lonely,” she said. “I was going to say I can see now how you get lonely.”

“It’s not all bad,” he said as Gorilla opened the brown double doors, and they stepped out into the backyard.

The dreary aura of the house gave way to warm sunlight, and Marinette welcomed the change, taking a deep breath of fresh air. Rose bushes lined the yard, vines trailing up the house in knotted tendrils while dozens of butterflies fluttered between the flowers. Despite the ever-present roar of the city beyond the walls, the garden was a tranquil place.

“It’s beautiful,” she murmured, dumbstruck.

“My mother loved to spend time out here, and somedays I catch my father sitting on the steps with his tablet. I thought that maybe it could inspire you too.” Adrien rubbed the back of his neck, and when Marinette turned to him with a smile, he gestured to the stairs. “Come on. It’s even better down there.”

Adrien beckoned for her to follow, and she trailed her hand along the smooth stone railing, head leaned back to take in all of the greenery. Sunlight trickled through the trees, casting speckled, glowing patterns on the ground. Birds chirped in the bushes, the occasional tiny head peeking out between the branches. Everything was so lively here, living in perfect harmony—a direct contrast from the dissonance inside the house.

They came to stop in front of the statue at the center—Adrien’s mother immortalized in stone. Much like the rest of the portraits in the house, it was beautiful, but also sad. Marinette couldn’t imagine losing her mom the way Adrien lost his. He put on a cheery face, but Marinette knew that he was still mourning deep down.

“My dad loves having images of my mom around. It’s like she’s still here with us,” he said. “It probably sounds silly, but I like to sit out here and talk to her sometimes. It’s comforting.”

“I don’t think that’s silly.” Marinette shook her head. “You really miss her.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “But I know she’d want me to be happy, so I try to keep my head up every day.”

Marinette hesitated, her fingers twitching toward his. It wouldn’t be out of line to take his hand. She just wanted to comfort him…as a friend. Despite convincing herself it was an innocent gesture, her heart still skipped when she finally mustered the courage to slip her hand into his. He welcomed it, giving her hand a tight squeeze.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said, “and for sticking by me through everything.”

Adrien turned to her, the sunniness returning to his smile as he shot her a wink. “I’ve got your back, Marinette. You’re one of my best friends, and I’ll always be here for you.”

Her cheeks warmed, and she turned back to the statue. It was strange. Normally hearing Adrien say such things would have sent her straight to cloud 9, and she would have spent hours replaying those words in her head. But her heart couldn’t seem to get off the ground. The light fluttery feeling was weighed by a heavy darkness as if it were still trapped in the house, unable to escape into the peace of the garden.

Then I guess we shouldn’t consider ourselves bffs if there’s so much we don’t know about each other.

Maybe we shouldn’t.

“Marinette?”

She blinked, and something hot slid down her cheek. Adrien stepped closer as she batted at it with a shaking hand, a wet sheen glistening on her fingers.

“It’s okay.” He pulled her into his arms.

She clung to him as more tears spilled over, burying her face in his shoulder. She hadn’t intended to make a habit of crying in the arms of the boy she loved, but given the circumstances, she couldn’t help it. Her tears came when they wanted and refused to surrender once they started. Luckily, Adrien was so perfect and understanding that he always held her close, whispering soft encouragement until her sobs quieted.

Marinette loved him with all of her heart.

“How can anyone live with themselves when they inflict this kind of pain on others?” Adrien murmured into her hair. “Lila Rossi really is evil.”

♪♫♪ …Ready for It? ♪♫♪

Chloe wasn’t surprised to see him that evening—she didn’t even pause her yoga when he entered. It should have bothered him more that she predicted he would cave, but Chloe had known him a long time. She knew better than anyone what his limits were.

“Have you thought about my request?” she asked, shifting into downward facing dog.

Adrien chewed his cheek, Marinette’s tears now dried on his shirt, and steeled his resolve. “If you and I were to plot revenge against Lila…what do you have in mind?”

#mdcsp #mdcspr #marinette dupain-cheng's spite playlist #marinette dupain-cheng's spite playlist remix #my writing

104 notes · View notes

oddaodd · 4 years

Text

Not Quite It Seems

· Tommy Shelby and the reader (who is an actress) become friends with benefits ·

Warnings: smut and angst.

Author´s note: This is loosely inspired by a scene in Alfred Hitchcock´s “Rear window”

And... here´s the second part.

Destiny brought them together for the first time during a charity gala for the Grace Shelby institute. Y/n´s best friend had invited her to go as her plus one after her date had ditched her.

“I told you he was no good” Y/n said on the car ride to the venue, elegantly smoking a cigarette.

“His loss really” replied her friend cheerfully.

They were both actresses and when they stepped into the venue they caught a lot of eyes. They politely smiled and shook hands with some of the many attendants before finding their seats for the speech Thomas Shelby was to give.

“That’s Mr. Shelby” pointed her friend as soon as he stood in the podium.

“He’s rather handsome isn’t he” whispered Y/n.

“Dangerous too” Whispered her friend in reply.

Y/n turned her attention back to his speech, not really minding her friends warning, feeling utterly enthralled by the man and blushed a bit when he noticed his eyes were staring intently at her. After He finished his speech Y/n and her friend went to write checks for the foundation before going to get a glass of champagne.

“I noticed” said her friend in a teasing tone.

“What did you notice?” Humored Y/n taking a sip of her champagne.

“The way he was looking at you”

Y/n was about to speak, to deny her friends accusations when she heard a voice behind her.

“Did you enjoy my speech Mrs. Y/L/N?”

Her friends eyes went a bit wide and y/n immediately knew who it was. She turned around gracefully and their eyes met once again.

“Very much so Mr. Shelby” she said in a velvety voice, before taking another sip of her champagne, her eyes never leaving his.

Thomas raised his eyebrows in amusement at her boldness and took a sip of his own champagne as Y/n´s friend scurried past her with a smile and a teasing whisper.

“Be careful”

Y/n was somehow afraid that he had heard it and spoke to avoid the subject as she saw her friend walking away and looking back at her with a smirk.

“Do you enjoy my films Mr. Shelby?”

“I do” he said honestly before downing the rest of his champagne and offering her his hand “Shall we dance Mrs. Y/N/l?”

“We shall” she said, smiling and placing her manicured hand on his, letting him lead her. “And Y/n will do”

They spent the rest of the night dancing and drinking and when the gala drew to a close, he invited her back to his place. She accepted, but before leaving went to talk to her friend, not wanting to ditch her. Much to Y/n¨s surprise, Her fiend had found herself a beau and insisted that y/n go with Mr. Shelby.

“But I want to hear everything about it tomorrow” her friend said excitedly.

“You will” y/n promised before walking away to rejoin Thomas.

Once they arrived at his home, their lips came together in passion and desire, unable to contain themselves as they made their way to one of the many spare rooms.

She tangled her fingers through his hair as he snaked his arms under her legs to lift her up so she could wrap her legs around his waist before pressing her back to a wall.

Tommy started kissing her neck and slipping the straps of her dress with one hand, exposing her breasts that were covered in a see through lace bra. He groaned at the sight and went to whisper at her ear “so beautiful” before bitting gently into her lobe.

His low voice made her moan in response and went to kiss his neck. She started feeling him getting hard through his trousers and slipped her hand between them to feel him.

“Fuck, love” he exhaled and continuing kissing her neck.

She unbuttoned is trousers and wrapped her hand around his cock, stroking it slowly. “I want you inside me” she whispered to his ear. His breathing became heavy and he carried her to bed. Once she was laying there he placed himself between her legs, staring a bit in admiration.

“So fucking beautiful” he said lifting her legs up to remove her underwear. He teased her wet entrance for a bit with his index finger and then took it to his mouth tasting her which made y/n give out a shuddering moan.

“You taste so good, love” he said lining himself up with her entrance and pausing for a second. “Are you sure?” he whispered looking into her eyes.

“God yes, Mr. Shelby, plea..” She started but abruptly stopped as she felt him pushing into her. Her eyes rolled back in bliss and her nails dug into his back. He gave her a moment to adjust to his size before starting thrusting into roughly. She kissed him to restrain her moans and Tommy smirked into the kiss. He took advantage of her distracted state and rolled over so that she was on top of him. This caught her by surprise and smiled teasingly as he adjusted herself to the new position, grinding slowly on his lap before starting to ride him, building up a pace. He placed his calloused hands on her waist guiding her. She loved how his hands felt on her skin and felt the familiar tension in the pit of her stomach building up. She placed her hands on her chest feeling his agitated heartbeat “Im close Mr. Shelby” she whined.

“I know love” he said, one of his hands traveling to her pussy and rubbing her clit. The friction from his fingers bringing her even closer to the edge

“Cum for me Y/N”

As soon as his words hit her ears she let herself go and came violently around his cock. He held her still by the waist allowing her to ride out her orgasm and came moments later at the sight.

She fell to his side in exhaustion, trying to catch her breath.

“Tommy will do” he said, barely a whisper.

After that night they entered into a sort of friends with benefits relationship. They started meeting almost exclusively at Y/n´s home. The sex was great and so were the conversations they held before or afterwards. Y/n found herself falling for the man and couldn’t help herself but want more of the relationship. She started inviting him to stay with her throughout the night, wanting to be with him for a little bit longer, but he always found a suave reason to leave. Still, she refused to believe he didn’t feel the same as her, not with all the tender touches and sweet nothings he sometimes whispered to her moments after their highs had dissipated.

And he did feel the same, but he knew it was better to not let it become anything else. He knew she didn’t fit into his world and would never forgive himself if something were to happen to her because of their association. So he ignored the guilt he felt whenever he saw her smile falter at his declinations to stay with her, reminding himself of what had happened to Grace.

One day she decided to pay him visit in one of his offices. He was surprised to see her there and it showed.

“What are you doing here?” He said, standing from his desk and hastily walking past her to shut the door and blinders so that nobody could see them inside.

She curiously watched him “I was just in the neighborhood and I thought i´d drop by” she said less than confidently, taking off her coat and hanging it before taking off her gloves and placing them in her purse.

He went to the liquor cabinet he kept in his office and poured her and himself some whiskey before giving one to her and going back to sit behind his desk, exhaling in frustration as he sat, leaning back on his chair.

Y/n stood in front of the desk, drink in hand, unsure of what to do.

“You shouldn’t be here” he said raising his eyebrows and looking at her.

She decided to not let her nervousness at his response show and smoothly sat down on one of the chairs in front of his desk “Is it so terribly wrong of me to want to see you?” she said teasingly, trying to lighten the mood.

“Yes it is” he said sitting upright now “This” he said gesturing to his office “What I do for a living is dangerous, an actress like you doesn’t belong here” He lit one of his cigarettes and exhaled the smoke staring at her, expecting her response, her smile gone now. She suddenly felt emotional at his words. She didn’t answer, so he continued “If you can’t confine this thing of ours to the bedroom we should end it here” he exhaled more smoke and stared at her trying to assess her reaction.

She looked at him in disbelief and stood up from the desk, her back to him, not allowing him to see her reaction. Patly offended, partly hurt, she started making her way to the coat hanger to grab her coat.

“I’m in love with you.” She confessed “I don’t care what you do for a living, I´d just like to be part of it somehow” She said slipping on her coat.

“Its deflating to find out the only way I can be part of it is to act as your personal whore” she fished in her purse for her gloves and held them in her hands “I guess I’m not the woman I thought I was”

“There’s nothing wrong with you Y/N. You have this whole country in the palm of your hand” he said guiltily trying to sound emotionless and smooth simultaneously.

She tuned back to look at him. There were tears threatening to fall from her eyes and his guilt increased significantly at the sight.

“Not quite it seems” she said slipping on her silk gloves and grabbing hold of the doorknob before giving him one last look and stepping out of the office, heels clicking on the wooden flooring as she walked away, out of the building. He stood up from his desk wanting to go after her, but stayed where he stood reminding himself of the many reasons why he shouldn’t.

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