#they really do have different faces but when you boil a butch down to her bare essentials... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bre-meister · 2 years

Note

Why didn't you tell me before? Greens please

I'm going to go ahead and put this under the cut since there is some explicit language towards the end. Hope you like it!

As they stood there in the rain, Butch looking at the hurt look on Buttercup’s face, he knew he should have felt some sort of regret or sadness. Maybe even indifference. Indifference definitely would have been better than what he was actually feeling in that moment - anger. His blood felt as if it were about to start boiling beneath his skin. He was focusing all his energy on mitigating his twitch. It was a surefire way to tell the woman in font of him how he was feeling and that was the last thing Butch wanted to do. If Buttercup knew how he was really feeling then it would only escalate the situation. Despite the heat he felt settling into his bones he really did not want to fight tonight. As much as he loved her when they fought, they fought. Their relationship had always been very physical from the beginning even when they were still enemies. That sort of passion never really died down and as much as he loved to spar and go a few rounds with the fire cracker that was his girlfriend, sparring and fighting were two different things.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Her voice was quiet, almost drowned out by the sounds of the rain and the party still going on in the restaurant he’d just stormed out of.

“Because it’s not a big deal.”

“Yes, it kind of is.”

“Ok, well then… “ Butch was finding himself at a loss for words. He didn’t really know how to explain it and his anger was rising every moment that pitying look stayed on her face. Butch knew she wasn’t doingit on purpose but he hated being pittied.

“I just - I knew you would react like this and make it a whole thing but it’s really not and quite frankly, I don’t want to talk about it.”

He turned to walk down the street towards his car. A bright green light flashed in his peripherals and suddenly Buttercup was blocking his path. Butch sighed and steadied himself. The life in Buttercup’s brow told him he hadn’t been successful in concealing his twitch this time. Damn sometimes he hated how well she knew him.

“Buttercup -”

“Butch, please just talk to me.” She reach foward to touch him and almost reflexsivly Butch grabbed her wrist stopping her just inches from his face.

“I don’t want to talk about it and I especially don’t want your pity. You’re looking at me like I'm some sort of hurt puppy and I'm not. I’m a big boy I can handle my own problems,” he said as he dropped her arm and pushed past her with a little more force than was necessary. He didn’t care though. He really did hate being pitied.

“Well you made it my problem when you made a scene in front of everyone I invited! After all I did for you!”

“Yeah, well no one asked you to!”

Another flash of green and the words hadn’t been all they way out his mouth before he was being shoved back. Butch stumbled, righting himself before he could fall. The slight pain in his chest from the unexpected impact fueled his anger and now he was close to seeing red.

“What the hell?”

“For such a big boy you really are acting like a child right now!” Buttercup sneered, her face twisted in her signature scowl. At least, Butch thought, the pity was gone.

“I don’t understand why this is so important to you! Why don’t you just go back to your little party and forget this ever happened. I bet everyone is waiting on you to cut the cake or whatever other dumb shit it is that you do.”

Fuck it, Butch thought, i’ll come back and get my car later. He changed directions again but just as his feet were lifting off the ground to fly anywhere but here, Buttercup essentially tackled him to the ground.

“What the hell!” They wrestled around for a short bit each trying to get the upper hand. If they weren’t soaked before they definitely were now. Butch could feel the mud soaking into his thin jacket and Buttersup essentially sat on top of him, using her weight to keep him down.

Butch’s vision litteraly went red. He was preparing to fire off an eye beam just to get her off of him when the unexpected happened.

“I’m sorry ok! I was just trying to do something nice for once, like a good girlfriend or whatever. How was I supposed to know you hate your birthday? Your brothers don’t. I thought everyone loved their birthday.”

Butch was taken abback. Buttercup rarely ever apologized. Her usual tactic even if she was wrong - which Butch was finding out more and more she rarley ever thought she was - was to double down and drag her feet even more.

Her hair was tousled from the struggle and she didn’t seem like the mud had spared her either but the look on her face only conveyed earnest sincerity. Butch did feel asahamed now. He shouldn’t have been mad and he really did know that. He’d never talked about his complicated feelings surrounding his birthday with anyone. She really couldn’t have known.

“Yeah well, Boomer never misses an excuse to party and as much as Brick might say otherwise, he secretly loves being the center of attention every now and again.”

“Like you don’t,” The joke fell flat between the two of them.

“Can you let me up now?”

“Only if you promise to actually talk to me and not run away.”

Butch sighed and rolled his eyes but he promised anyway. Buttercup got up and offered him her hand. He didn’t take it. As petty as it was he took a small victory in the look of annoyance that crossed over her face.

“So tell me why.”

“Damn, where to start. Maybe it’s the fact that I was birthed from a literal toilet or that it gets kind of confusing because I technically have two birthdays because, well you know, you literally blew me up!” Butch used his arms to mimick an explosion.

“I’m not apologizing for that again. You know why that had to happen and I know that’s not what's really bothering you.” Buttercup’s tone combined with her crossed arms was really getting across how unamused she was.

“I guess it must be the fact that I never had a real birthday party as a kid since everyone kinda hated us and my dad’s could never shake their obsession with you and your sisters! Or, I don’t know, the knowledge that Mojo and Him never really wanted us and still don’t. We were always just a fucking tool to them to get to you so excuse me if I don’t want to celebrate a day that just reminds me about how much of a failure and a shity, unwanted person I am from the very beginning!” Butch was breathing hard by the end of his rant. He doesn't know why he told her the truth and judging by the shocked look on her face he apparently neither did Buttercup.

“Whatever,’’ he mumbled, “I’m going home.” He turned again, this time resigning himself to just walk the several miles back in the rain. For some reason he felt like he deserved it.

“Butch.” He ignored her call. He should have known that wouldn’t stop her.

“Butch, stop. Look at me. Please.” Something about the way her voice trembled, how small she sounded - so unlike herself - made him comply.

As he turned around he couldn’t tell whether her face was wet from the rain or tears. But something in Butch told him that broken expression wasn’t pity. It was something far from it.

“I -” her voice failed. Instead of trying again she threw herself at him. This time not to tackle him but to hug him. The impact almost made him topple over but he wrapped his arms around her instinctively and they both stumbled a bit until they stopped moving all together.

They stayed like that for a while, her face tucked into his chest and holding on to him as if both their lives depended on it. Butch hated to admit that he was holding on just as desperately. It was Buttercup who finally broke the silence.

“I’m not sorry you were made in a fucking toilet. I’m not sorry I blew you up that one time or that you were resurrected or that we were enemies for a while. I am sorry that you had such an unfair childhood. Believe it or not, I know how it feels to be hated by everyone.”

“Yeah right, I don’t believe that. Who could ever hate a Powerpuff Girl?”

Buttercup’s responding scoff told him all he needed to know. That was a conversation for a different time though.

“You had a really shity start in life but everything brought you here. To me. To us. And I’m not sorry about that. I will never be sorry about that. Let me help you make better memories about your birthday. Forget about the past and let's just focus on our future together.”

Butch had seldom seen his girlfirend look so sincere, so… soft. He closed his eyes and lowered his head. Even through the mud and rain he could still catch the scent of apples that always lingered on her hair from her shampoo. In the back of his mind he chalked it up to the one third puppy dog in him.

“I’d like that,” he whispered. To a normal human it would have been drowned out by the rain but Buttercup heard it just fine.

Their moment was rudely interrupted by one of his brothers sticking his head out the door to inform them everyone was waiting on them to finish so they could cut the cake. Butch sighed. Preparing himself to go back and face everyone he’d just raged in front of and get back on with the party.

“You guys go on without us,” Buttercup cut in to his surprise, “I think we’re going to go celebrate on our own”

“Ok…” Boomer said. He gave them a weird look but left them alone.

“You didn’t have to do that. Even if I was being a dick earlier I know how hard you worked to do this for me.”

“You’re right, you were being a dick,” they both chuckled a bit before Buttercup continued, “but I get it now. I was serious about making better memories but let's start small. Maybe a movie at your place, a cupcake or two if you’re feeling festive.”

“I love you.” he sighed, bringing his hands up to wipe the water off her face. His efforts were futile as it was still very much raining but the gesture was nice.

“I know.”

As Buttercup pulled him down into a kiss Butch couldn’t help but think that maybe he had birthdays all wrong. And that it also wouldn’t hurt if he started opening up a little more to this woman he was lucky enough to call his.

#ppg fanfic #ppg buttercup #ppg butch #ppg greens #my wiritng #dialogue prompts #at first I didn't know where this was going but I loved where it ended #butchercup

32 notes · View notes

susiephone · 3 years

Note

Imagine thinking that wanting straight people to be accepting of gay people is a "trap" and not like, literally THE entire goal of the modern LGBT rights movement since its inception

okay. this is in response to me saying “respectability politics is a trap.” which it absolutely is.

but i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here. let’s define respectability politics, shall we?

several people who are more well-spoken than me have talked about this. to quote this article on the subject:

Respectability politics is a school of thought that utilizes respectability narratives as the basis for enacting social, political, and legal change.

Respectability narratives are representations of marginalized individuals meant to construct an image of the marginalized group as people sharing similar traits, values, morals with the dominant group.

essentially, respectability politics is when people in a marginalized group (queer people, disabled people, people of color) wish to be accepted by the majority, and thus present themselves in a way and behave in a way that the majority deems acceptable - and pressure others in their marginalized group to do the same. for example:

“Not all bisexual people are sluts, I’m bi and I’ve been in a committed relationship for 20 years!”

“I’m gay, but I’m not one of THOSE gay guys, I hate shopping and I don’t like to flaunt my sexuality at all!”

“Lesbians aren’t really all masculine, I love makeup and having long hair.”

(I’m using examples I’ve seen in the queer community because I’m queer; I know this happens a lot in communities of color, but I am not qualified to speak on that at all.)

this stems from a desire to be accepted by the majority; for the purposes of this discussion, straight people. we hear straight people say things like “i could never date a bi person, they’re all cheaters” or “i don’t mind gay guys, don’t just shove it in my face” and “why don’t lesbians act like women if they love them?” and, in response, some people go, “i don’t act like that!! you can accept me! i fit in! i’m respectable, i’m not like those guys, they embarrass us!”

there’s also a lot of people saying, “don’t reinforce the stereotype.” as if it’s OUR fault straight people stereotype us.

so this leads to shaming within our own community:

“You’re bi and polyamorous? Wow, way to make people think we’re all two-timing whores.”

“Makeup? Jesus, we get it, you’re gay, you don’t have to make it a pride parade every time you go out.”

“You look like a teenage boy, this is why everyone lesbians aren’t real women.”

and that all boils down to:

“THIS is the example you’re setting? This is the face you show to the world? Don’t you know you’re representing us? No wonder they don’t respect us.”

and that’s the real problem: telling other queer people, “it is YOUR fault you’re not accepted, YOU aren’t acceptable, YOU reinforce these stereotypes, YOU should try and be more respectable, more normal.” and the thing is, “normal” is defined by the majority. THEY decide what is acceptable behavior for us. and guess what?

most of the time, that boils down to, “It’s fine if you’re different... as long as you’re as close to what I deem normal as possible. As long as I can’t tell you’re different.”

in the queer community, this sort of thinking has led to the exclusion of butch lesbians, femme gay men, nonbinary people, non-passing trans people, trans people in general, people who use any pronouns besides she/her and he/him, bisexual people, ace people, aro people, pan people, polyamorous bisexual people, people who have an active sex life, sex workers, people who have changed how they identify, and countless others. these people get shoved aside by the Good Respectable Gays, who are eager to say, “We’re not like them, we’re just like you!” in order to be accepted by the mainstream. and it still doesn’t work. even the most macho, would-never-guess-it gay guy is bound to face some level of oppression or otherness at some point in his life. it doesn’t matter how much he fits in, how much he distances himself from the Unacceptable Queers; it won’t work 100% of the time. how’s that for a punchline?

there is no point in trying to file off the “unacceptable” parts of our community just to please straight people.

if a person hates all queer people, no matter how they act or present, they’re a homophobe.

if a person doesn’t hate queer people, just the ones who shove it in your face and sleep around and won’t shut up about it and buck gender norms and use weird pronouns and expect people to learn their new name and change their identity every week... they’re still a fucking homophobe.

and why the fuck are we trying to please homophobes, again?

so when people say lil nas x is bad, actually, because he “reinforces the stereotype” of gay people going to hell and thinking a lot about sex or whatever, they’re playing right into respectability politics. why can’t he just talk about his sexuality in a normal way? why can’t he express himself in a nicer way? why does he have to use that imagery? why does he have to make straight people uncomfortable?

lis nas x is a gay black man who grew up being told he’d burn in hell for being gay. and he made an awesome song with a legendary music video saying, “fine. i’ll go to hell, just like you want, and it’ll be great. i’ll take the damn place over and make satan fall in love with me. and i’ll have a great time doing it, because i’m proud of who i am, and i won’t apologize for it or be ashamed of it anymore.”

to see that and wring your hands, worrying that a straight person will see it and decide to be homophobic about it, and pinning the blame for that on nas is missing the point.

every time we as a community make ourselves lesser or change the way we present just to be accepted by the majority, they move the goalposts, and someone else gets left behind. and the beautiful thing about the queer community is that there is a place for everyone who is left out in the cold by the straight, cis majority.

“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” was the rallying cry for a reason. we’re different, you think we’re weird, you think we’re deviant, you don’t get us, and that’s fine, you don’t have to get us. we’re not going anywhere. get used to it.

respectability politics is a game you cannot win. so stop playing.

#respectability politics #queer #queer pride #lgbtq #long post cw #Anonymous

10K notes · View notes

palmett-hoes · 3 years

Note

Do you have any fan casts or strong takes/feelings on the foxes’ appearances? Fandom tends to use the same Pinterest models, which feels wrong to me.

i do in fact! i've actually been meaning to make a post about how i choose to write all of the foxes' ethnicities anyway

but yes i absolutely agree that the typical pinterest model types u generally see on edits is not how i see any of them. nor is reece king or froy gutierrez or lucky blue smith one of my FCs for anyone

for a lot of them i don't necessarily have a single specific FC so much as i have like,, a general impression of features that i will see on various different people, who all may look wildly different from each other or who may not even look how i see the character as a whole but do have a specific feature i associate with them. mostly it boils down to the Energy i get tbh and that's just a Feeling i cant even explain

fun fact im a tiny bit face blind so that might account for some of why i'm so all-over about this

may as well go chronologically. some of them i definitely have more thoughts on than others

1. Dan

ethnicity: Afro Native (Sioux)

features: medium dark skin. buzzcut, killer fade. she often styles it in waves. she's very butch, wears a lot of basketball and cargo shorts, tank tops and flannels and jerseys, hiking boots. skinny but muscular, with a very rectangular body shape. defined jaw. probably like 5'4 or 5'5

FC/Energy: sometimes i get some dan energy out of janelle monae but more butch. lotta dan energy out of samira wiley. lashana lynch

2. Kevin

ethnicity: a lot of things tbd, but he's pretty multi-ethnic. i like the idea of kayleigh being half- or a quarter-japanese in addition to irish because it gives her more of a reason to go to japan for her undergrad. wymack is from d.c. which is a majority black city for its actual residents, but i also like the idea of him being Pasifika/Hawaiian. HOWEVER - and this is pretty important to my read of kevin's character - he's white passing, and has been mostly treated as a white guy who tans his whole life, like occasionally asked if he's italian maybe. learning that his father was a Distinctly Not White Man was a big shock to him.

kristin kreuk, lindsay price, phoebe cates, and marie digby are all half-asian actresses i base kayleigh on

i suppose i base his story partially on broadway actress carol channing, who revealed publically that she was a quarter black when she was like 80 years old. though maybe wentworth miller, a biracial actor who knows his father is black but also doesn't know him, is more accurate to kevin's story. then keanu reeves is a white passing actor with asian ancestry

also none of these people look anything like how i picture kevin lol. kevin is just like,, a guy. handsome ig. but kind of in a CW character kind of way

actually

kevin looks exactly like young jason momoa

3. Andrew

ethnicity: kayin/karen from myanmar

features: fat and muscular, very wide and heavy. this blog is basically all andrew body type refs. medium-olive skin, has a bit of a greyish tinge that makes him look a bit eerie or unhealthy. deep set, droopy eyes; looks so tired. flat face with a low-bridged nose. crooked teeth, especially his canines. natural hair black-ish but he bleaches it light blond. has the beginnings of martial artist punching callouses in his knuckles

FC/Energy: holy shit the characters i feel have Andrew Energy are all over the place. pedro pascal. babe ruth (yes fr). oddjob (harold sakata) from goldfinger. the jinn (mousa kraish) from american gods. gaear grimsrud (peter stormare) from fargo. takeshi kovacs (joel kinnaman) from altered carbon. and i wanna be clear, it's these characters specifically, and generally NOT the actors outside of that specific role. except pedro ❤️

4. Matt

ethnicity: cuban

appearance: matt has more of an Energy than specific features to me rn. that energy is Warm. he has that Warm bro jock dude energy. kind of a marvel hero build, hunky and muscular. very rectangular face. has this haircut:

5. Aaron

i get to cut myself some slack and not go AS in depth about aaron because he and andrew are identical twins

ethnicity: kayin/karen from myanmar

appearance: similar build to andrew, less confident and casual posture and body language. less apathetically murderous and more emotive expressions. better teeth bc his mom took him to the dentist. yes also bleaches his hair

celebrities: probably a lot like the difference between the characters and the actors. andrew is the characters and aaron is how the actors actually look. idk ive never looked at someone and thought 'hey! looks like aaron!'

6. Seth

ethnicity: have been going with half-vietnamese. considering looking into various south asian possibilities like pakistani

appearance: string bean build. that's all i have to offer

7. Allison

ethnicity: allison's very up in the air for me. she and seth are the two foxes i feel fine with being white, but im committing to having no white foxes sooo. i would say i generally see her as either half-middle eastern or chinese

appearance: plus sized and hourglass shaped. heart shaped face. taller, like 5'8 or 5'9. she has a pretty fraught history with her appearance and her parents payed for/pressured her into getting a nose job to have a 'prettier' nose. she also bleaches her hair blonde. she gets it done at a salon tho the twinyards do it in their bathroom

FC/Energy: elle king and nadia aboulhosn are my main inspos for her, esp body type but nadia esp in Vibes

8. Nicky

ethnicity: multi-ethnic. his mother is southern mexican Indigenous, possibly oaxacan. his father is mixed white/kayin

appearance: definitely takes after his mother while his father is white passing. dark brown skin, warm undertones. slightly stocky build. tall ovular head and thin aquiline nose. he's kind of just,, the opposite of the twins ig, so like their facial features look very different, which is a big part of why people don't make the connection between him and the twins alongside the difference in their skin tones, heights, and builds. nicky's build and features are very vertically-oriented, with a tall head, narrow-set eyes, thin nose with a high bridge, etc. the twins are horizontally-orienged, with broad, flat faces, wide-set eyes, wide noses with a low bridge, etc.

FC/Energy: yalitza aparicio, not a guy but one of the few Mexican Indigenous stars in the film industry and i really like her features for nicky. she's oaxacan

9. Renee

ethnicity: Black. african american

appearance: plus sized, circular/apple body shape. round face. dark skin. microlocs to a bit past her chin, bleached white and dyed at the ends. she and allison go to the salon together. femme but plain style, a lot of blouses and long skirts, practical shoes. knuckle callouses. about 5'6

FC/Energy: dominique fishback. tracie thoms, esp in RENT. gabourey sidibe. nicole byer, but not in Energy. brandy, for some reason, probably bc i think she has very serene Energy and is a little bit otherworldly. like if brandy played arwen or galadriel from lotr it would make perfect sense to me, and that's the Renee Energy™️

10. Neil

ethnicity: mixed. Black/Jewish on both sides. his father is polish ashkenazi and afro-brazilian. his mother is Black British and algerian jewish

appearance: very... sharp. like sharp all over. does that make sense? sharp features, sharp face shape, sharp angles to his body. he's got what i vaguely think of as a 'basketball build' not meaning tall but meaning very rangy and angular and lean. all limbs. seth has a similar build. lighter brown skin. he has waardenburg syndrome which is actually where he gets he gets his eye color, and his eyes are very large and widely spaced as well. freckles freckles freckles. freckles everywhere. 4a hair but at least during canon it's not very healthy and thus the curls aren't well-defined. he grows it out long enough to tie back and starts taking better care of it in post-canon. wonky, slightly crooked teeth, with a gap between the fronts

FC/Energy: now neil i actually have a ton for. mostly models which im a lil ashamed of bc i do try to draw more from athletes. alton mason is a main body type ref. mugsy bogues is good to see what i mean about the basketball build without the height. here're the boys: cykeem white, luka sabbat, désiré mia, Leo Hoyte-Egan, dylan hasselbaink, this beautiful stock photo model i've never been able to track down

i think about him every. goddamn. day.

in terms of like,, real ppl and not models: corbin bleu, especially during Jump In. figure skater elladj balde. rayan "ray ray" lopez from mindless behavior. A$AP Rocky a lil bit, maybe i just like his hairstyle idk

two more models i think are important: carissa pinkston and ralph souffrant

50 notes · View notes

heart-of-gold-outlaw · 4 years

Text

Welcome Home | Chapter Four: Bulletproof Heart

Ao3 Wattpad

All things considered, you think you're fairly well-equipped to handle yourself. You may not be the best at fighting (never really had the occasion), and you're certainly no gunslinger, but you have balance and enough adrenaline rushes to deal with things as they come. O'Driscoll's or bears, as long as you have friends to back you up, you'll be alright.

Well... that's the idea, anyway. In theory. In practice? Only time and experience will tell.

You haven't gotten much better with horses since your last encounter. You still think they're beautiful animals. From afar. And maybe one day, if whatever sent you back in time decides to keep you there, you'll get one of your own. But for now, you'll settle for what you can get.

As Arthur, Bill, John, and Kieran get ready to hunt down Colm O'Driscoll, you find yourself shifting nervously in front of Taima. You don't trust yourself enough to ride without problems. This, to make matters worse, sounds like a job you don't want to mess up. From what you've gathered over the last few weeks (months?), Colm O'Driscoll is bad news. Not that you're traveling with people who are much better, but they, at least, seem to treat people right when it boils down to it.

Arthur notices you standing there and glances at Taima. Looking back to you, he motions for you to walk toward his horse. He named it Florence, if you remember right. It's fitting. The beast looks like something out of a Renaissance painting, anyways.

"We'll let Taima have a rest," Arthur says as he gets in the saddle. He then lifts you up so you're sitting behind him. "And maybe save Charles some trouble."

You nod, trying your best to ignore how warm he is. "Uh-huh. Trouble. Right."

Bill and John ride up next to you, Kieran on the back of Old Boy. He looks nervous. You can't blame him. After the lies you spun, you're surprised he's not terrified. Well... that you can see, anyways.

"We'll have to move quick," Arthur says once you're all on the trail. He's letting John take point, and you grip him tightly, not wanting to face-plant on the ground. "Colm ain't getting away this time."

"Damn right!" Bill agrees from atop his horse. The thing's a beast and easily fitting for a man like him.

Kieran leads you all a little ways away from the Heartlands and into the forest. He sounds better, once he gets his bearings. You can't imagine life in camp has been easy for him. Getting tied to a tree doesn't sound fun in most scenarios. Still, he's not dead. Honestly, that's a step up from what it was looking like in the Grizzlies.

The forest eventually gives way into a small clearing, and Kieran tells everybody to stop. You find yourself holding on to Arthur just a bit tighter when Florence shifts underneath you. He glances back at you. You don't need to look very hard to see the amusement in his eyes. Embarrassingly, your face flushes an unflattering shade of red.

"It's just on the other side of this clearing," Kieran says, thankfully distracting Arthur enough for you to get back in control of yourself. "I would leave your horses here, if I were you."

After Arthur dismounts, you manage to do the same without falling flat on your face. It's a small achievement, but you'll take what you can get.

The five of you start heading for the cabin, Arthur and John taking the lead while dragging Kieran along. You trail behind with Bill. It doesn't take too long for a dilapidated structure to appear, and you're not surprised to see it's absolutely swarming with O'Driscoll's. Thankfully, they haven't noticed a damn thing yet.

"Well, this is gonna be a clusterfuck," you mutter.

Bill's head swivels your way. "What?"

"I said," you repeat, looking him dead in the eye, "this is gonna be a clusterfuck."

He stares at you for a moment, mouth slightly agape. You shrug. He should be used to that kind of language, considering he runs with a gang of outlaws.

Thankfully, Arthur interrupts the exchange before it can go any further. "We gotta keep this quiet," he says. "We can take 'em by surprise, maybe get the jump on Colm." He glances toward three people who are walking your way. "Starting with these bastards."

"You got those throwing knives?" Bill asks.

Arthur gives him a look. "The ones you so kindly forgot to tell me about?"

There's an eye-roll from Bill, followed by his snide retort: "Last goddamn favor I do you."

You watch the O'Driscoll pissing by a tree, lips curling in contempt. You've heard about them, about what they did to Dutch's sweetheart, and about what a nasty gang they are. Not to mention how they made Mrs. Adler a widow. Sadie still won't talk to you—or to anybody, for that matter. If anything, this hit might give her a little peace of mind.

"Alright," Arthur says as he motions for Bill and John to get into position. "We take care of the pisser, then move up on 'em." He turns and hands you a revolver, one you recognize as looted from an O'Driscoll back in the Grizzlies. "Y/N, you keep an eye on ol' Kieran here."

You sigh. "So I'm babysitting now? That's some bull."

"He tries anything," Arthur continues, ignoring your complaint, "and I mean anything, you shoot him dead." He glares at Kieran. "Got that?"

"Yeah." You look at the revolver. You've seen enough movies to know a little about how they work. Still, you don't think watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a great safety lesson. "Got it."

Arthur, Bill, and John head out to ambush the O'Driscoll's, leaving you with Kieran. For a few minutes, the two of you just stare at each other. He's still terrified. That much is pretty clear. You roll your eyes and settle against a tree with a huff.

"You do know I'm not gonna shoot you, right?" You ask him.

"Y-You're..." He looks astounded by the revelation. "You're not?"

With another eye-roll, you slowly sink to the forest floor. "Nope. Far as I'm concerned, you're an okay guy."

He watches you warily. You can see him thinking rapidly, can see him wondering if you're telling the truth, and you give him a small smile.

"Listen," you say, just as gunshots start echoing throughout the clearing. You look over to make sure Arthur, Bill, and John are okay, then go back to Kieran. "You and me? We're kinda in a similar boat. We're both new to the gang... well, for different reasons." You shrug again. "Guess I just want a friend who kinda understands."

It takes him a few moments, but eventually, he returns your smile. "Thanks, Y/N... For not killing me."

"Yeah, well," you settle back against the tree again. "I can't make any promises for everybody else."

Kieran laughs a little at that, but then immediately sobers when he glances toward the cabin. "Y/N—look!"

You follow his stare in time to see Arthur heading that way. Through the windows of the structure, you can just barely make out a figure getting ready for an ambush. And Arthur's none the wiser.

Without thinking, you're suddenly on your feet and sprinting toward him. You grip the revolver tightly in your hand. You've never hurt anybody before, never had reason to do so. You've also never shot a gun. But when the door to the cabin bursts open, knocking Arthur to the ground and momentarily stunning him, all hesitation flees from your mind.

A giant of a man steps out into the open. He stands over Arthur, aiming a gun directly at him before he can even react. It takes less than a second, but you fire your revolver and hit Arthur's assailant square in the chest. There's a flare of pain on your hand, but you scarcely notice it. The man drops to the ground, choking and sputtering, and then goes still.

"You okay?" You frantically ask Arthur. You let go of the revolver and run to stand over him as he gets to his feet.

"Sure," he says. "Thank you."

He checks the cabin. You, meanwhile, take a look at your hand. There's an angry burn mark splayed out across your palm, and it's throbbing like all hell. But none of it comes close to the pounding in your head as you slowly move to stand over the dead man on the ground... the man you just killed.

You stare at him. His eyes, sightless and glassy, stare up at the sky. Painfully loud, a high-pitched ringing fills your ears and deafens you to whatever else is happening. Distantly, you're aware of Arthur storming out of the cabin. You don't hear what he says to Bill and John. You don't hear much of anything.

Then—he notices you standing there, still watching the dead man. You see something in his expression soften as he steps closer to you. Still, everything's ringing and ringing and ringing. When Arthur's mouth moves, no sound comes out.

He finally reaches you and gently grips both of your shoulders. With a light shake and some persuasion, you find yourself looking at him. There's something in his eyes you can't quite place. But it sure does look like worry.

Eventually, you come back to the real world. It's startling, to say the least.

"I..." You somehow manage around a rapidly tightening throat. "I killed him."

Arthur nods and carefully pats your back a few times. "You did." He gives you a small, grateful smile. "Thank you."

A quick glance around reveals that the entire camp of O'Driscoll's is absolutely demolished. Arthur notices this, then sighs.

"We need to get outta here," he says as he carefully steers you back toward the horses. "We didn't get Colm, but this hit'll hurt him pretty bad." His expression darkens. "And I need to have a few words with Kieran."

You look up at him. "You know," you say, voice sounding distant to your own ears. "He was the one who noticed you were in trouble. I wouldn't have seen it, otherwise."

For a moment, you expect Arthur to ignore everything you just said. When he's on the warpath, you've come to realize, it's not easy to drag him away from it. But, much to your surprise, he looks like he's considering everything. And then, eventually, he nods his head.

"Alright." He keeps a steady hand on your shoulder all the way back to the horses. "Maybe Kieran ain't worth killin'... Yet."

A/N: And here’s the next update! Sorry it’s a little late y’all!

Next Chapter: Alone Together

Previous Chapter: Dirty Rotten Bastards

Inspired Playlist Track: My Chemical Romance - “Bulletproof Heart”

#rdr2 #red dead redemption 2 #arthur morgan #arthur morgan x reader #arthur morgan x modern!reader #modern!reader #fic #rdr2 fic #rdr2 fanfic #my fic #my writing #welcome home

78 notes · View notes

cranetreegang · 4 years

Text

4) 7 Day Fallout Writing Challenge: Coming Home

Day 4!!! This one was way too much fun to write. Decided to do present tense, and nearly wanted to die. Present tense sucks. It’s a bit on the longer side too. It’s like 1,400 words.

Fallout 3 again! I remember the first time I did Trouble on the Home-front, and I nearly blew the whole place up after I ‘saved’ them. Vault 101 is literally the breeding ground of assholes. EXCEPT for my main man Officer Gomez. He’s a real G.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think!

Warnings: one curse word and mentions of dead people

Some dialogue (specifically at first with Amata) I did take straight from the game. So credit to Fallout 3 for that.

Amata gives me a smile of relief. The dark circles under her hazel eyes really aged her and her raven black hair is dull and tangled into a messy bun. With the conflict over, I can tell a weight is lifted from her. We move closer together, filling me with a certain nostalgia. I’m finally back with my best friend and I can’t wait to tell her everything that’s happened. To finally catch up without chaos ensuing. The stories I have will stomp anything we ever read in the Grognak Comics. I’m already forming plans on who we can go to for supplies. How I can help protect our people from the Wastes.

“I… I can’t believe it.” Amata whispers, pulling me from my grand plans. “My father… I can’t believe he’s stepping down. I can’t believe you got through to him.”

“We talked. I think for the first time, he actually listened. He… he didn’t even realize how wrong he was.” I take in the disarray state of the medical room. A place I saw as a sanctuary growing up. I could still see Jim laying stiffly against the wall when I first arrived. Or even Beatrice’s mangled corpse in the next room. A shake of my head returns me to the present. “But I set him straight.”

“Well, thanks for keeping your cool. Violence would only lead to more problems in the future.” She puts her hands on her hips with a prideful smirk. “It’s time for our dusty old Vault to have a new beginning and it’ll start by opening it up again, and this time for good. It’s a bright new day for the Vault…,” Her pause takes me off guard. She looks at me sheepishly. The same look she gave me when I first got here. “But I’m afraid there’s one thing that has to change.”

“Whatever it is, I’m happy to help.” I reassure her.

“I know you are and, on behalf of the Vault, I thank you for all you’ve done.” She places her hand on my shoulder and gives a gentle squeeze. She sounds too much like an Overseer already. “But there are still many who blame you for everything that happened. So I have to ask you to leave. I’m sorry, but the situation is just... too delicate for you to stay.”

My stomach feels like it’s in a knot; like I had been punched in the gut. I know I’m making a face as Amata continues, “Please. If you want to help the Vault, you need to leave.”

The sting of tears began and my throat’s tight. I stare her down with a bitter smile. “Just like that, huh? After everything I’ve done, you’re kicking me out.” I laugh a bit as I realize that was her plan all along. She knew I would come, she knew I would help, and she knew I wasn’t allowed to stay.

“No, it’s not like that.” Amata grabs my hands to bring my attention back to her. Her hands are so soft compared to mine. “But if you stay, it’ll just keep causing more problems. The Vault can’t take any more in-fighting. It’s just what has to be.” Her explanation only makes my blood boil. I swear, I knew raiders that were less cold-blooded than her. “It’ll be awhile before we’re ready to really go outside. But once the Vault is stable again, maybe we’ll see you out there.” She smiles sweetly at me, which feeds my disgust toward her. I let the silence fester before I rip my hands from hers. She frowns, but switches back to a sweet smile.

“I guess this is goodbye for now.” She reaches behind her and hands me a dirty utility suit. “It’s not much, but take this with you, to remember us by. With luck, we’ll meet again.”

I look at the grimy suit for a moment in a state of absolute shock. This is it? All that she sees me worthy of is some piece of shit suit?

“Goodbye, Amata. I have a feeling you’ll do just fine as Overseer.” The ice in my tone causes her to flinch. I give a parting glance to the room that was my whole life with my dad. Him teaching me how to treat cuts, bruises, sprains, and numerous other ailments. The trash and overturn tables made the bile crawl further up my throat. Freddie and Mr. Brotch walk over to me just before I turn away.

“Goodbye. We’ll miss ya.” Freddie says. His ‘Tunnel Snake’ leather jacket slipping off his slim frame.

“I never thought you would be back. I’m sorry you have to go. You were always a pleasure to have in class.” Mr. Brotch adds with his warm brown eyes giving me pity. But he does nothing to object to my banishment.

I almost roll my eyes at their pathetic attempts at a goodbye. “Good luck out there. You’ll need it.” I walk through the familiar yet ruined hallways of my home… former home. I pass by my room. My heart nearly shatters upon seeing Dad’s old bed, but I force myself to keep going. Residents line the hallways as their whispers and glares follow me.

“Good riddance.”

“Get out.”

“You don’t belong here.”

“This is all your fault!” The voices say as I pass by.

I hold my head up high despite wanting to yell and scream at them. They’re supposed to be my family, yet here I am leaving with my tail between my legs. I’m at the security room when a familiar guard brings me out of my haze.

“Officer Gomez?”

He looks at me with sorrowful eyes. “You aren’t leaving already, are you? Goodness, you just got here.”

I curse my growing bad luck. He’s always been so kind to me. His salt and pepper hair made me think of a time long before that. The fondest memory being when he got onto Butch for stealing my sweet roll. I thought of him as my hero from that moment forward. I find it hard to look at him now.

“Yeah. It’s… for the best. Or so I’m told.” I mumble.

He places his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry about your daddy. And I’m sorry that… I wish you could stay.” I meet his gaze and he looks more upset than I am. “Good golly, I don’t know what’s happened to you out there, but you’re different now. I can see it in your eyes. You’re not... ,” He laughs a bit before giving me a beaming grin. “You’re not a kid anymore. I’m real proud of ya. I know you’re gonna do great things, kiddo. Always have. I hope we get to see you one day. Out there. Maybe you’ll be the one giving us the big tour of the place.”

I bite my lip to keep a sob at bay before hugging him as tightly as I can. “Thank you, Mr. Gomez. I’m gonna miss you.” My voice cracks and a few tears stream down my cheek.

He chuckles a bit, but hugs me back. “Stay safe.”

I nod my head and smile. “You too.”

He pats me on the back as I walk towards the exit. I spare him one last look. He waves with a warm parting smile. I walk outside and open the wooden slat door. The ground shudders from the vault closing. The breeze rifles through my hair and the dust fills my nostrils. The heat of the waning sun warms my skin. I hear the metal screeching of the vault sealing. My breath leaves my chest and a choked cry follows. It’s done.

I stare at the scorched landscape around me. Echoes of the past are all that’s left. Megaton catches my eye against the evening sun. I suppose that’s not entirely true, I realize. I think of Gob, and Lucas, and even Moriarty. I start to think of the Brotherhood, and the people of Rivet City. So many people that I’ve met, helped, or killed. I notice a furry blob heading towards me. A wide grin forms on my face when I realize who it is.

Dogmeat barrels up to me with yips of excitement. I pat his head while scratching behind his large ears. His rough fur feels great against my near numb fingers. His brown and blue eyes fill me with a comforting warmth.

“I missed ya, too. Ya mangy mutt.” I tease.

He nudges my wet cheek then takes off down the hill. I look back at the Vault. I feel over the utility suit in my hands. The 101 is a faded yellow against the dingy navy. I hang the suit on the wooden door and re-shoulder my rifle. I meet up with the enthusiastic pooch at the bottom who huffs at my lack of rush. He spins in place a few times before taking charge towards Megaton. Our home.

#vault720 #fo3 #officer gomez is a real g #fallout fanfic writers #fallout #fallout 3 #amata almodovar #7daychallenge

13 notes · View notes

loveisfriendship · 7 years

Text

It always happens in the garden

Request: Jealous!Loki x reader

Author’s Note: Finally after a very long time and overcoming a writers block tonight, I am able to post this :) So this was requested, there weren’t any specifics, so I hope whoever requested this, likes it 😊 And again, leave comments or feedback or whatever you like 😊 And I would like to get a feedback from the ano that requested it. Thank and Enjoy!

Love, Lis 😊

Growing up with Loki meant having a different adventure every day. Playing pranks on each other, but him playing unfair with his magic. After all he is the trickster. When you grew older the image of your “brother” and best friend, turned into your crush and then into a love. He was of course oblivious to it. He always showed off being the smart god, but when it got down to feelings he didn’t know a thing.

As you got older, you were getting closer with Thor, too. You were always his brothers best friend and the two of you played pranks on him, too. But now you were interested in fights, were the best at hand-to-hand combat and he got more and more interested in you, which didn’t go unnoticed by his father Odin.

And here you are, practicing hand-to-hand combat with Loki as his brother rushes to the two of you, calling out your name.

“Quite busy now Thor. What do you want?” you ask, dodging a punch from Loki, throwing one back at him, which he in return dodged.

“My father wants to see you.” He said, out of breath. That catches yours and Loki’s attention.

“The All-father wants to see me?!” you ask, getting nervous and glancing over at Loki, who looks at you confused.

“Did he tell you why he wants to see her?” Loki asks his brother, concern written all over his face.

“No, but he wants to see you right now, so you better hurry up.”

You give both of them another nervous glance and then hurry out of the room towards the great hall. The guards nod at you and open the door. You hurry inside and quickly kneel in front of the throne where Odin is seated.

“You send for me, all-father?” you ask, looking at the ground.

“I did, child. Let’s take a walk.” He says, standing up and making his way over to you. You look up and just nod at him.

“Of course.” You answer and he leads you out of the room towards the balcony and down to the garden. You stay quiet the whole time, waiting for him to talk and not even glancing at him, getting even more nervous, as he usually doesn’t take anyone on a stroll through the garden.

“You might ask yourself, why ordered you here.” He says.

“Yes, I do.” You say, still not looking at him.

“Well, it came to my attention that you spent a lot of time with my sons.” He says and you swallow hard.

“I do, all-father.”

“And it came to my attention that my son, Thor, is rather fond of you.” He says and you shoot your head up looking at him surprised.

“I didn’t know, sire.”

“Well I do and I came to a decision, that you would be perfect at his side.” He says, stopping and looking at you. Your eyes widen and you don’t know what to say.

“A King needs a strong Queen, love. And you would be perfect for Thor.” He says with a slight smile.

“I-… I’m honored but …” you start but get interrupted by him.

“You don’t have to make a decision yet, because it has also come to my attention that you have a rather strong bond with Loki. But I do want you to accompany Thor to the ball tomorrow. Be by his side at all times and see where the evening leads you.” He says.

“Yes, I will.” You say and give him a slight nod. He bids you farewell and leaves you there dumbfounded, not knowing what to do or to say. You move over to a bench nearby and drop down to it.

You don’t know how long you have been sitting there, thinking about what Odin told you over and over, until you hear two sets of footsteps running in you direction. As Thor and Loki see you they both call out your name and rush to your side. You must have looked really pale, because Loki immediately kneels down in front of you and holds your face in his hands.

“Are you alright? What happened ? Where is our father?” he asks, looking for reassurance that you are okay in your eyes. You nod at him and put your hands over his, to assure him, that you are indeed alright.

“I’m fine, your father went back inside a long while ago.” You say.

“What did he want from you?” now it was Thor’s turn to talk.

“He wants me to accompany you to the ball tomorrow night.” You say, recognizing happiness in Thor’s eyes, but something else in Loki’s. Loki let’s go of your face and stands back up.

“Why?” Loki bluntly asks.

“I don’t know. He just said, that I would be great next to Thor.” And it hit Loki immediately.

“He wants you to get married to him.” He says, but it’s just above a whisper and he looks down to the ground.

“Yes.” You say, not being able to look at any of them.

Thor is a little taken aback, too but quickly recovers and smiles at both you and Loki, oblivious to the fact that he stands in front of two heartbroken souls.

The ball came even faster than you wanted it to be and now you are standing in the great hall, right next to Thor who had his arm around your waist, smiling politely at the people that he was talking to. You didn’t pay attention when they were introduced to you.

But since you arrived you had two sets of eyes on you the whole time. Odin and Loki have been watching you the whole time, from different parts of the room.

The whole situation made you uncomfortable and nervous and sick to your stomach. You couldn’t marry Thor, not in a thousand years. He was your best friend and more importantly your loves brother.

You feel like this night will never end and Thor keeps on introducing you to people and you don’t even make an effort at remembering their names. You hated balls and dressing up and pretending to like this all.

Loki new that, after all he was the closest to you. He had an eye on you since you walked in the room with Thor by your side and an arm wrapped around your waist. He saw that you never paid attention to what was being said, but still smiled at Thor whenever he looked at you. Now you are standing there wrapped in Thor’s arms as he keeps on talking. He feels this anger boiling up inside him. Why Thor? Because he was the first born? Why not him? Why would his father want you to marry Thor? Did he not deserve a wife like you?

Next time he looked over, his breath is caught in his throat. There you are, still wrapped in Thor’s arms as he gives you a kiss to your cheek. You close your eyes and smile and then start to giggle as Thor’s beard tickles your cheek, making Thor laugh, too.

Jealousy floods him, he throws a death stare into your direction and then to his father and stomps off, leaving the ball.

You stand there and just smile at Thor as he wraps both of his arms around you from behind. He keeps on talking and joking, but you are too caught up in your thoughts to bother. But then he smiles at you and you give him an assuring smile back. He leans down and gives you a kiss on your cheek, making you giggle, because of his beard. He chuckles, too and gives you a little squeeze.

But out of the corner of your eye, you see Loki. He gives you and Thor a death glare, then glances over to his father and leaves the room abruptly.

You free yourself of Thor’s arms and excuse yourself, hurrying behind Loki, knowing exactly that Odin is watching you.

You hurry outside and move down to the garden, knowing exactly where to find Loki. You see him standing with his back to you. You clear your throat and move closer to him.

“Don’t you have to be in my brother’s arms?” he asks.

“Not when my best friend needs me.” You say, stepping yet another step closer to him.

He doesn’t butch but sighs and drops his shoulders.

“I don’t need you and as far as I see, you have another best friend.” He answers.

You quickly walk up to him and wrap your arms around him from behind. He feel him tensing up but he doesn’t push you away. He just closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

“I don’t want to be with Thor.” You say, pressing your cheek against his back.

“Didn’t look like it back then.”

“Odin wanted me to. He said I will have to accompany Thor and should stay by his side at all times.”

“You still didn’t mind, being wrapped in his arms and him smothering you with kisses.” He remarks and pushes your arms away and turns around, anger visibly seen on his face. And you can see jealousy, too. He moves to walk away and goes around you.

“I imagined it to be you.” You whisper, tears stinging in your eyes. Loki freezes in his steps and slowly turns around.

“Wh-What?” he whispers back.

Your eyes widen, you didn’t expect him to hear you. You turn around and look at him.

“I imagined it to be you. I don’t love Thor, I could never be with him.” You honestly say to him.

He takes two steps to you and cups your face in his hands and gently presses his lips onto yours. You immediately relax into his touch. After a little moment the two of you part and he presses his forehead against yours. You both keep your eyes shut and you move your hands to his face, holding him close.

“I imagined to be in my brother’s place, too.” He admits to you.

You smile at him and press another kiss to his lips.

“We just have to tell your father. Although I feel like he knows already.” You say and you see movement in the corner of your eye. You look to the side, seeing Odin on the balcony and you recognize a small smile on his lips. Loki turns around wide eyed just as Odin turned around and walks back inside.

“Well he definitely is the all-father.” He mumbles, making you chuckle and gives you another kiss, wrapping his arms around you.

#loki #loki laufeyson #loki imagine #loki fanfiction #tom hiddleston #tom hiddleston x reader #loki x read #tom hiddleston imagine #tom hiddleston fanfiction

876 notes · View notes

ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

Text

Slay

Once a month, every month, we go to the club and we slay. Let the smooth edges of the music slide across our exposed shoulders like silk, like Britney’s snake, like the arm of a lover we’vejust met. We come home with blood in our mouths, fur on our knuckles still receding. The thin cuts from breaking fresh and red down our hands and arms, our chests and faces. Our jaws and teeth sore, still a little swollen from the transformation. We throw on some fresh clothes, dump the bloodied ones in the outside trash. We text a time to meet for brunch and then we all sit together, pushing our eggs around our plates like it’s nothing, this monthly trauma, like we’ve just gotten our periods and oh my god are we all finally on the same cycle? We laugh because we are still coming back to our bodies, because at first humor is the only kind of consciousness that is tolerable. And it is quite the joke, isn’t it? Werewolf drag queens? The stuff of B-horror movies, sexploitation films. But here we were, real as the mimosas in our manicured hands. Last month, one of us joked that we felt long in the tooth, and we all threw our heads back to howl.

We never thought of ourselves as mutants, but I guess some people saw it like that. We were in constant transformation, but hadn’t we always been? Hadn’t everyone always been? To be human wasto change. We had reached a higher plane. We tucked, we stuffed our bras.If we had to, we filled our veins with hormones. Some of us cut away at ourselves, with the help of doctors or razors, whichever felt more like home, whatever homewas supposed to be. We broke ourselves to make the breaking a choice. We were family.

We are the best of the best, we are the house that dominates the drag scene. We kill as long as we have the stage and a murderous pair of heels and a damn good song. We spin, and we let the beaded fringe of our skirts rattle over our thighs. We throw the long hair of our wigs out over our shoulders and then pull our hands up our silk-smooth, shaven legs, careful not to let our fresh red nails snag the fishnets or the nylons we wear. We smile and the whole crowd melts. They look and they look and they look and we let them. We strut out to take the dollar bills from the bachelorette parties and the straight-but-curious and the oh-no-not-me-I-could-nevers and the liberal anthropologists and the best friends and the beards and the hags and the drunks and the allies and the whole entire spectrum. We are radiant, and this—killing—is how we can afford to stay radiant.

Slaying is our one night off, because who can work knowing that the bodies we love so dearly, the changeable bodies we maul and remold and fight against and show off with, are about to break open? So on nights when the full moon rises high in the sky, we slip on a sparkly red dress or a slick new suit, and contour and tuck and bind, or sometimes we slay simply as we are, unedited. So many of us feel out of place in our own skin, even when we change at night, even when we become something closer to who we really are. The one place we feel at home? That’s on the dance floor at our favorite bar, Tits Up, a drink in one hand and a new lover on the other.

Under the half-dome of the ceiling, the spinning disco ball threw multicolor lights across ourfaces. All around us, sharp-lined eyes flashed like pinpricks in the dark bar. Even in the dead of winter, skin was everywhere, moving in time with the music, and we were no exception. We liked to dance against the moon, until we could feel our milk teeth pushing out from the base of our gums. When we could take it no longer, we’d hand our heels to a friend, andshuffle out, discreet as we could.We’d run down the alley at the end of the block, to the parkon the water that closed after sundown. Then it was a quick dash under cover of the trees to the nearest abandoned construction site, far from the eyes of the bustling nightlife. Then we’d break open, tears in our eyes, the streaks from our mascara only more shadows in the light from the moon.

We knew our history. House LaBeija. DuPree. Xtravaganza. We were respectful to our elders. We were old school, or we wanted to be.Weall had different styles: femmes and kings and butch queens and comedy queens and then there were some of us that were just starting out. But of course we were all the same, so we made our own house.

We were the House of Breaking. The House of the moon. The House of blood and bite and bone. Nobody, not even the horror queens, wanted to be in our house, but that didn’t mean we didn’t command their respect. People in the drag community knew what we were, and they kept an open mind, or they kept their mouths shut, anyway.

One night, we were out at a show, one night. A Williamsburg show, in a newer place.

A lunatic had made the country his bitch.His white men in red hats wanted a fight, had the gall to shout slurs and declare themselves proud Nazis on camera, and still they cried that they were the oppressed. They needed protection. The look in their eyes frightened us. Us! Creatures of fur and tooth and claw, creatures of unknowable strength. But we were petrified. Because we knew the look well: bloodlust.

That night, we were leaning against the wall of the club, out for one lastsmokebefore moonrise.Aman, white as Florida beach sand, in a bright red baseball hat, turned on to the street. He was with a few friends of much the same ilk, though they did not have the hats to match. They laughed easily, telling a long-winded story about something basic. We tensed a little, armor on, and the youngest of us, the stunning Miss Maya Condios, bared her teeth.

The man approached, and as he walked we took all of him in: his look (middle-aged dad), his scent (sweat and cornchips and Aqua Velva), who he was wearing (nobody, maybe Massimo for Target), whether he could hurt us (yes). When he got close enough, Maya tilted up her chin and glared down at him imperiously. She blew him a kiss.

“Fucking faggots,” the hat man snarled, and launched a thick glob of spit at us. It landed on Ursa Major’s breasts, smearing the contour applied there. And that was it.

Maya leapt on him, sunk her teeth into hisshoulder, and drew blood. We knew, because it spread like an opening black bud on the white pique cotton of the polo he wore. And because of the unearthly shriek he let forth. His two friends fell on Maya, landing punches left and right, but she dug her teeth into that shoulder and growled, the dark curls of her wig swinging wildly as the man spun beneath her, trying to shake her off. We leapt into the fray, the largest of us prying the men apart from each other, the smallest of us pulling at Maya, begging her to stop. We liked this club, it was good money. We didn’t want to be banned, especially not on account of some homophobic asshole.

We broke apart, a clump of brawlers glistening with sequins and sweat, and glared at each other. Some of us held Miss Maya back. We could feel the breaking starting beneath her skin. Her arms were shaking with rage, with the coming change boiling in her blood.

“Get her out of here,” one of us said, and the others obliged, rushing Maya down the street and into a dark alley where she could break peaceably, a place away from the leering crowd that had gathered, a place free of reflective surfaces. Maya, always the high femme, hated to watch herself break. She couldn’t bear the masses of fur that sprouted from her knuckles and the way her petite fingers lengthened and gnarled into paws with dirty yellow claws. The stretch and distortion of her face, her nose. The contour would be all wrong, her perfect makeup suddenly a garish mistake on such a wolfish head. As we watched her duck into the alley from our places outside the bar, we could hear her cry, a low mongrel whine.

“What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

The indignant tone in the man’s voice brought us back. It wasn’t the man who’d been attacked, who was looking a little woozy. That was the way it was. He would break later tonight, guaranteed. He had caught it, and you always broke the night you were bitten. We exchanged nervous glances. It wasn’t our way to leave a fellow breaker unsupervised, but it also wasn’t our way to take in so called Proud Boys. Most often, we bit when in the throes of passion, not out of hate or righteous indignation. And there was no easy way to separate this man from his friends.

This was uncharted territory.

“Your friend fucking bitGarrett,” the one man kept saying. “Bit him.”

“What the fuck,” Garrett said, sounding a little weak. His other friend helped him sink to the bench outside of the club. He touched his shoulder and looked at the blood on his hand.

“You better not have given him AIDS.”

We had a few options. Killing him would be messy. A crowd was already gathering.

“Faggots,” said one of them.

That word again. We looked at each other. The oldest of us, Rhea Bilitation, stepped right up to the mouthy one, towering over him in her blue sequin leotard, her breastplate nearly touching his face.

“Honey, do you know where you are?” she said, allowing a little of the growl into her voice. “This is New York fucking City, not Fargo or Topeka or wherever the fuck little shit town you call home. You want to call the cops? Do you knowwhat drag queens like us do to cops?”

The man swallowed. Rhea was used to flexing her muscles in dangerous situations. She was the one of us with the most control over her breaking. The smell of the wolf—musk, woods, wet dog—pervaded the air. The man dropped his gaze and stepped back.

“Yeah,” Rhea said. “That’s what I thought.”

A twink across the street let out a cheer.

“Now get your girl,” Rhea flicked iridescent nails toward the bleeding man on the bench. “And get out of here.”

The men considered for a moment, but then thought better of it, probably because their friend looked so bad. They hoisted the bleeding man up off the bench and to his feet.

“Better go get that looked at, honey,” someone shouted.

We really hoped they didn’t get it looked at. Exposure would be the end of us. If anything was true of America these days, it was that only so much difference was permitted, and even then on very rocky terms. Now was not a good time to be outed.

Rhea touched her short blonde wig and curtseyed to the gathered crowd, then yelled, “Now who wants to see me reallyslay?”

Brunch the next day was tense.

Yes, we had slayed, thanks to Rhea’s recovery, but we did not consider it a victory. At least, most of us did not consider it a victory. Others, including Maya—who looked a little worse for wear after breaking, but still glamorous as ever—were alive with excitement. We were fighting back. Hate could go and fuck itself.

But some of us, the older ones, still felt danger crackling in the air. And more than that, we were less of a unit now. Less “we” more “me,” and that was how drag houses died.

Some of us felt that this was no display of force, nor was it a win for love. Maya biting that man put all of us into danger.

“We don’t have to take him in, do we?” Maya said, pulling the celery out of her Bloody. “I’m not babysitting that. Hell no.”

“You should have thought about that before you decided to bite him,” Lex said, her pencil mustache from last night’s Gomez drag still Spirit Glued to her upper lip. She took a bite of her cheeseburger.

Rhea sucked her teeth. “Hopefully the problem resolves itself.”

First, we had to get ready for our show. Same Williamsburg venue, with hopefully a different crowd. Tres LaVain squeezed into thigh high stiletto boots and a shocking white wig, and Lex prepped her Lady Gaga/Joe Calderone drag. Rhea went red this time, and Maya looked like a space princess from another dimension. Ursa opted to keep the Morticia drag from last night’s duo with Lex, but this time in irony. Williamsburg would eat that shit up.

$2 PBRs, $3 wells, and the packed-house crowd was revved, bristling with bills ripe for the taking. Lex did a backflip off of the shoddy piano and tips rained down. Ursa’s death drop was amazing, and Maya landed a full back handspring into a split. Tres did an original comedy number about Jerry Springer. Rhea broke a little onstage, letting her face elongate into a snout and then when she turned around again, she was her regular self, only a little bloody. The crowd roared.

We had all but forgotten about the fight.

And then, at three AM, we walked out of the club, and there he was, caked in rust-colored blood. He wore the same white polo shirt, or what was left of it. He looked like death.

“Please help me,” he said.

We took him home with us. We piled into the subway and climbed out at the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop. On the way, we learned a little more about our guest: Garrett, no last name, though he did tell us he had a wife upstate and three young kids—two girls and a boy.

We all agreed; his obvious fear—of himself, of us—made everything much less fun.

“Relax, doll,” Rhea said.

“You’re one of us now,” Lex said, and we weren’t sure how to feel.

“I… I killed someone, or something,” he said. “I think, anyway.”

“Alright, well, rule number one is discretion,” Rhea said sternly, as she unlocked the door to our apartment building. “Which means don’t talk about kills, or about breaking, while you’re still in the middle of a fucking street, especially not in motherfucking New York City, honey.”

“Breaking?” he asked. Somehow, Garrett had the gall to speak after this reprimand. We exchanged major side-eye. It was a bad idea to fuck with Rhea.

“Could you please shut up,” Maya said, under her breath. The door opened and we pushed him in front of us.

“You live here?” he said.

“Welcome,” Tres growled, and opened the door to the apartment.

We tried to make ourselves comfortable in the living room. Ursa put a kettle on, like she always did when she was stressed. Garrett did not sit. He paced the length of the apartment, which made the whole scene tight and dire. It was not a good look. None of us were sure whether we should start getting out of drag or not, if we should start counting our money. The breach of trust that this man had created by entering our sacred space was more and more damaging by the second, and our resentment toward him—and toward Maya—swelled.

“Okay, first off,” Rhea said. “Don’t fucking touch anything that doesn’t belong to you. This is not your home, and this is not your space. You are a visitor here, and you will act as such until we teach you how to handle the breaking. When we are confident that you have control of yourself, you will leave, and not come back.”

“You’re experiencing Breaking,” Ursa said, bringing a tray of teacups and a steaming hot pot into the room and setting it down on the coffee table. She served us each a cup as she spoke. “At least, that’s what we call it. You’re a werewolf, for lack of a better term. We don’t really like to use that word—it’s reductive and dehumanizing—but that’s essentially what’s happening to you. You will break—turn—every month at the full moon. More often until you get a handle on the wolf inside you.”

“How do I get better?” Garrett asked. We had clearly confirmed his worst fears.

“You don’t,” Tres said, and sipped her tea.

“What do you mean? There’s gotta be a cure, right?” he said, voice cracking.

Ursa poured him a cup of tea and pushed it into his hand.

“I know it’s tough,” Maya said. “But we can help you—”

“Fuck you,you’re the one who got me sick,” he spat.

“Language,” Ursa said, as calmly as she could. She sat on the couch next to Maya and held her hand. Maya was trembling, trying to keep herself under control.

“Rule number two: you treat us with respect, or we turn you out before you’re ready,” Rhea said with authority. “No more of this homophobic, toxic masculinity bullshit you’re serving. And trust me,” Rhea said. “You need our help.”

Garrett glared at her. “Fine.”

“Good,” Rhea said. “Managing this conditionis fully a matter of self-control. We will work with you—at our own expense, by the way, so you’re welcome—for the next few weeks to teach you how we handle the breaking, and what to do during a full moon.”

“What if—what if I killed someone already?” Garrett stammered, fear again in his voice.

Rhea leaned forward, pulled the man close to her, and sniffed. “This is deer blood. Lucky break. Now, call your family. Tell them your trip has been extended, that you’ll see them as soon as you can. And remember: discretion.”

The man nodded and got up to go into the kitchen, dialing a number on his cell.

“Don’t think we won’t kill you to keep ourselves safe,” Lex called after him.

“Please,” Ursa interrupted. “I think we’ve had enough violence for now.”

Lex crossed her arms.

Over the next few days, Garrett learned as best as he could how to control his emotions. Apparently, he had never felt like it was okay to even acknowledge his emotions at all, much less known how to control them. We would have pitied him for that, if it weren’t such a huge problem. He listened when he wanted to, which was more and more often. He and Maya became close. Terribly close. A little too close, we thought.

For a week, we ran Garrett through the gamut: how to control each break until he had found safe cover, where to stash extra clothes for the next day, how to gracefully back out of a conflict (some of us were still working on that one). The more he learned, the more optimistic and kind he became. The more human to us. We marveled when one night we came in to find him braiding Lex’s short hair in the living room, the two of them laughing at an old re-run of The Addams Family. We were even more shocked when the sound of glass shaking in the kitchen cupboards echoed through the apartment one night, and we peeked out of our doorways to find the blue light of the open fridge spilled out onto the kitchen floor, broken into long shadows by Maya’s bare legs lined up with Garrett’s. One of her broad hands pulling his bare ass back and back again against her body, the other buried in his sandy hair, his ear pressed hard against the freezer door, his face screwed up, small moans of pleasure from them both as they rocked against the appliance, Ursa’s many crystal vases clattering in the cabinets above. We exchanged looks as best as we could in the dark, then slipped back into bed.

When we got up the next morning, Miss Maya was sitting on the couch in the living room, a piece of scrap paper in her hand. She was smoking a cigarette, something she only ever did after someone dumped her.

“He left,” she said. She held up the piece of paper. Thanks for everything, three cold words in chicken scrawl. Tres scowled. Ursa climbed onto the couch with Maya, touched her knee. Lex was silent.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t do anything stupid,” Rhea said, and poured herself a shot of tequila. And that was that. There was no news of Garrett for days.

Until there was.

We were at brunch, after a particularly lucrative show the night before. We’d finished eating and gossip hung heavy in the air. It was almost time for the menu to change over to dinner, and all of us were feeling tipsy, loose and bright. All was right with the world, for the moment, at least.

“That opener,” said Tres. “Do you think she knew her weave was all fucked?”

“Her? Please,” Ursa reached out to touch Tres’s elbow. “Honey I don’t even know if that wasa weave.”

“Girl needs some practice,” Maya agreed, smiling snidely. “And a mirror.”

“Such shade,” Lex said and tutted, then smiled. Maya flicked the umbrella from her drink at her.

Rhea didn’t say anything. She was staring at the TV above the bar.

Garrett’s face was on the news, along with the caption, SEARCH FOR SUSPECT CONTINUES.Our mouths dropped, and Tres gasped. Rhea waved and got the bartender’s attention. The screen cut to footage of helicopters circling a white clapboard house. Yellow police tape fenced off the crime scene. Police swarmed like ants on the yard.

“Could you turn it up for a second?” she asked, her voice flat. We held our breath.

The bartender nodded and turned up the TV.

…earlier this morning, when police responded to a 911 call from a neighbor after they heard screams coming from the house,a male news anchor was saying. When authorities entered the house, they found the suspect’s wife, Sandy Keller, and the Kellers’ three young children, Christine, Megan, and Johnathan, had been slashed open and left to die in what is seemingly one of the most brutal murders that Rochester has experienced in the last decade. We go live now to Patty, who is on the scene. Patty?

The report cut to a tearful interview with the neighbor, and we turned to each other. None of us knew what to say. Had we not trained him well enough? Did he not listen to anything we had taught?

The TV showed a cop with a serious expression, giving some kind of official statement.

Our main suspect, Garrett Keller, is still at large. We have a warrant for his arrest. Anyone with information should call Rochester PD. It is not clear whether the suspect is armed, but he is considered dangerous, the sheriff said.

Rhea thanked the bartender and passed him a ten dollar bill.

“This is not good,” she said, and the rest of us nodded, suddenly sober.

We took a car home together. We were anxious and tense, and we needed to be somewhere it was safe to discuss logistics. If he did get caught, and he would, what if he outed us? What if he didn’t plan to out us, but he got hurt in the scuffle, and needed to go to the hospital? We couldn’t have doctors finding out about what he was, even if he did keep his mouth shut, which we didn’t trust to begin with. Where there was one werewolf, odds are there was another. Or five others, in our case. We didn’t want to split up.

“Maybe he won’t get caught,” Ursa suggested as the car pulled up in front of our building. Tres snorted.

“Yeah,” Ursa said, in a resigned tone. “You’re right.”

We thanked the driver and got out, started to walk up the steps to the door.

“Wait,” Rhea said with such authority that we all froze in place, our breath caught. Fear vibrated off us.

A shadow moved in the darkness of the alcove where the door to our apartment building was.

“Who’s there?” Rhea said.

The shadow stepped out into the light. Garrett.

He was wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, khakis and penny loafers. His eyes were wild, and his face and hands were still bloody from the morning.

Rhea tucked one hand into the pocket of her jacket, where she kept her cell phone and a switchblade.

“Please help me,” he said. “I have nowhere else.”

“Why did you kill them?” Maya said, her voice cracking. When we looked, we could see that she had started to cry. “Why would you do that?”

Garrett stepped forward and we all stepped back instinctively. His face fell. He seemed hurt by our retreat. “I wasn’t trying to—I didn’t want to be alone,” he said. “I was trying to turn them.” He glanced at Maya. “Like how you did with me.”

He stepped toward us and we stepped back. “I don’t know who I am anymore. After all this and then that night—“

“Don’t you darefucking blame this on that,” Maya growled. Lex reached out a steadying hand. “You’re the one that wanted to hook up to begin with.”

“I was confused—”

“So you went home and slaughtered your family?” Tres said. “Confusion doesn’t justify murder, you asshole.”

We were all quiet for a moment. A siren wailed in the distance. The wail became louder.

“You didn’t,” Garrett said, and Rhea held up her cell phone.

“I’ve had this text drafted since I saw the news,” she said. “I knew you’d try to come back here.” “You’re my family,” Garrett said. “You said. We’re family.”

“No,” Rhea said. She turned and gestured to all of us. “Thisis my family. You are an unfortunate accident, one who only thinks about himself. You don’t know what it means to be in a family. You just murdered your own children, for fuck’s sake. How dare youtalk to me about family.”

He clenched and unclenched his fists, looked wildly at each of us. Then he settled on Maya.

“Baby,” he said.

Maya spat on the ground. “Don’t even fucking start with me.”

The cop car turned down the street and Garrett cursed, pushed past us to run, but it was no use. Soon the cop ran him down, threw his body to the concrete and read him his rights. We turned away. We never liked seeing anyone get arrested.

A few months passed. The news would not let up about the Rochester Ripper, the name they had given Garrett, thanks to the gruesome state he’d left his family in after he broke in front of them. His trial was widely publicized, and there was nationwide coverage of the grim affair. We had go bags ready, in case things took a turn for the worse, but even still, we weren’t sure where we could go that this nightmare wouldn’t follow. Europe, maybe. South America. But odds were good that if a werewolf craze broke out in the U.S., and there was even a little proof, we would never have a safe place to break in peace again. We would all end up like the Lady Twain, or worse. At best, we knew we would never see each other again. A whole pack, a drag house, is too easy to find. We watched the proceedings from our apartment, in a black mood.

Garrett took the stand. After he answered some basic logistical questions (where were you when it happened, why did you run), the information Garrett began to share made us tremble.

“Mr. Keller,” the prosecutor said with a voice like a knife. “Why were you in Brooklyn the night you were arrested? What were you doing there, a full five-hour drive from your home? Were you attempting to find shelter from the law?”

Garrett looked terrible. His months in jail had not treated him well. His beard was nearly full, and his blonde hair had become stringy and matted with sweat. He had scratches all over his face, arms, and hands. From breaking, we knew. According to the news reports, Garrett had been kept in solitary confinement out of safety for the other prisoners, and probably out of some cruel sense of retaliation. Some said he had even bene forced to wear a straightjacket, because of all the self-harming he was doing. We cringed at that. The idea of having to break inside of a straightjacket was more than horrible. We wondered how many bones he had broken in the process. From the looks of him, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

“I was there because,” Garrett started, then looked down at his hands for a moment. We prayed he didn’t sell us out. “I was there to see some friends. People I thought were my friends. People who were trying to help me.”

“So where to? Canada first, then Iceland?” Maya said, her voice flat. She sat on the couch with her arms crossed, uncrossing them every so often to take a drag from her cigarette.

Lex put a finger up to her lips and hissed. We all listened, hard.

“According to the arrest report, the person who called the police was named Ryan Bisby, a local drag queen better known as Rhea Bilitation,” the prosecutor said, pacing the floor.

“He butchered my name,” Rhea grumbled, and Tres put a hand on her shoulder. “RayBilitation? What the fuck is Ray Bilitation? There’s no pun there, it’s not even pretty!”

“Mr. Keller, are you homosexual?” the prosecutor asked, a cruel twist of the knife in his voice. Garrett blanched, and he continued, “Were you having an affair with this person?”

“Jesus Christ,” Maya said.

“Here it comes,” Ursa said, and squeezed Rhea’s hand.

“Objection!” cried the defense lawyer. “This is irrelevant to my client’s case.”

“Sustained,” the judge said, surprising us all. Maybe she was our ally in the courtroom.

The prosecutor did not look amused. “Then what were you doing there?” he said.

Garrett took a deep breath, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Then he set his hands down and answered. “I just drove as far away from Rochester as I possibly could. I didn’t care where. I figured the city was as good a place to try to get lost as any, and so I went there. I picked the first house I got to and tried to break in. They came home too soon. I panicked when I saw the cops and I ran,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the whole story. I don’t know them. They seemed like good people.”

“Oh my god,” Rhea said. Maya shed a tear. Lex’s hand went to her mouth.

“He didn’t sell us out,” Ursa said. Tres narrowed her eyes at the screen.

The prosecutor looked skeptical. “Interesting,” he said. “So, you’d never seen them before you showed up on their particular doorstep that day looking for a place to hide?”

“Right.”

The prosecutor grinned.

“That is a truly remarkable answer, Mr. Keller,” he said, back to pacing, confident. “You see, the police received an anonymous tip from someone who mentioned they had seen you and some friends about three months before the attack. They saw you get into an altercation with a group of drag queens, including the aforementioned Rhea Bilitiation, outside of a Williamsburg gay bar.”

“Oh fuck,” Rhea said, and we were all thinking it, too.

The courtroom was silent, except for the sound of the prosecutor’s pacing steps. He stopped. “Well?”

Garrett came unraveled. He told it all, from the initial bite to the cohabitation to the training to the fucking to the killing. His eyes were wide, and the whole time, he clawed at himself, digging new red lines into the skin of his face. He did his best to explain the process of breaking—he was getting so worked up even talking about it that we thought maybe he would break right there, on camera, for all the world to see. But he kept it together, enough that he didn’t start to turn. When he was done, breathless and weeping, the court was silent once more.

Rhea turned the television off, her expression more tired than anything else. It was over for us, what we’d had here. We’d have to run. But not that day. We spent the rest of that day together, drinking and telling stories about our greatest shows. Smoking all of our cigarettes and draining what booze we had, music turned way up loud. We wanted to be together for one last day. We’d leave in the morning.

We rose before the sun came up, all of us dreadfully hungover, all of us packed and ready to go. Rhea fried up an egg for each of us. Ursa, tears in her eyes, poured cups of tea. One last meal. We were less ready to let go than we wanted to admit.

Tres clicked on the television.

“What’s the verdict?” Maya asked.

Tres flipped to a news channel covering the story.

ROCHESTER RIPPER PLEADS INSANITY,the screen read.

“Whoa, hey, turn it up,” Maya said, but Tres was already on it. Hope spiked in our hearts.

“And that’s the thing about these kinds of killers,” a dark-skinned woman in a smart suit was explaining. The description under her name read: FBI Agent, Criminal Profiler.“Sometimes they become so disconnected from reality, and the reality of what they’ve done to their victims, that they truly start to believe in an alternate reality, one in which they are the victim. One in which they have no control over their actions.”

The blonde news anchor nodded along. “It’s just terrible, what’s happened in Rochester,” she said. “But at least now the community is getting some justice.”

“And the killer is getting help from the good people at the Rochester Psychiatric Center,” the FBI agent agreed. “Rehabilitation is key in these cases. Perhaps by the end of his life, he will be able to come to terms with what he’s done.”

Rhea smiled. “You heard what they said: Rhea Bilitation is key in these cases.”

“So we’re not leaving?” Ursa asked, her joy evident in her tone.

“We’re staying right here!” Maya shouted. She unzipped her suitcase and dumped out the contents, spilling makeup and glitter everywhere. The rest of us did the same. We all felt so full of light, of justice. We looked around at each other, safe again in our home, with our family, in our House. We would go out and slay tonight, that was a given. But for now, we threw our heads back and we howled.

0 notes

queermequeeryou · 5 years

Photo

Chapter two: Firestarter

[music]

Chela woke up as usual, with the first rays of light at about five o’clock. She put on her worn up slippers and lit a cigar instead of preparing proper breakfast. She only put an electric kettle on the gas in order to make black coffee. Few minutes later, a brunette, young man came into the kitchen as well trying to wash away tiredness by rubbing his eyes. Canek was surprisingly busy those days. Chela was looking at him suspiciously for a while. He was like a son for her, therefore she was worried. “Morning, ¿Demasiado temprano? Or should I ask why have you been coming back so late recently?” she leaned on the windowsill holding up her cigarette. “Too early. I found new extra job, you know.” he said looking for something unclassified because his tiredness made him think to slow. “Water’s just boiled if you need coffee.” she put the cigar in her mouth and took the kettle, then poured water into her glass as well as to the other one she picked up. “What kind of job is it?” Asked Chela while handing him his coffee. “Well, nothing much. Just some guard thing” “Where?” Chela was not very happy. “Local bar. They needed a guy for the entry.” he sipped a bit from the glass. “Canek, it’s not a good idea. First of all, you have to be alive each morning to look after the production and also cooperate. You need to control the additional sales. It’s too risky. Somebody can find out. You know, some clubbing kids can ask you about buying openly because they heard you have it and other guards would hear it. We are done then. Besides, this buffoon lady will kill us all if anything spoils out. “Ayy, Chela. Don’t preach. Everything is under control. I need extra money. It’s really nice, I can look for girls, we have free drink after work...” “Free drinks are not for you because you come back home right after you finish your shift and go to fucking bed because you have your job in the morning. Is it understandable?” she said in a very serious tone. “Chela, don’t overreact. I’m not a kid, I know how to take care of my shit and our shit. You can trust me”. “If I wouldn’t trust you, who in this fucking world I would?” she said more to herself looking ahead. “You have ten minutes.” She said and left the kitchen to finish her coffee and smoke one more cigarette in the living room. Chela knew Canek lied about girls but they have never spoken about that.

Coco was hoping to go partying with her girlfriend but she informed her that she is having some preparations for the job because she got through to the next part of the recruitment process. She decided to spend an evening with her friends and talk about make-up and new relationships within the rich society. As the evening was slowly coming, Loca started to prepare for her date with Augusta. It was actually the first time she was thinking that she really broke the line with all these courtships. It could cost her a lot if the gossips about Augusta’s taste would be all tonterías or if she would not be interested. Everything could come out and it would make her lose Coco and what was more important, his father’s business could suffer from it as well. Most of the affairs there were depending on what other important and rich people would think and say. Nevertheless, it was too hard for her to not try. It was like a dream. Every young girl wants to meet an American actor and fall in love with him. Loca was having kinda a flashback attitude to this. Obviously, it was different because she was going to sleep with Augusta but majority of Mexico City knew who she was. And she was not a celebrity, more of a businesswoman and a successful person but still her fame was almost everywhere and whenever she goes out somewhere she is catching eyes and some people even take photos of her with the mobile phone. Loca put on a black shirt, used some cologne and put up her hair with a styling gum. Lastly, she added her wooden beaded bracelets and signets. She was ready. The butler took her to the address she said - four numbers further than Lagos mansion, opposite side of the road. When Loca reached el hogar de Lagos, she ringed the bell. Augusta herself opened the door. She was looking stunning in a tight dress, stocking that were visible from underneath it and strong make-up. The smell of expansive perfumes immediately came to Loca’s nostrils. “Welcome en mi casa. I’m glad we can discuss the business” she said in a very serious tone. Without further a do, she begun to pour red wine to the glasses. Loca took a look through the rooms.They were wonderful, very rich and looked a bit like a classic art museum. With all her appreciation, Loca was quite surprised anyone is able to live in those interiors. Augusta was probably very lonely most of the time. Loca was appreciating the paintings on the wall when Augusta came finally and handed her the glass. The dame put the curtains on and took a sip of her drink. “Do you like them?” she asked surprisingly. “Yes. They look peculiar. I like campy things. This may seem like the reason why is the choice of the colors but I think there’s something more.” replied Loca focusing on the art piece. “You know something about it, I see.” Augusta was not expecting any kind of wisdom from this rich, spoiled girl but she probably judged her poorly. “I was an art curator before I met Manuel. I studied in Venice. Well, afterwards I stood by my passion collecting paintings.” “Did you also paint by yourself?” asked Loca and turned her face towards the woman. Augusta was not expecting that she will be speaking with Loca at all. The plan was different but something pushed her into the conversation, Maybe, a loneliness was the real reason why she was wearing her wide range of masks. She looked on her glass and again on the young woman. “I used to. For a short period.” this question triggered some harsh throwbacks she was not expecting. She drunk the rest from the glass in a one sip and look into Loca’s eyes. Loca was enjoying the conversation but she understood her place. She took another sip, really huge one and put a glass on the table as well. Loca put her hands on Augusta’s hips and kissed her lips passionately. The woman’s cheeks became redder which was quite unexpected but they decided to speak no more. Loca sat her on the table and kissed while the older woman was leaning back and moaning. Augusta unzipped Loca’s trousers breathing heavily. She stood up and took her hand to show where the bedroom was. Loca took off her dress. Underneath she had a very elegant bra and stockings that were matching also the pants. Loca took off her trousers where she had black Calvin Klein trunks. Augusta unzipped her shirt were there was no bra because the younger woman has had this great, small body features almost every tomboy or butch would kill for. The older woman smiled and kissed her. Loca massaged her gently to the point Augusta was satisfied and then the older woman went down on her. Young Lopez held her head while she was doing that. When she finished, Augusta took a tissue to fix her lips and looked to the mirror that stood on a bedside table to check if her make-up is still on fleek. She came back to bed and they continued. They laid down for a while. Loca kissed her hand. “Would you like to come by soon again?” asked finally Augusta. “Would you allow me to invite you for an art exhibition first? Then, we can enjoy ourselves like tonight”. Augusta was quite surprised. “You are too brave, Lauren” she said quite impressed by her. “Loca” replied a younger woman and brushed short, black hair with her right hand. “Nobody calls my Lauren except my parents.” “Well, it suits you better at least” was Augusta’s response. “We can go to an exhibition first but you’re not inviting me. We just go. I have an entry for an opening of Damien Hirst new thing. I will send you the details via e-mail you attached in your application. It’s on Friday.” “Two days and I will see you again, than” said Loca looking into Augusta’s eyes and kissed her gently. There was something that was cutting her inside in that woman. “I gotta go now.” she took her phone and made a call to her butler. “He’s going to be there in a quarter. I have time for a little extra”. Augusta felt strange when she was closing the door behind Loca. Like the loneliness she was feeling inside was finally hitting her in the hardest possible way. She was not stupid. She was not young. It was the most silly idea right now to get involved. Manuel’s death, meeting with Chela, lies, playing the role of a perfect wife for all these years. It was all too much even for her. The fighter, The warrior. She got back to the room, closed the doors to her bedroom so the servants will not disturb her and burst into tears.

A masked man was walking through the darkness. He got gasoline, he got matches.

#queermequeeryou #lesbians #lesbian #lgbt #story #Geometria polisentimental #writer #queer

0 notes

amorremanet · 7 years

Note

10 facts about Sara Grace?

“ten facts about my characters” meme

1. Her birthday is March 20th, 1993 — she was born on the Pisces side of the Pisces/Aries cusp (the Cusp of Renewal), on the day that The Secret Language of Birthdays (Gary Goldschneider & Joost Elffers) calls, “The Day of the Labyrinth.”

Unlike most of the other characters (whose opinions on astrology differ but largely boil down to, “It’s silly, but it’s harmless”), Sara Grace actually cares about it and kind of does believe in it. She can’t decide if she agrees with the, “It’s silly” crowd, if she genuinely believes, or if she wants to believe in it so much that she’s made herself feel like she genuinely believes.

2. She and Lucy have been dating for a little over two years by the time they get introduced about midway through the first book, and Sara Grace…… she doesn’t NOT care about their anniversary? But she puts more effort into their matching Halloween costumes.

Their first Halloween together (2013), she was the fem!Mulder and Lucy was Scully.

Last year (2014), Sara Grace was Ariel and Lucy was her “kinda experimenting with butch but really unsure of herself in it and also trying not to be too obviously gay because her parents are on Facebook and privacy settings are a crapshoot” fem!Eric.

This year, they’re planning to go as Lady and Lady Macbeth — i.e., Sara Grace will be the Lady Macbeth we all know as Lady Macbeth, and Lucy will be her “still unsure about this butch thing but curious and trying it out” fem!Macbeth.

Mulder and Scully was a joint idea, inspired by one of the sororities on their campus holding a, “dress as your favorite 90’s TV characters”-themed Halloween party, but the other two Halloween costumes were all Sara Grace’s idea.

3. Her full given name is Sara Grace Nichelle Kelley — with “Sara Grace” being a double-name like “Mary Ellen” or, “Seung Gil” or so on. Her mother picked all of it out, Nichelle for Nichelle Nichols (…because Amanda is an old school Trekkie), and “Sara Grace” because she always wanted to name her first daughter, “Sara Grace,” and then thought it was extra amusing after she married Bryce Kelley, because the spelling might be different, but it made her name sound like the better-known maiden name of Princess Grace of Monaco.

Sara Grace herself has mixed feelings about this. Like, on one hand, it made using her full given first name hard to successfully do when she was in trouble because Amanda and Bryce never stopped kind of finding the, “Grace Kelley” part of their first daughter’s name hilarious (and “Sara Grace Nichelle Kelley” is admittedly kind of a mouthful, so it also wasn’t ideal for when she was in trouble).

But on the other hand, it’s made Sara Grace kind of hate things like going to the DMV or filling out forms, because other people will notice the, “Grace Kelley” thing and find it funny or cool, and yeah, it was pretty cool for a while when she was younger — especially because she totally wanted to be a princess when she grew up and still kind of has a Thing for princesses, and hey, her Mom named her after a real life princess, kind of — but now, it’s just tedious.

Like, please, she’s either “Sara Grace” or, “Ms. Kelley,” not the full thing, if it can be avoided, please, please, please.

(And this isn’t an in-universe fact, but OOCly, Sara Grace was named for my older goddaughter, and her surname came from my aunt [who is the mother of both of my goddaughters], I just added the ‘E’ because I’ve always seen, “Kelley” more often for when it’s a surname, and then I read the whole thing and saw the “Grace Kelly” business and went, “lmao, I’m keeping it”)

4. Sara Grace’s mutant superpowers are primarily based in either speed and, well, grace (as in: balance, equilibrium, steadiness, etc), OR in sound.

She’s not quite a potentially game-breaking speedster on the level of the Flash or XMCU!Quicksilver, but a big reason for this is that she hasn’t ventured out into mutant superheroics. Up until she makes the choice to do that in the story, she’s been one of the mutants who just want to go to school or work, hang out with their friends, watch The Daily Show or whatever they like, and live their lives without all of the crime-fighting stuff — so, she hasn’t trained everything up as much as she could do.

What this means is that…… yeah, she’s still fast, and it still falls outside three standard deviations of the human mean, even though she’s not a trained sprinter or anything (which is the most common test for, “is this thing a mutant superpower or is someone just really good at whatever they’re doing”), but she’s not as fast as she could be and doesn’t always have the hang of things like stopping, maneuvering at high speeds, not getting hit in the face by insects, etc.

Her biggest reason why she initially didn’t want to run headlong into superheroics came down to protecting and taking care of herself, because her abilities have serious downsides that can be difficult for her to manage and that can be really stress-inducing. But they’re also going to be under the read-more because they involve why it sucks to be a speedster who’s struggled with eating disorders.

Her sonic powers are a bit more trained up, partly because it’s easier to do that without getting on the wrong side of what she is and isn’t allowed to do with her class of superpower license — and partly because, although she’s primarily a dancer, she does love to sing and she’s usually pretty vocally expressive.

For the most part, she tends to limit her use of these powers to the ones that have cool potential uses but are a lot less awesome than, say, debilitating super-screams (which she can do, but would usually prefer not to, not least because she’s not trained up in it so she can’t really control it).

Like, one of her favorite party tricks and “getting to know you” ice-breakers is admitting she’s a mutant just enough to do a perfect imitation of different celebrity voices (as in, “you could have experts compare a legit recording of any given celebrity to Sara Grace’s superpowered recreation of their voice, and the experts would almost definitely NOT be able to tell the difference, because superpowers”)

Lucy first noticed her because Sara Grace was at a party being hosted by mutual friends, and during some game that Lucy wasn’t actually participating in, one of the other players asked Sara Grace to do a William Shatner voice and read some selection for a purple prose-y bodice ripper…… and she did, and it was awesome, and Lucy had to go find out who that girl was, holy shit

But yeah. All up, Sara Grace has the potential to be a serious power-house — she’s not going to get quite to Flash-levels of game-breaking speedster, but that’s on the world-building, not her, because there are some things that super-speedsters can do that I’m just not letting anybody do — but when she’s first introduced, she lacks training.

Even without training, she shouldn’t be dismissed as a possible threat (which Conrad is going to do, but in fairness, the only team members he sees as potential threats are Seb and Josie, because Josie is a telepath like Conrad and ruling Josie out as a threat might require Conrad to admit that maybe he’s not that great, and if you ask Conrad, Seb can’t overpower him or get any kind of jump on him, not least since he’s proven himself to be incredibly vulnerable to telepathy, but he might ruin things with his insistence on refusing all of Conrad’s offers to team up as proper nemeses in the name of the Greater Good and by being all concerned about other people and shit)

Like, seriously. If you ask Conrad: Todd, Stephen, Margot, and Pete are in no way threats to him because none of them is a mutant, and the only reason that he deigns to acknowledge them at all is that Sebastian insists on being a bleeding heart weirdo and won’t let Conrad ignore them

Lucy isn’t a threat to him because she’s inexperienced and confused and more likely to hurt herself than anyone else because she tries to run headlong into things like she lives in a Silver Age comic book and then gets in over her head and reality kicks her in the shins and takes her lunch money

Alexandra isn’t a threat because her ability to resist any telepathic attacks isn’t as strong as Conrad assumed it was at first, and she tries harder to stick to the rules than any of the other major cast members, save Holmes, who kinda has to respect the rules because he’s the resident boss man

(—this is not actually true of Alex, and the fact is that she favors her own personally determined code of ethics over externally imposed rules, but Conrad is wrong about a lot of things, so…… his opinions are just bad in general, so it’s not exactly weird that he’s wrong about Alex)

Julian, Annie, and Dylan aren’t threats because they’re on the same team as Conrad, despite all of them having some major disagreements and differences of opinion with him, and even when S.T.R.O.M.A. gets Dylan (which they would not have done if not for Conrad tipping Julian and Annie off about a bust that S.T.R.O.M.A. and the DEA are collaborating on, but completely forgetting Dylan as more than, “Julian’s sidekick who constantly looks like he’s only two seconds off from crying, whatever, Julian will handle it”), Conrad doesn’t think it’s any kind of problem because he assumes that these three are his minions and that, all disagreements aside, their loyalty is absolute

This………… really doesn’t work out so well

And you’d think that Conrad might get a reality check after getting arrested before Julian does and before Annie is even properly on the radar as more than, “one of the daughters of that one douchebag who’s trying to get the Republican nomination; she’s the party girl to her eldest sister’s Responsible Adult With A Cool Head and her twin’s, ‘well she wants to think she’s a serious journalist but lbr she just has a webshow where she yells at people and throws a lot of conservative buzzwords around like she knows what she’s talking about’”

—and you would be wrong. Like, yeah, you would be completely wrong.

But Conrad’s refusal to get a reality check is a totally different story

and Sara Grace isn’t a threat to him because she’s nothing but a pretty face with an anxiety disorder, who’s too scared of her true, untapped power to use it, even in the name of the Greater Good, and too scared of her own potential to accomplish anything, and probably just pretending to be a lesbian because she wants to piss off her parents or she thinks it makes her more interesting to guys or something

………Actually, Amanda and Bryce have never been anything but completely supportive, and Sara Grace has no interest in making men find her interesting because (and this gets complicated, Conrad, so you might want to sit down) she is not attracted to men

But, again, Conrad’s opinions are usually fifty shades of wrong and gross, so him dismissing Sara Grace as a potential threat because she’s untrained and has an anxiety disorder is just another example of him being completely full of shit

5. Okay, so. I want to try to keep this one brief, because I’m doing it last and this post is already long enough that it’s starting to make Firefox lag on me while I’m typing and there’s a lot of potential angst in this post already. But one of the things that a lot of people don’t acknowledge about a lot of superpowers, especially speedy powers, is that it’d take a LOT of calories to fuel those. Even in some works where they do deal with it, they underestimate just how much energy it would actually take.

To be fair, I’m not going to manage this perfectly either because at a certain point, you have to suspend some parts of real-world physics and biology to make superpowers work, and it’s just not feasible to have almost all of your mutant heroes and villains constantly hooked up to IV lines so that they don’t die of malnutrition by simply existing while having superpowers

But I am going to deal with it more than a lot of superhero stuff tends to do, and Sara Grace is one of the characters who has more problems with it than average.

The big reason why she has more problems than average is that before her mutant abilities fully manifested (which was when she was about 17), she dealt with an eating disorder. This is also a big reason why she wound up not going into dance professionally, because one of her biggest triggers was how much pressure she felt to force her body to fit certain ideals and standards — and dude, she’s 5’10” and has been really tall for her entire life, so it was even harder to do this, because she was basically trying to restrict her diet and starve herself down to a weight that would’ve been on the low side for someone with her build who was six inches shorter

—but by the time her mutant superpowers started to manifest in full, Sara Grace had actually done really well in her therapy and treatment (and unlike some of the other characters who’ve dealt with similar kinds of struggles, whether ED’s or the more general, “problem where there’s some very obvious unhealthy manifestation that needs to get dealt with, but there are a lot of underlying emotional issues you need to address too”), and she had gotten to a place where she felt more or less okay…… and suddenly, superpowers everywhere

Like, it was hard enough for her to adjust her diet and her routines to accommodate the most basic-level, “existing with superpowers even if you don’t really use them that often” stuff, and then she knew she’d have to be adjusting to college in the near future — and she really, really didn’t want to end up in a hardcore relapse

So, from her perspective, the choices here kind of boiled down to, “You can get more training and a license that lets you be what is basically a superhero and help people, but do it at the expense of your own health,” and, “You can pass on that and take care of yourself” — and she picked taking care of herself

By the time she gets another choice to get involved in mutant superheroics or not, Sara Grace is at a more secure place than she was at 17/18, and she’s going to acknowledge that this is a potential risk but it’s one that she feels up to handling.

She’s not going to be wrong, but it’s going to be a mixed bag for her, mostly because…… well. She’s a human being and this means that she can’t perfectly predict anything, so there are some things that she’s prepared to deal with, some that she knew might happen and wasn’t entirely prepared for but she’s better equipped to handle them than she would’ve been back at 17/18, and some that totally blindside her

But she’s going to grow and deal with things because…… well, that’s what fictional characters do

6. Her top three favorite songs for karaoke night are “I Will Survive,” “Baby One More Time,” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” (if she can get Lauryn Hill’s version of it, then awesome, but if not, then any version of it will work just fine)

She has learned, however, that she should not try to sing “Freakum Dress” at karaoke while tipsy.

Honestly, the conclusion that Sara Grace should’ve drawn from the incident that led to that lesson? Was, “don’t try to do some complicated dance moves in hella high heels while so drunk that most other people would be flat on their asses, which for you means that you’re too drunk to pay attention to where your feet are, so you get tangled in the wires and fall over in the middle of your song”

But she was singing “Freakum Dress” at the time, and while she doesn’t generally do karaoke night while drunk most of the time anyway, she primarily took it to, “Don’t do drunk karaoke with ‘Freakum Dress’ as your song” because if you ask her, she only tried to do such complicated dance moves because she was singing “Freakum Dress”

That…… isn’t necessarily true, but it’s also not entirely untrue, either? It felt true to her at the time, at least.

She has also learned that making Lucy do a duet of, “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” won’t work exactly how she imagined that it would, because Lucy isn’t quite tone-deaf? But she can’t really sing that well, either, and in Sara Grace’s daydream that led to her doing this, they sounded great and had perfect harmonies and it was totally awesome…… but in reality, Lucy was off-beat and off-key, her tone wasn’t that great, and it was still pretty fun, but okay, her girlfriend can’t sing, lesson learned

7. She wouldn’t call herself the, “selfie queen,” exactly…… but literally only because she would prefer to be the, “selfie princess,” because yeah, okay, she has adult goals and dreams now (she’s working toward becoming a therapist with a specialty in art therapy), but she still kinda wants to be a princess when she grows up

8. As far as superpowers licenses go, Sara Grace has one that has more allowance for power incontinence and for using her abilities in to help out in emergency situations, but that is closer to the, “I’m seriously not going to do more than use heat vision to reheat my coffee, I don’t want this and would prefer to ignore it”

Power incontinence is like… okay, example: if Superman were minding his own business but one of his Kryptonian allergies got aggravated and he sneezed out ice breath or something? That would be power incontinence.

The term, in-universe, is usually used to cover things that might happen when someone can’t fully control their powers (e.g., Seb has to work to figure out what makes La Bête tick and get control over his beast-mode shifts)

or things that might happen in highly stressful situations (e.g., Josie usually has their telepathic and empathic abilities pretty well-controlled but can start slipping when they’re dealing with a lot of shit if they aren’t properly taking care of themself emotionally; and Yael might be in her eighties and one of the most respected mutants on the planet, but she still has a tendency to make electronics with magnetic parts start malfunctioning when she gets really angry)

This comes in handy because it covers things like all the times when Sara Grace doesn’t mean to rely on her super-attuned send of balance but she also can’t really turn it off

Like, if she were ever in the position to do so (which she doesn’t plan to be, but that’s another story), she could pass the physical parts of field sobriety test while totally drunk, but she’d stumble on anything that involves any talking to the officer

Because her body might be way more stable than it should be but that won’t rein in how easily distracted she gets when she’s drunk (like… no, honey, the officer did not ask for you to do your dramatic reenactment of Det. Olivia Benson’s entire personal history through wherever you are in watching SVU if you aren’t up to date on it, complete with doing Mariska Hargitay’s voice, and this really isn’t helpful)

…and being able to walk in a straight line while her head is reeling and her perception is distorted doesn’t mean that she won’t be slurring her words

—And if she had a more restrictive license, she could get in trouble for relying on her super-balance in this situation because in most places, “using superpowers to pass a field sobriety test, even if you don’t actually pass it” would count as more than, “I just want to go home and use heat vision to reheat my coffee”

Not that this means that having coverage in her license type is a guarantee for her or anybody, because unfortunately, as we already know, way too many cops in the U.S. are complete fuck-wads against anyone who isn’t a straight, non-disabled, gender-conforming white guy

And since Sara Grace is a black femme lesbian who has mutant superpowers and no arrest record but some past involvement in protests and social activism, she would personally rather not test whether or not any given cops would be deterred from trying to charge her for violating the terms of her superpowers license by the fact that hers covers her super-balance because she cannot turn it off

Her introductory scene is actually going to address these fears, somewhat. See, Sara Grace and Lucy are brought into the story’s narrative on October 15th, 2015 — a Thursday evening, which they had planned to spend at an open-air concert at a park in Baltimore, and then they wanted to go back to Lucy’s together because she’s lived at home after their graduation in May, but her parents are out of town and the only other member of the Murphy family who might come around is Damien, who already knows that Lucy and Sara Grace are together.

Incidentally, that Thursday evening was also going to be date-night for Seb and Stephen, who were going to the symphony because Seb’s parents had tickets that they couldn’t use and eldest brother Max would need a third for his daughter (and for the show to not be at 8PM on a school night), sister Addie doesn’t have anyone she’d actually want to take, and middle brother Ambrose moved to Vermont when he got a job teaching at a private school up there. Much like Lucy and Sara Grace, Seb and Stephen really just wanted to have a nice time together.

Sucks for them, though, because there was a supervillain attack at the concert.

I’m still hammering out the exact details of what actually happens in said attack, but the really important point, plot-wise, is that the perp (who wound up apprehended pretty quickly) wasn’t acting of his own free will, but had gotten telepathically taken over and forced to do it by everyone’s least favorite douchebag, Conrad.

That’s not immediately apparent, though, and for the time being, Sara Grace is more concerned with the shit that’s going on right now — a list that includes:

how she used her powers to try and get some of the other civilians out of harm’s way

how the supervillain of the day tried to stop her and wound up with damaged eardrums because Sara Grace screamed and couldn’t control how powerful it was

(it’s frankly a miracle that it only hurt the supervillain, since one of the potential risks of sonic abilities is how they can affect people other than the intended target and Sara Grace wasn’t consciously targeting anyone)

how she and Lucy wound up incapacitating the villain long enough for cops to get him in cuffs so they could eventually hand him off to S.T.R.O.M.A. officials (which is a GOOD thing, yes, and this kind of situation should fall under the emergency provisions that Sara Grace’s license has, but she’s incredibly wary and also kind of an anxious mess following all of this, so that wariness gets magnified by a power of ten)

and how Lucy did so with powers she didn’t even know she had, got injured in the process, and then passed out while her healing factor kicked in, but was still injured enough to get stitches after getting taken to the hospital

So, suffice it to say, Sara Grace is not exactly in the best and calmest state of mind when a beautiful dark-skinned woman (who kind of looks like she’d gotten home, taken off her work clothes, gotten relaxed, and then abruptly had to throw them back on…… largely because that is exactly what happened to Alex tonight) asks her to please leave her girlfriend’s bedside for a couple minutes, then brings her into the hallway, where she introduces Sara Grace to a really tall white guy in a nice suit and another white person who’s only slightly taller than Sara Grace, looks more like a guy than not, and has barely-noticeable lace on the trim of their collar, and all three of them pull out S.T.R.O.M.A. identification

Like, her immediate fear here is, “Oh, shit, are you going to arrest me, I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, hey, I can cite all the rules that say what I did was okay, I keep up on all of this…… did I do anything wrong? Did my screaming hurt someone else or something? What’s going on?”

……Actually, based on all the witnesses they’ve already heard from, Alex, Josie, and Seb are not even thinking of bringing Sara Grace into custody for anything. They more or less get why she’s scared (given that Alex and Josie have both dealt with S.T.R.O.M.A. officials being seriously unethical about recruitment and making it seem like they had to accept recruitment or get slapped with charges for violating their licenses, they’re REALLY not interested in doing that to someone else, especially not a terrified girl who’s trying really, really hard to talk tough and not doing as well as she could if she weren’t currently an anxious mess)

They’re literally just here to (loosely in order, but it’s really not official): 1. see if Sara Grace and Lucy are alright, or as alright as they can be after this horrible experience (which, frankly, most people aren’t prepared for because most supervillains don’t do this kind of out-in-the-open, Silver Age bullshit);

2. thank both of them for their assistance in saving lives and preventing more injuries and destruction;

3. collect their statements about the evening’s events, which neither of them is not obligated to give but they’d appreciate it anyway (and Sara Grace in particular has Alex’s promise that, whatever Sara Grace decides, Alex will do everything that she can to make sure that no one twists that choice to use it against her when she acted like a heroine tonight and should be praised, not punished);

and 4. offer them some information on counseling services, if they want it.

Like, the reason why Seb heads in to see Lucy alone is that Sara Grace does decide to share her recollection of what happened, but she’s still pretty tense as she tells it, so Josie asks if she’d feel more comfortable going to a different room, rather than a sofa in a visitors’ lounge, but her response is that she’d feel more comfortable if it was one-on-one or two-on-one, instead of three-on-one

Since Seb is standing, and more so because he’s the tall white guy, who Sara Grace can’t get a read on right away, so she’s not sure how she feels about him right now and, at the moment, that makes her feel uneasiest about him being around, Josie asks him to go see if the evening’s other heroine is alright and up for a talk

And Seb doesn’t mind because…… hey, if it makes Sara Grace feel a little less ill-at-ease after what she just went through? Then it’s not a big deal. He might mind a little more if he knew exactly who he’s going to see, but he literally only heard that Sara Grace’s girlfriend is named Lucy (which is a common enough name that he doesn’t even think, “Oh, she could be the Lucy who I used to know”)

—But this is only about four months after he went through his own episode of, “suddenly, superpowers everywhere, then S.T.R.O.M.A. gets involved and oh holy shit,” so while he’s definitely not in the same boat as Sara Grace, he appreciates that her comfort > his, right now

So, yeah.

Sara Grace is going to spend her introductory scene being an anxious mess and trying to keep it together, only to probably succeed for a while and then end up crying on either Alex or Josie, because she’s 22 and even after being reassured that she is absolutely not in trouble, she’s just had a very stressful evening when it was supposed to be a relaxing night with her girlfriend without Lucy’s Mom and Dad there to be homophobic and force the two of them to act like they’re Just Gals Being Pals, Totally Not Lesbians Or Dating Each Other, Nope, and she’s scared for herself and scared for her girlfriend and now that she’s thought about the idea that her scream could’ve hurt an innocent person, she’s scared that it might’ve happened, and jesus fucking christ, she’s a champ for making it all the way through her statement to Josie and Alex before she cries, I’d like to see any hypothetical naysayers do better in her position

9. Although she didn’t go into dancing professionally, like she wanted to when she was younger, dancing is still one of her favorite forms of stress-relief. Much like how Lucy sometimes hits a wall where she needs to tap out and go play Tetris until she can handle things like an adult again, Sara Grace hits walls where she needs to tap out and go work out her feelings and clear her head, and she prefers to do so with dancing, when she can.

Oddly enough, her love for dance made people think that she might be autistic when she was younger, even though she isn’t, while Lucy, who actually is autistic, went completely unnoticed

See, one of the more common and easily noticeable stims that kids on the spectrum engage in sometimes? Is walking on your toes for no reason that makes itself readily apparent to allistic adults.

Sara Grace, as a kid, wasn’t actually trying to walk on her toes. She was just in love with her kiddie ballet lessons, to the point that she turned every moment when no one stopped her into an excuse to practice something that she’d learned in class, and it sometimes looked like she was walking on her toes to the adults who had no idea what was going on.

Which led to her parents getting her tested, and granted, those tests are by no means 100% reliable…… but in this case, when the psychologist who talked to Sara Grace went, “Yeah, she isn’t autistic, she’s just really into her dancing and invested in giving it her all,” Dr. So-and-So happened to be right

10. She’s a cat person. If she could have a hundred cats without it becoming an issue for some reason, she would totally have a hundred cats, and then probably try to have more.

As it stands, she already has two of them — a tabby shorthair named Valerie (whether she named Val after the Zutons’ song or Valerie Brown of Josie and the Pussycats will depend on when you ask her, because Sara Grace has said both things before, as well as, “I don’t know, I just thought she felt like a Valerie, y’know?”) and a fluffy black longhair named Peppermint Patty (who doesn’t look like the Peanuts character and the resemblance between them is only apparent to Sara Grace, but when she found Patty at the shelter, she went, “You remind me of Peppermint Patty, that’s your name now”)

—and about the only reason she doesn’t have more babies is that it would cost money, and her current internship may not be unpaid but it still doesn’t pay very well. (Strictly speaking, the cousins she lives with would prefer it if she didn’t try to bring another cat home because of space concerns, but Sara Grace insists that she could find a way to make it work.)

Like, seriously? Much like Seb isn’t usually allowed to go to an ASPCA shelter alone because he might try to adopt yet another dog (even though he already has six and would have seven if his Chewie hadn’t passed away in March 2015), Sara Grace is not allowed near a shelter without a chaperone because she might try to do the same with kitties. When they get to know each other, they won’t be allowed to act as chaperones either, because Margot, Lucy, and Pete correctly assume that they’d enable each other, rather than act as impulse control.

Stephen is sorta kinda allowed to act as chaperone, but only for one of them at a time. It could be either one (though he’d have an easier time telling Sebastian that he doesn’t need another dog, simply because…… dude. six. it’s enough, you’re good.)

(Also, while Stephen likes all of his boyfriend’s dogs, he’s somewhat less fond of things like, “accidentally startling a nine-pound Yorkie because Achilles decided to take a nap on top of Stephen while he was taking a nap and Stephen didn’t notice”

or, “being woken up by a corgi-husky crossbreed trying, maybe succeeding but maybe not, to jump up into bed with Seb and Stephen, and trying to make Stephen come play with him, because Oscar has decided that Stephen is the new non-Seb favorite (at least, he’s tied with Seb’s Mom) and no, no, no, it’s not time for sleeping, it’s time for playing”

or, “eventually, trying to have an ~intimate moment~ — whether that means sex or not — with his boyfriend, only to get interrupted by Oscar waddling into Seb’s bedroom like he was invited by virtue of his Dad and New Favorite both being there, or by pit-mix Lola sticking her head in like, ‘Do you guys need anything? Snacks? A condom? Let me know!,’ or by Achilles whining at them for attention because he feels ignored”

—but that’s sort of beside the point, which was just that…… Yeah, no, Stephen would have a way easier time telling his boyfriend not to adopt another dog than he would, if he tried to tell Sara Grace that she doesn’t need another cat)

Anyway, Stephen won’t be allowed to chaperone both of them to the ASPCA shelter at once, because his reason will get overridden by how cute both of them are when they start looking at cute animals, and Sara Grace started getting teary about this one cat who’d been rescued off the streets after going through some vaguely defined Hell that Stephen didn’t hear all the details about, and Seb got making heart eyes at a little Jack Russell mix because they reminded him of his first dog (Toby), and Stephen tried to tell them not to, okay, he really tried, but they were being so cute and the animals’ stories were so sad and that’s why the team has two new animal companions???

—Fortunately, that’s never going to happen for realskis, because the rest of the team will veto the idea before it even gets off the ground, but…… yeah.

All three of these characters are actual facts adults, I swear

They just can’t act like it very well around cute things and especially not if the cute things involve animals

Sara Grace is also going to be low-key jealous that Seb can kind of talk to animals (…it’s not quite that simple, but that’s how this ability of his looks to her), and at some point, she’s probably going to ask him to translate her cats for her because she really wants to know that Peppermint Patty and Valerie know that she loves them, and then, she will be told that it doesn’t really work that way, but okay, he can try to do his best for her, if it makes her feel better? :/

And it does make her feel better, Seb. Thank you.

1 note · View note

artificialqueens · 7 years

Text

Cradle Ch.4 (Thorgy × Violet and Trixya by Vanguard)

Thank you to the Anon that asked about my story. I REALLY hope that the formatting behaves!

Part 4 Katya woke up with a jolt and looked around. He had no fucking clue where he was. He sat up and looked around. Instead of being in his bland white hotel room, he was in a room with shades of oranges and browns in a giant bed with a mountain of soft pillows. He also had a pair of flannel paw-printed pajamas on.

Then the truth of yesterday and what happened to Violet hit him like a punch in the gut. Like he normally did when there were bad feelings, he looked for a distraction which came in the form of padding out of the room in his barefeet and following the aroma of coffee and bacon.

He still couldn’t remember where he was. He turned off the hall into the kitchen to see Lee, the girl from last night, sitting at the small scrubwood table, reading the newspaper with a somewhat serious look on her face. She looked up at the sound of the floor creaking and gave Katya a small smile.

She got up and bustled in the kitchen for a moment before thrusting a plate of bacon, eggs and toast with the largest mug of coffee he had ever seen into his hands.

He sunk down into a chair beside her at the table and realized just how ravenously hungry he really was. The last time he’d eaten was about 18 hours ago so as much as his stomach was churning, he tucked into his breakfast.

“I’m sorry, you must have been so confused when you woke up! I just couldn’t bear for you to go back to a cold hotel room in your state. I hope that is ok?”

Katya nodded, his mouth too full of egg and toast to speak. Lee gave him a moment, looking nervous like he was going to be angry that she had given him shelter when he was upset instead of being abandoned to fend for himself at a hotel.

“It’s ok, thank you. When do you have to work today?” Katya was going to the hospital today but he didn’t know if she was in a rush to leave. He didn’t want to make her late.

“I actually took the day off, I don’t want you to be alone and you will only be able to visit Violet for 10 minutes per hour in the ICU so I thought it would be good for you to have company when you aren’t visiting them. I would be surprised if they weren’t in the ICU with their leg alone. Actually I work there so I might be able to get you a bit more time with them. I have connections.” She joked and then became serious, “Sorry, this probably isn’t the time for joking.”

Katya shook his head, “no, actually now is a good time for joking. If I didn’t joke when things were serious, I would just be crying nonstop. I have to call my boyfriend before we go. Also, nice pajamas.” he said, pulling the collar of his PJs up.

Her laugh was musical, “You were freezing so I lent you a pair of warm PJs, you said you didn’t want to go back into your room at the hotel because you and Violet were sharing a room.”

“Oh yeah,” Katya whispered, faintly remembering the conversation, at least he changed on his own this time.

“I think I have a few pairs of men’s jeans and some polo shirts if you don’t want to go to the hotel. I am a stereotypical lesbian sometimes, I’m so butch.” She joked, holding her arms away from her tall yet feminine frame.

Katya let out a little snort of laughter, “that would be great if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, later I’ll sell ‘em on ebay.” She teased. “I’ll go see what I have and throw it on the bed. There is a shower off the bedroom.”

“Ok.”

She left and Katya pushed his plate away, resting his elbows on the table and leaning his chin on his hands.

Last night was the most horrible night of his life, even worse than withdrawals when he first came off of drugs because it was happening to someone he cared about instead of himself. He couldn’t control the suffering someone else he cared for was feeling.

He remembered rushing into the hospital with Lee who probably broke the speed limit and A LOT of traffic laws on the way. She told him to sit and she went up to an information desk. She was speaking to the man behind desk for what felt like forever.

She was pale when she came back, and sat beside me, “So I may have told the guy that you were Violet’s brother because he’s new. Violet went into surgery for their leg and they are still running tests because they are concerned about a possible spinal cord injury.”

“Oh no! OH NO!” Katya burst into tears. Lee rubbed his back and he turned and hugged her and cried on her shoulder.

“Shhh I’m so sorry Katya, we can go up to the ICU when you feel ready. That is probably the best way to get notified when they wake up from surgery. If they know we are there, we will get updates.”

They had waited for 3 and a half hours before they suggested that we come back in the morning. By then it was 4:30 in the morning. Between the drive to Lee’s and getting into bed was a blur.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” He muttered as he got up and reached his hand blindly around in his drag bag, he totally forgot to send a goodnight text!! Sure enough there were 4 texts and 5 missed calls.

Trixie: Hey babe! Just finished the show here.

Trixie: Is it cold in Canada? It’s nice and warm in Brazil so haha!

Trixie: Goodnight Brian, I hope you are ok! You must have been tired so I hope you are sleeping well. You realize you broke our 400 day goodnight message streak right? You’re soooo gonna pay for that!

Then this morning there was:

Trixie: Are you there? Are you ok? Please let me know.

He listened through all of the messages, Trixie getting more panicked every time he called.

He was just about to call when Lee came up behind him and said “there are a few different choices on the bed but I don’t mind swinging by the hotel.” Katya jumped at the sound of her voice, “Oh shit sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!!”

“It’s ok!” Katya brushed it off, “I’m gonna make a call in the bedroom and then have a shower if it’s ok.”

“Sure, there are towels on the bed and feel free to use whatever in the bathroom.”

Katya put his hand on her shoulder as she turned around, “Thank you Lee. I think you are the first angel I’ve ever met.”

“Daww you are sweet! I’m glad to help!”

Katya swerved off of the hallway and into the bedroom, dialing without even looking at the phone.

“Hey Brian, it’s Brian!” Trixie answered cheerfully, a stupid corny greeting they thought was funny, because they were both stupid and corny together.

“Hi Brian, it’s Brian.” Katya said back half-heartedly.

“What’s wrong baby?” Trixie said, immediately concerned. He should have known that the only reason he hadn’t called or texted goodnight was because something bad had happened. Trixie’s mind went into overdrive. “Did you hurt yourself? Did you break your sobriety?” He hated to ask that question but he had know that Kat had had a bit of a rough spot at one point after Rupaul’s Best Friend Race.

Katya sat down on the bed and burst into tears.

“Aww babe, what’s wrong? Please tell me.” Trixie could feel the tears welling in his eyes at the sound of his beloved in such anguish. “Whatever it is, I will help you fix it.”

“It’s Vi, they had an accident.”

“Oh my God! Are they ok?” Obviously they weren’t if Katya was sobbing that hard.

Trixie could barely understand him, he heard “Violet….fell…doing aerials….really hurt….I don’t know…what to…do..”

“Brian, take a deep breath. Remember? In…1…2…3. Out…1…2…3…4…5…6.”

It took about 5 minutes til Katya wasn’t crying so hard that Trixie couldn’t understand him.

“Sorry.” Katya mumbled.

“Hey. You know you don’t have to apologize to me for being upset or anxious EVER right? I still mean it.”

“I know, I’m sor….” Katya took a shaky breath, “I think I can tell you now.”

Trixie sat down in the chair in his hotel room, he felt like he was gonna need it.

“Ok so, um, Violet was doing their aerials routine and you know the trick they do at the end where they drop?”

“The one that scares the shit out of me. Right?” Trixie asked.

“Yeah, that one. I don’t know if it was the way the fabric was hooked in or if they..if something happened with them but they fell from almost the top of the ceiling of the venue.”

“Oh my God!” Trixie said again, glad he was sitting.

“Yeah.” Katya said shakily. “So one of the fabric pieces fell down and I didn’t know what I was gonna find when I was pulling it off.” Katya was talking faster and faster, like he was trying to exorcise the memory out of his mind. “This nurse Lee was there and we didn’t move them and the ambulance came and took her and Thorgy to the hospital in two ambulances. Acid went with Thorgy but Violet was all alone.”

“Wait what? What happened with Thorgy?” Trixie asked, confused.

“Thorgy and Violet are DATING and I think he was in shock or something.”

“Thorgy and Vi eh? What an odd couple!”

“Don’t tell anyone! I would have had no idea if I hadn’t walked in on them kissing.”

“Ok so, what happened next?”

“Well I had Violet’s blood all over me because I was holding onto them.” Trixie felt a shiver go up his spine at the image in his head. “And I was shaking so hard, and so this nurse named Lee who happened to be at the show helped me change and then we went to the hospital.”

“Ok, what happened next?” Trixie coaxed after a minute or two of silence and crying from the other end.

“We got to the hospital and Lee said I was Violet’s brother so we could get information. Violet was in surgery so..”

“Wait. I’m lost. Why were they in surgery?”

“They broke their thigh bone very badly, their bone was sticking out of their skin and so they needed to put pins or screws or something in it.”

Trixie’s stomach lurched at the gory image in his head.

“Fuuucckkk! Did the surgery go well?”

“I don’t know, we waited for a really long time, 3 and a half hours before they told us that we should go home. I didn’t want to go back to the hotel and see all of Violet’s things so Lee let me stay here at her house. But I haven’t told you the worst of it.”

“There is more?” Trixie felt like he had molten iron in his stomach, heavy, boiling hot, angry and painful. He could hear Katya weeping again.

“They think that Vi might have a spinal cord injury.”

That’s when the molten lava in Trixie’s stomach decided it would like out NOW. He barely made it to the bathroom in time, his phone crashing to the floor as he hugged the cold porcelain.

“Trixie? Trix? Brian!” He heard Katya calling from his phone but it was too far to reach.

Katya heard Trixie throwing up and wished he was there to hug him and rub his back.

“Ugghh sorry.” Trixie said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I’m sorry, it’s horrible news to get over the phone, plus if it makes you feel any better, I barfed all over the stage last night.”

“Of course it doesn’t make me feel any better! I’m so sorry hun.”

“Me too. I am sorry but I have to get dressed so we can go see how they are.”

“Please keep me updated!” Trixie pleaded. “Do you need me to call your manager to get some time off?”

“Yeah that would be great. I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“OF course you haven’t! That is the least of your worries. How long? I’ll text you when I know my flight details too.” Trixie said, writing himself a note on the hotel stationery.

“I don’t want you to cut your trip short. I will be ok!! I mean, I miss you but I don’t want you to lose out on gigs to come here and sit in some cold ICU waiting room with me.”

“I want to, I don’t want you to be alone and as much as Violet is a little bitch, they’re a lovable little bitch and one of my good friends. I want to be there for you AND for them. Ok?” Trixie said firmly, knowing that Katya would try to argue.

“Ok.” he said in the smallest little voice that broke Trixie’s heart.

“I will let you go but I will call or text when I have more information and you answer whenever you can ok? No trips outside just to check your phone. And you tell,” Trixie’s chin quivered and his voice got husky, “you tell Violet to hang in there ok? You tell them to…” He floundered for a moment, he wasn’t equipped to deal with a situation like this. Was anyone though? “Stay strong ok? You too. I love you so much and I will see you really soon ok?”

“I love you too. I’ll see you soon and hey Trix?”

“Mmhmm?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For understanding just how much I need you to be with me right now without me having to say it outloud. You always seem to know and I love that about you.”

“I love that you need me.” Trixie said in a broken whisper.

“Always. I will ALWAYS need you moya golubchik!” Katya reassured him.

“I love it when you talk Russian to me. What did you call me this time? A turtle? Rat dropping?” Trixie asked with a hint of humour in his voice.

“My little dove.”

“Aww I like that one! Ok you go! Call or text me when you can and I will do the same ok?”

“Ok, I love you.”

“I love you too, so much!”

Katya took the quickest shower of his life and managed to find a pair of jeans that were a tiny bit loose and a purple polo shirt.

Lee was dressed when he came out of the bedroom and they hopped in her slightly beat up red Prius as they drove the few blocks there in relative silence while Katya’s brain ran rampant. They got up the the ICU and Lee steered him to a chair where he felt like he waited forever.

Lee eventually turned and beckoned him forward. He searched her face for a moment for clues as to what she was about to say but her facial expression was unreadable. He was going in blind, he wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans and stood up slowly.

“Here we go into the unknown.” He thought and gulped and followed Lee into the ICU and uncertainty.

#cradle #vanguard #thorcid #trixya #thorgy thor #violet chachki #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #oc #rpdr fanfiction #thorgy x violet #canon compliant #rare pair

21 notes · View notes

fountainpenguin · 7 years

Note

Have you ever found poems that speak to you and seen perfect for your favourite shows? Do you ever read a poem and think it really fits a character, either yours or Butch Hartman's? I have, plenty of times - "The Stolen Child" makes me think of Cosmo and Wanda adopting Timmy, "The Erl-King" makes me think of Vlad trying to take Danny away from Jack, and "The Phantom-Wooer" makes me think of Danny seducing Paulina. But I wonder if others do this or if I'm just weird.

I… hate poetry.

I just.

Uggggghghghghghghghg poetry makes me cry.

Like, it’s FINE, and I’ve written plenty of poems myself, and songs are okay, but just…… dfgjdligjidlkgjdjsldf I don’t wanna think about poems nope nope.

Tfw you take creative writing classes but they only give you writing prompts and deadlines and don’t tell you anything about grammar or structure or finding an agent or self-publishing or ANYTHING, you just write poems all the time, and the class is peer-graded and your peers give you an F at the end of the quarter because they “couldn’t understand the characters’ accents”, so you have to go in and talk to your teacher about why she accepted this as your actual grade without bothering to check when she KNOWS you can do better than that. Fortunately she DID change my grade. Jerks.

Shel Silverstein is my only poet, and if a certain Follower of mine makes a wisecrack about his death then I’m done with everything.

Really, it just boils down to people’s tastes. Some people pick songs to match different characters. Some might pick written poems. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. It’s just not a thing I myself do. “Ozymandias” is a good poem, which I’m probably biased towards because of “Children of the Lamp”. But I like Silverstein, and Jack Prelutsky, and don’t really care for anyone else.

For anyone curious, I’ve included the prose piece (from 2014) they graded me an F on here, because I’m still MAJORLY salty about this. Fun Fact: some elements of Jake were eventually recycled into Anti-Sanderson.

Be They Mouse or Squirrel or Chipmunk:

Baylor hissed whenhe saw the wall. He gave a yank on Prince’s reins, and the iguana lumbered to ahalt and sat down.

“Curse thesecloudy skies: We’ve been going in circles.”

A second mouserode to join Baylor on the sand dune, his mouth set in a hard thin line. Hebobbed his head several times as he counted each hut in the human villagebelow.

“’S definitely thesame one we left this morning,” he reported to Baylor, and then for goodmeasure added, “We’s gotten lost.”

Again, Baylor gavea hiss through his teeth. He removed his hat and used it to fan his face whilehe scoured the sky. The sunset painted the sand in a bloody red circle and casta soft glow on the surrounding clouds. Through the wisps of petal pink, Baylorcould only make out a single star in the sky.

The mouse replaced his hat and turned in hissaddle to look at the half dozen in his shabby party. He didn’t see Jake andfor a split second wondered if the chipmunk had made a dash for it across thedesert without the rest of them noticing. But then a big black and white mousemoved her iguana forward, revealing Jake stumbling along behind. His wrists werestill bound, but the ropes were notched and fraying, and wet with saliva.

“The owls will beout soon,” Baylor called, flicking his tail to the left. “We’ll make campbehind that north hill. Simon, I want you and Weston to gather tumbleweed forfire. No,” he corrected himself, frowning at the brown scales on Prince’s back.Baylor shook his head. “We’re much too close to the humans for that. We’ll gowithout tonight.”

The othersgrumbled, but Harold, who was still perched on his steed on Baylor’s right, soonput an end to that. He rode his iguana forward and set about scolding theoffenders.

Baylor turned tolook again at the sunset. It was fading fast, and already the cold night windshad begun to stir. Grit blew into his fur and stung his eyes. From somewhere inthe distance came the howl of a coyote.

“Oh Rita,” hemurmured, “What are we going to do?”

Smoke rose fromthe huts below. A mother called out to her dark-skinned children who had beenplaying in the dusty road. Even from up on hill, Baylor could smell the stew,still hot.

Over the next dunehe dismounted and tied Prince to a cactus beside the other steeds. Jake sat afew paces away working at his wrists, stopping only when Simon yanked hard onhis ear. Baylor had him moved across the camp, as far as possible from theiguanas. Bound wrists or not, the last thing they needed was for the chipmunkto set them all free during the night. Or worse, make a getaway on themhimself.

They had no fire,but when the moon rose in the sky it was round and bright, and they had a nicemeal of tortillas and beans. The food was cold, but Baylor refused and pleas byWeston to warm them with fire.

“We’re too closeto the human settlement. We lost a lot of time today going in circles. Tomorrowthe sky will be clearer, and we’ll be able to follow the sun.”

The black and whitemouse - Baylor realized he still didn’t know her name - grumbled something, andElliot joined in, but Henry shushed them both with a hiss. Baylor couldn’tblame them for their complaints. They were three days behind schedule as itwas.

Henry offered totake first watch, but Baylor refused. As the others began to settle down, hejoined Jake in the far corner of the camp. Obviously the prisoner had nointention of sleeping either. He had given up on untying his wrists, or so itseemed, but he leaned against a dark red boulder with one leg crossed over theother and his bound forepaws tucked behind his head.

“Can’t sleep?”Baylor asked him. He’d taken care to step quietly and the wind was blowingtowards him, but Jake didn’t twitch when the mouse’s voice suddenly broke thequiet.

“No sir, not awink, sir.”

Baylor noddedslowly. He took a sip from his canteen without looking away. Jake’s casual grinstarted to slip. His nose twitched and one eye darted over and then away.

“Thirsty?”

“Yes sir, butseein’ as I plan to be long gone in the morning I’d advise ya not to waste anya’ tha’ precious water on li’l ol’ me.”

Baylor wrinkledhis nose. “I see two long days of walking hasn’t cured you of your sharptongue.”

The chipmunk ducked his head, but Baylor couldsee him grinning. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but it takes a bi’ more’n sorefeet an’ a few cloudy days to cure ol’ Jake of his only skill worth ‘aving.”

“So I see.” Baylor folded his arms and put onefoot up against the rock. Together he and Jake gazed into the sky. The cloudshad shifted over the past two hours, and more and more stars were blinking intoexistence with every heartbeat. Jake raised his bound forepaws.

“Right there,” he said, “tha’s Terrin thefarmer. He’s got his hoe wit’ him, see? Legends say tha’ when he was defendin’his family he used it a’ take out thirty-five trained soldiers ‘fore one of ‘emfinally got close enough ta send him to the stars. Backstabbin’ rat got ‘imright in th’ back, he did.”

Baylor squinted his eyes. He could make out theconstellation only vaguely, but Jake plowed onward before he had the chance tosay anything.

“An’ over that way, just above that big sanddune, tha’s the river brot’er, Shrio. He’s the one tha’ near flooded my villagewit’ one of his temper tantrums. Oh, he ain’t all bad, though: He brings th’rains down from the moun’ains too.”

“Oh, does he?”

Jake nodded enthusiastically. He gnawed on hisropes for a second or two, then gestured to a third constellation with hisnose.

“She’s my favorite,tha’ one.” His tone turned reverent. “Mother of all the stars, Rita.”

“You chipmunksbelieve in Mother Rita?” Baylor’s ears pricked forward. His foot slid acrossthe red rock and thumped awkwardly in the sand. Jake turned to stare at him,brow wrinkled and whiskers twitching.

“An’ wha’ssamatter wit’ it? You believe in her too, sir. The whole lot a’ you do. I’veheard ya talkin’.”

“Of course we do,”fumbled Baylor, furious that he felt the need to explain himself to a prisoner,“but that’s different. She’s a kangaroo rat. Key word, rat. She’s one of ours.”

Jake cocked his head. “E’ery one of us rodentsbelieves in Mother Rita, be ‘em mouse or squirrel or chipmunk. You peoplewho’re always goin’ an’ raidin’ peaceful farmin’ towns like mine ought a’ know that more’n anyone.”

Baylor refused to rise to the bait. Instead hetook a great gulp of water from his canteen and scrubbed a defiant paw acrosshis face when he was done.

“I don’t believe you. If Mother Rita were yourgoddess too then she wouldn’t pick favorites between you and me and all therest. She’d send her blessings to her own kind, and that’s what she’s done.That’s us.”

Jake flicked his eyes up and down. His whiskerswere trembling more than ever now, and his beady black eyes had squinted intoslits. With some effort he licked a paw, drew it back over his ear, and thenflopped against the rock with his back to Baylor.

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but a mouse ain’t arat either.”

The chipmunk was gone by morning light, alongwith a roll of tortillas, a packet of matches, and Baylor’s favorite hat.

(One of the critiques I got on this piece is that my peers couldn’t tell Jake was a prisoner until they read “the prisoner”. Actually, they thought Baylor sat by Jake AND a prisoner. What is wrong with these people?)

#Anon #asks #Going Ghost!#Goldfeather works #99% true as far as we remember

1 note · View note

glittership · 5 years

Text

Episode #76 — "Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons" by Jennifer Lee Rossman

Direct download here.

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 76 is part of the Autumn 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons

By Jennifer Lee Rossman

They weren’t real, but they still took my breath away.

The model dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties lived on and swam in the waters around three islands in Hyde Park. Enormous things, so big that I’d heard their designer had hosted a dinner party inside one, and so lifelike! If I stared long enough, I was sure I’d see one blink.

I turned to Samira and found her twirling her parasol, an act purposely designed to bely the rage burning in her eyes. She would never let it show, her pleasant smile practically painted on, but I’d spent enough time with her to recognize that fury boiling just beneath the surface.

Befuddled, I looked back at the dinosaurs, this time flipping down my telescopic goggles. The craftsmanship was immaculate, the color consistent all along the plesiosaur’s corkscrew neck, and the pudgy, horned iguanodons looked structurally sound, what with their bellies dragging on the ground.

Dinosaurs were Samira’s everything; how could seeing them practically coming to life not give her joy?

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 76 for June 24, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, which is available in the Autumn 2018 issue that you can pick up at GlitterShip.com/buy, on Gumroad at gum.co/gship08, or on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and other ebook retailers.

If you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them.

This is a great deal, so if you want to take advantage of it, go to Storybundle.com/pride soon! The deal only runs through June 27th, depending on your time zone.

Today’s story is “Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” by Jennfer Lee Rossman, but first our poem, “Shortcake” by Jade Homa.

Jade Homa is an intersectional feminist, sapphic poet, lgbtq sensitivity reader, member of The Rainbow Alliance, and editor-in-chief of Blue Literary Magazine. Her poetry has been published in over 7 literary magazines, including BlazeVOX, A Tired Heroine, The Ocotillo Review, and Sinister Wisdom (in print). Jade’s work will be featured in an exhibit via Pen and Brush, a New York City based non profit that showcases emerging female artists, later this year, along with being featured in a special edition of Rattle which highlights dynamic Instagram poets. In her free time, Jade loves petting dogs, eating pasta, and daydreaming about girls.

Shortcake by Jade Homa

you called me your strawberry girl / and I wondered if it was / the wolf inside my jaw / or the red stained across my cheeks / or the way I said fuck / or that time I yanked your / hair / or every moment / you swallowed me whole

And now “Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” by Jennifer Lee Rossman, read by April Grant.

Jennifer Lee Rossman is that autistic nerd who complains about inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs. Along with Jaylee James, she is the co-editor of Love & Bubbles, a queer anthology of underwater romance. Her debut novel, Jack Jetstark’s Intergalactic Freakshow, was published by World Weaver Press in 2018. She tweets about dinosaurs @JenLRossman

April Grant lives in the greater Boston area. Her backstory includes time as a sidewalk musician, real estate agent, public historian, dishwasher, and librarian. Among her hobbies are biking and singing.

Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons

By Jennifer Lee Rossman

They weren’t real, but they still took my breath away.

Dinosaurs were Samira’s everything; how could seeing them practically coming to life not give her joy?

“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly, so as not to disturb the crowds around us. Well, any more than our mere presence disturbed them by default.

(It wasn’t every day they saw a girl in a mechanical chair and her butch Indian crush who wore trousers with her best jewelry, and they did not particularly care for us. We didn’t particularly care what they thought, which really didn’t engender ourselves to them, but luckily polite society frowned on yelling at people for being gay, disabled, and/or nonwhite, so hooray for us.)

“It’s wrong.”

“What is?”

She gestured emphatically at the islands, growing visibly distressed. “It! Them! Everything! Everything is wrong!”

If Samira’s frustration had a pressure valve, the needle would have been edging toward the red. She needed to get out of the situation before she burst a pipe.

I knew better than to take her hand, as she didn’t always appreciate physical touch the way I did, so I gently tugged at the corner of her vest as I engaged my chair. The miniature steam engine behind me activated the pistons that turned my chrome wheels, and Samira held onto my velvet-padded armrest as we left the main viewing area and took refuge by one of the fountains in the Crystal Palace.

She sat on the marble edge, letting a hand trail in the shimmery water until she felt calm enough to speak.

“They did it all wrong, Tilly. They didn’t take any of my advice.” She rummaged through her many pockets, finally producing a scrap of paper with a dinosaur sketched on it. “This is what iguanodon looked like.”

Her drawing showed an entirely different creature than the park’s statue. While theirs looked sluggish and fat, kind of like a doofy dragon, Samira’s interpretation was nimble and intelligent, standing on four legs with a solid but agile tail held horizontally behind it. And its nose horn was completely absent, though it did have a large thumb spike, giving it the impression of perpetually congratulating someone on a job well done.

It certainly looked like a more realistic representation of a living creature, but these things lived, what, millions of years ago? Even someone as brilliant as Samira couldn’t possibly have known what they were really like.

But I couldn’t tell her that. Girlfriends are supposed to be supportive, and I needed to do everything I could to gain prospective girlfriend points before I asked her out.

“What evidence did you give them for your hypothesis?” I asked instead. “All we really have are fossils, right?”

Her face lit up at the invitation to delve into her favorite subject. “Right, and we don’t even have full skeletons yet of most of them. But we have limbs. Joints. And if we compare them to skeletons of things that exist now, they don’t resemble big, fat lizards that could hardly move around. That makes no biological sense, because predators could just waltz up and eat them. They had to be faster, more agile. They wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”

“So why wouldn’t they have listened to you?” I asked, perplexed.

“Because they don’t understand evolution,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced. “Or they don’t want to be shown up by a girl. A lesbian girl with nonconforming hair and wardrobe who dares to be from a country they pretend to own.” She crossed her arms and stared at her boots. “Or both. But there’s no excuse for the plesiosaurs. No creature’s neck can bend like that.”

I wasn’t sure exactly how I was supposed to respond to that. Samira never complained about something just to commiserate; she expected answers, a solution. But I couldn’t very well make them redesign the statues, no matter how happy that would have made her.

So we just sat together quietly by the fountain, fuming at the ignorant men in charge of the park, and I schemed for a way to fix things for the girl that made my eyes light up the way dinosaurs lit hers.

Every problem had a solution, if you tinkered hard enough.

After my accident, I took a steam engine and wheels from a horseless wagon and stuck them on a chair. My mum hadn’t been amused to lose part of her dinette set, but it got me around town until I could build a proper wheelchair. (Around the flat parts of town, anyway. My latest blueprints involved extending legs that could climb stairs.)

And when Londoners complained about the airship mooring towers were ruining the skyline, who figured out a way to make them retractable? That would be me. The airship commissioner hadn’t responded to my proposal yet, but it totally worked in small scale on my dollhouse.

It was just a matter of finding the solution to Samira’s dinosaur problem.

I spent all night in my workshop, referring to her sketches and comparing them to promotional drawings of the park’s beasts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider breaking in and altering the statues somehow, but the sheer amount that they had gotten wrong precluded that as a possibility. This wasn’t a mere paintjob or moving an iguanodon horn; they needed a complete overhaul.

I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration.

The day they announced that they were building realistic, life sized dinosaurs in Crystal Park was the day I fell for Samira.

I’d always thought she was pretty—tall, brilliant smile, didn’t conform to society’s expectations for women—but the pure joy radiating from her… It was like she’d turned on a giant electromagnet inside her, and the clockwork the doctors had installed to keep my heart beating was powerless against her magnetic field.

So I listened to her gush about the park, about how the statues would make everyone else see the amazing lost world she saw when she looked at a fossil. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I understood her passion.

The grand opening was supposed to be the day I finally asked her out, but now it would have to be when I presented her with my grand gesture of grandness…

Whatever it was.

I woke abruptly to the chimes of my upcycled church organ doorbell and found a sprocket embedded in my face.

Groaning, I pushed myself off my worktable and into a sitting position. “Did you let me sleep out here all night?” I said into the mouthpiece of the two-way vibration communicator prototype that fed through the wall and into the kitchen.

A moment later, my mum picked up her end. “‘Mum,'” she said, imitating my voice, “‘I’m a professional tinkerer and nearly an adult. I can’t be having a bedtime!'”

“Point taken. Have I missed breakfast?”

The door in the wall opened to reveal a plate of pancakes.

“Thanks!” I tore a bite out of one as I wheeled over to the door. My crooked spine ached from sitting up all night.

Activating the pneumatic door opener, I found George about to ring the bell again.

George, my former boyfriend and current best friend. Chubby, handsome, super gay. We’d tried the whole hetero thing for two whole days before we realized it wasn’t for us, then pretended for another six months to keep his father from trying to matchmake him with one of the Clearwater sisters.

I wouldn’t have minded being with a man, necessarily, but ladies really sent my heart a-ticking, so it was no great loss when George told me he was a horticultural lad.

(You know, a pansy. A daisy. A… erm. Bougainvillea? I must confess, flowers didn’t excite me unless they were made of scrap metal.)

George raised an eyebrow. “I take it the declaration of love went well, then?” When I only frowned in confusion, he pointed to my face. “The sprocket-shaped dent in your cheek would suggest you spent the night with a woman.”

“Samira isn’t an automaton, George.”

“No, but she’s got the…” He mimed having a large chest. “And the, um… Scaffolding.”

“Do you think women’s undergarments are made of clockwork?” I asked, amused. I mean, mine were, but that was just so I could tighten the laces behind my back without assistance when I wore a corset.

Which wasn’t often. My favorite dresses were the color of grease stains and had a lot of pockets, so it should come as no surprise that I didn’t go anywhere fancy on a regular basis.

George blushed. “So… it did not go well, then?”

He came in and tinkered with me over pancakes while I told him about my predicament, making sympathetic noises at the appropriate times.

When I was done with my story, he sat quietly for a moment, thinking while he adjusted the spring mechanism in an old cuckoo clock. “And you can’t just go over with flowers and say, ‘Hey, gorgeous, wanna gay together?’ because…?”

“Have you met me? I don’t do romance. I make things for romantic people.” I gestured to the wind-up music boxes, mechanical roses that opened to reveal a love note, and clockwork pendants scattered about my workshop. All commissions from people who were better at love than I was.

“Then pretend you’re a clueless client like Reverend Paul. Remember what you did for him?”

The reverend had come in wanting to woo Widow Trefauny but didn’t know a thing about her except that she liked dogs and made his heart smile. I thought my solution was ingenious.

“I built a steam-powered puppy.”

George held his hands out, prompting. “So…”

Suddenly, it all clicked into place, like the last cog in a clock mechanism that makes everything tick.

“I need to build a steam-powered dinosaur for Samira.”

Dinosaurs, as it turned out, were huge. I mean, they looked big on the islands, sure, but that was so far away that I only truly got a sense of scale when I started measuring in my workshop.

Samira’s notes put iguanodon, my dino of choice, at around ten meters in length. Since a measuring tape required more free hands than I had, I tied a string around one of the spokes of my chair’s wheels, which had a one-point-eight meter circumference, and measured five and a half revolutions…

Which took me out of my cramped shop and into the street, forcing horses and their mechanical counterparts to divert around me.

“Don’t suppose it would do to detour traffic for a couple weeks, eh?” I asked a tophatted hansom cabbie, who had stopped his horseless machine to watch me in amusement.

“Reckon not, Miss Tilly,” he said with a laugh, stepping down from his perch at the front of the carriage. He pulled a lever, and the cab door opened with a hiss to reveal a pile of gleaming metal parts.

“Ooh!” I clapped my hands. “Are those for me?”

He nodded and began unloading them. My iguanodon was going to be much taller than me, and even though George had promised his assistance, I needed to make extendy arms to hold the heavy parts. “Is there somewhere else you could build him?”

I supposed this wouldn’t exactly be stealthy. I could stop Samira from going in my shop, but it would have been substantially more difficult to stop her from going down an entire street.

But where?

I got my answer a few days later, when the twice weekly zeppelin to Devon lifted off without Samira on board. She was usually the first in line, going not for the luxury holiday destinations that drew in an upper-class clientele, but for the fossils.

The coast of Devon was absolutely lousy with fossils. The concept of extinction had been proven there, Mary Anning herself found her first ichthyosaur there, and all the best scientists fought for the right to have their automata scan the coast with ground-penetrating radar.

Samira’s life revolved around trips to Devon and the buckets of new specimens she brought home every week.

“Why aren’t you on that zeppelin?” I asked as we sat in her room, sorting her fossilized ammonites. She’d originally had the little spiral-shelled mollusks organized by size, but now thought it more logical to sort by age. Me, I thought size was a fine method, but I didn’t know a thing about fossils and was happy to do it however she wanted.

She didn’t answer me, just kind of shrugged and ran her thumb over the spiral impression in the rock.

“Is it because you’re upset that they didn’t take your advice on the dinosaurs?” I knew it was, but I had to hear her say it.

“I don’t see the point of it if no one will care about what I find.” She sounded so utterly despondent. Joyless. The one thing that gave her life purpose had been taken away by careless men.

They probably only cared about whether the park was profitable, not if it was accurate.

I couldn’t make them change their statues, and I couldn’t make the public care that they were wrong. But I had to fix it for my best girl, because there was nothing sadder than seeing her like that.

“Can I hold your hand for a second?” I asked quietly. She gave the slightest of nods and I took her hand gently in mine, my clockwork heart ticking at double speed. “You’ve got a gift, Samira. Scientists have to study these bones for months just to make bad guesses about the animals they came from, but you can look at an ankle joint and figure that it was a quadruped or a biped, if it ate meat or plants, and what color its skin was.”

She gave me a look.

“Okay, I’m exaggerating, but only a little. I don’t agree with the way they’re portrayed, but this world is going to love dinosaurs because of the ones at Crystal Palace. People are going to dig for fossils even more, and they’re going to need someone amazing like you to teach them about the new things they unearth.” I tried to refrain from intertwining our fingers; just touching was a big enough step. “I need you to promise me something.”

Samira pulled away, and I had to remind myself that this didn’t necessarily mean anything more than her just being done holding hands. “What is it?”

“A week from today, be on the zeppelin to the coast.” The coast, with its ample space and no chance of Samira discovering my project before it was ready.

She made a face. “I don’t know.”

“Please?” I begged. “For me?”

After a long moment’s consideration, she nodded. “For you.”

George and I caught the midweek zeppelin. Lucky for us, most tourists went down for the weekend, so all of our metal parts didn’t weigh us down too much. We did share the cabin with a few fancy ladies, who stared in wordless shock at Iggy’s scrapmetal skull sitting on the chair beside us.

I’d named him Iggy. His head was almost a meter long. Mostly bronze and copper, but I’d done a few tin accents around the eyes to really make ’em pop.

When we arrived at the shore, we had to fight a couple paleontologists for space on the rocky coastline. Not physically fight, fun as that might have been. Once they realized we weren’t trying to steal their dig sites, they happily moved their little chugging machines to give us a flat stretch of beach.

Which just left us with three days to assemble Iggy, whose hundreds of parts I had not thought to label beforehand.

Another thing I neglected to do: inform George of the scope of this project.

“Matilda, I adore you and will always help you with anything you need,” he said, dragging a tail segment across the rocks with a horrific scraping. “But for future reference, the next time you invite me to Devon to build a life-sized steam-powered iguanodon? You might mention how abysmally enormous iguanodon were.”

“That sounds like a you problem,” I teased, my voice echoing metallically as I welded the neck together from the inside. I’d actually gotten out of my chair and lay down in the metal shell, figuring it would be easier to attach all the pneumatics and hydraulics that way.

I should have brought a pillow.

At night, because we were too poor to afford one of the fancy hotels in town, we slept on the beach beneath a blanket of stars, Iggy’s half-finished shape silhouetted against the sky.

“Samira’s a fancy lady,” I said to George as we lay in the sand. “She doesn’t wear them, but she has expensive dresses. All lacy and no stains. Her family has a lot of money. Could she ever really want to be with someone like me?”

He rolled over to face me. “What do you mean, someone like you?”

“Poor mechanic who can’t go up stairs, whose heart is being kept alive with the insides of a pocket watch that could stop at any time.”

I didn’t try to think about it a lot, but the fact was that the doctors had never done an operation like mine before. It ticked all right for now, but no one knew if my body would keep it wound or if I would just… stop one day.

The fear tried to stop me from doing things, tried to take away what little life I might have had left, but I couldn’t let it. I had to grab on as hard as I could and never let go. In an ideal world, Samira would be part of that.

But the world wasn’t ideal. Far from it.

Was I too much to put up with? Would she rather date someone who didn’t have to take the long way around because the back door didn’t have steps? Someone who could give her jewels and… fine cheeses and pet monkeys and whatever else rich people gave their girlfriends?

Someone she knew would be around to grow old with her?

Maybe that’s why I’d put off asking her to be my gal, because even though we got along better than the Queen’s guards and ridiculous hats, even though we both fancied ladies and wanted to marry one someday, I couldn’t stand to know she didn’t see me that way. I cherished her as a friend and didn’t see romance as being somehow more than friendship, but she smelled like cookies and I just really wanted to be in love with her.

“Hey,” George said softly, pulling me closer to him. “She loves you. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I guess,” I said into his shoulder. He smelled like grease. A nice, comforting smell, but too much like my own. At the end of the day, I wanted to curl up with someone like Samira.

“You guess. You’ve held her hand, Tilly. She’s made eye contact with you. That’s big for her. You don’t need a big gesture like this, but I know she’s going to love it because she loves you.”

I hoped he was right.

I saw the weekend zeppelin from London come in, lowering over the city where it was scheduled to moor. Samira would be here soon.

And Iggy wasn’t finished.

He towered over the beach, his metal skin gleaming in the sun, but something was wrong on the inside. The steam engine in his belly, which was supposed to puff steam out of his nose and make him turn his head, wouldn’t start up.

George saw me check my pocket watch for the umpteenth time and removed the wrench from my hand. “I’ll look into it. Go.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

My wheels skidded on the sand and rocks, but I reached the mooring station just as the passengers were disembarking. The sight of Samira standing there in her trademark trousers and parasol combo made my clockwork heart tick audibly. She came. I didn’t really doubt that she would, but still.

She flashed me a quick smile. “I don’t want to fossil hunt,” she said in lieu of a greeting.

“That’s not why we’re here,” I promised. “But I do want to show you something on the beach, if that’s okay.”

She slipped a hand around my armrest and walked with me. When Iggy’s head poked up over the rocks, she broke into a run, forcing me to go full speed to keep up.

Laughing, she went right up to Iggy and ran her hands over his massive legs. “He’s so biologically accurate!”

But did he work? I looked to George, who gave his head a quick shake.

Blast.

Samira didn’t seem to mind, though, marveling at every detail of the dinosaur’s posture and shape. “And the thumb spikes that aren’t horns!” she exclaimed, her hands flapping in excitement.

And she wasn’t the only one who appreciated our work. A small group of pith-helmeted paleontologists had abandoned their digging and scanning in order to come and admire Iggy.

“It really is magnificent,” one scientist said. “The anatomy is nothing like what we’ve been assuming they looked like, and yet…”

“It’s so logical,” his colleague agreed. “Why should they be fat and slow? Look at elephants—heavy, but sturdy and not so sluggish as their size would suggest. There’s no reason these terrible lizards couldn’t have been similar.”

A third paleontologist turned to George. “My good man, might we pick your brain on the neck of the plesiosaur?”

George held up his hands. “I just did some riveting—the real geniuses are Matilda and her girlfriend Samira.”

“Mostly Samira,” I added, glancing at her. “And I’m not sure if she’s my girlfriend or not, but I’d like her to be.”

She beamed at me. “I would also like that.” To the men, she said, “I have a lot of thoughts on plesiosaur neck anatomy. I can show you my sketches, and I saw a layer of strata that could bear fossils over here…”

She led them away, chattering about prehistoric life with that pure joy that made her so amazing.

That girl took my breath away.

END

“Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” is copyright Jennifer Lee Rossman 2019.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, leaving reviews on iTunes, or buying your own copy of the Autumn 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy. You can also support us by picking up a free audiobook at www.audibletrial.com/glittership.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “The Quiet Realm of the Dark Queen” by Jenny Blackford.

Episode #76 — “Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” by Jennifer Lee Rossman was originally published on GlitterShip

#GlitterShip #lgbtq fiction #queer fiction #short stories #science fiction and fantasy #podcast

0 notes

rafterzebra · 6 years

Text

College Football is Back, and I Will Be Watching

College Football is back! Since I was a young lad I have enjoyed watching college football; the pageantry, the passion, the rivalries, the tailgates, the hours of lying on a couch and being entertained. In college I was fortunate to attend during a time when my university was at the height of the sport and won a national championship. That only fueled my intense focus on the sport even more. But wait......aren't there a litany of problems in college football and college sports in general? Yes, yes there are. Problems that may affect the passion one has for the sport, possibly diminishing it enough not to watch or at the very least, watch with keeping these issues at the forefront of one's mind? Again, yes. This was supposed to be a pure, unadulterated and unfettered celebration of the return of America's premiere secular experience, it's now going to turn into one of those unbearable think pieces on the state of the game and how it relates to society, isn't it? Also, yes.

I suppose we can start at the fundamental argument of football itself. We all know football is a violent game, once so violent that in the infant days of college football it was almost outlawed due to the severe injuries and in some cases, death of ts participants. It has only been recently that focus in the form of research and litigation that the overall merits of the game versus health of players has been examined.

The most chilling accounts are of former players that have had severe declines in physical and mental health after leaving the game. Some have had the courage to have their bodies and in particular their brains donated to science to be examined after their death. The result have been mostly cases of severe CTE. What was more haunting than anything in the college football realm was Washington State quarterback Tyler Hilinski committing suicide this offseason and subsequently being found to have CTE. This was a player, in the most protected position in the game was found to have CTE while he was still in college. It gives some people pause to cheer on this sport that could have such grave implications. Increasingly, we are seeing lawsuits brought on by former college football players as the NCAA scrambles to fend off the lawsuits with one hand, and develop reasonable and protective concussion protocol with the other. Unlike the NFL, college football is a scattered enterprise, comprised of hundreds of schools in their own conferences and at various levels of competition (Divisions I, II, III, NAIA, etc). These various levels of existence create various levels of funding and medical training staff. You do not have to be an SEC starter to be affected by an injury that will stay with you for years beyond your time on the field.

So how does one reconcile the potential crippling nature of the sport? Some don't mind, others will point to the voluntary nature of participation. While it is true that college football athletes are not held in captivity and forced to participate like gladiators of Rome, in certain cases football is the only means by which an individual can improve the status of their livelihood, or at least that is what they are told. The best I can offer is to recognize the issues that are happening, and not ignore them. Player safety has to be paramount, even when the game is based on violent collisions. Rule implementations have sought to decrease the worst kind of collisions by eliminating hits targeted at the head of other players, or by using the helmet as a launch weapon. There needs to be increased oversight of both coaches and players when it comes to injuries. Coaches want their best players to be out there, and players want to play just about no matter what. Still, when a player is lying motionless on the field after a big hit, or a player wobbly stumbles to the sidelines, the feeling of the why I watch and invest so much in watching creeps up the back of my neck.

The other prime element that makes for uncomfortable watching is the system of amateurism within college football. Having worked in the industry of college athletics, I could spew a book worth of thoughts on the framework of amateur college athletics in this country. To boil it down, the players deserve more. I do not believe they should be salaried employees, but they need to be compensated more than they already are at present. My main issue settles around the right for a player to use his(or her for female sports) image and likeness for monetary gain. I won't go into details here, but it can be accomplished without making it the wild west for boosters. Johnny Manziel, for all his flaws and faults deserved to capitalize on the swell of popularity while he played at Texas A&M. Whatever he was getting compensated for under the table, or outside the rules is irrelevant to this argument. If you are a public figure of note and entities around you are reaping the monetary benefits of your success, something is wrong. Again, I am not advocating for the third strong long snapper to get the same rate as the starting quarterback, but when billions in television deals, ad revenues and apparel sales for the school and other entities are being collected, something has to be done.

The laziest argument to be made for this issue is to simply say a scholarship/education is sufficient for these individuals at their collegiate institution. This is laughable considering the strides in awards the players are able to receive within the past decade. Scholarships can now go up to the university's listed cost of attendance which accounts for expenses outside of the traditional tuition, room and board, and books scholarships had been allowed to contain in the past. Furthermore, medical and academic expenses have no limit in terms of what the school can provide. Travel expenses, including for family members, have been expanded. If an education was enough, why has there been an increase in what players receive.Still, most polls show the public is in favor or just about even on the topic of paying collegiate players. The populace likes their tradition, especially when it comes to college football. As I watch on Saturdays, I again have that bad taste of knowing some of these players who will not make a living playing football professionally will have failed to make their due in college due to archaic rules. One glimmer is that things have changed and continue to change with great momentum in this area and in time we could see proper compensation or at least something closer to it. I doubt that is of comfort to those on the field now.

If I had to target one other major area which puts a significant cramp in my enjoyment of the sport of college football, it is the deification of coaches. Coaching a successful college football program is difficult, exceedingly so. My intent is not to diminish that or the profession in general. The problem I have is the autonomy, and in some cases the recklessness with which they are allowed to operate. I won't begrudge the enormous salaries, we do live in a free market now, don't we? It is amusing to me, however, how often athletic departments can get taken for a ride on a coach that has not proven much. This includes bloated buyouts on the back end so when a coach does fail or flame out in spectacular fashion, they are given a suitcase full of cash on the way out the door. Well, come to think of it, I guess that is little different for high-level executives in the corporate world.

My grievances are more of certain individuals to resemble even a small slice of what they portend to be to their athletic departments, universities, the public at-large, and the parents of the players they coach. Too many times, and sadly mostly after tragedy occurs, we hear of how a coach operated with impunity, and fostered an environment that either put his players in danger or allowed his players to be a danger to others. There are countless examples, but I would like to focus on two. One is Butch Jones at Tennessee. There was a clear culture issue going on during his tenure there but the sole incident that burned me up was when a wide receiver was assisting and helping to report a victim of sexual assault by his teammates, Jones called him a traitor for betraying his teammates. The player also faced the wrath of his teammates and ended up transferring. Jones denied the allegations, but I remain dubious. Even if Jones is correct in that he never told the player that, it indicates the kind of toxic culture that can be fostered in football programs. Where crimes, and particularly those against women are not punished and reported correctly and those that want to report them fear the repercussions.

The other incident is the recent tragedy at Maryland. A young man lost his life because he was being put through physical conditioning drills while displaying signs of distress. This followed with players providing information to ESPN about the coaching and strength staff bullying players, and forcing them to workout without proper safety precautions. Furthermore, the article has a quote from an anonymous staff member saying they wouldn't let their son play in the program. This really infuriates me because it is the number one duty of athletic staff members to lookout for the welfare and well-being of student-athletes in their charge. Being aware of a bad situation and remaining silent is just as much of a horrid act as the perpetrators themselves. It is mind-blowing to me that in this day and age, with all the lives that have been lost in previous incidents, including recently, and everything we know about the science of performance, that we still have coaches that are pushing kids to extreme limits. Working them out past the duration that is healthy and denying them proper hydration. This doesn't mold men into battle-tested warriors, it puts their health and lives at risk. In game situations, you see trainers everywhere, water is provided at every turn, and if a player is fatigued he gets substituted. Why some feel the need to restrict these safeguards in training because they think it will make them perform better I'll never know. If you are familiar with the story of Bear Bryan't Junction Boys, you think to yourself that situation would never happen today. Unfortunately, there are coaches out there with this mindset. It is clearly a foolish and risky behavior.

These coaches are held on such pedestals they often think themselves beyond reproach. Urban Meyer's situation is still unfolding while he will remain as the coach at Ohio State, but the lengths that people have gone to in order to defend him and keep him there as their coach is telling about the culture across the country. These cultures are so embedded, they want their program to win and remain protected from outside forces, even in the face of criminal and horrifying atrocities. These people cannot be reasoned with, and any attempts at finding the real stories behind their coaches' scandals are met with extreme blowback. I don't know what exactly happened at Ohio State, but I know it wasn't good, and there were most likely negative situations that were not dealt with because of wanting to keep the status quo in place, which was winning football games.

These are not singular attacks on specific programs, if you root for a major college football program, myself included, you have witnessed a situation where the consideration of the football program or a high profile coach has been placed before human decency or even the law. It definitely affects how I have viewed the "purity" of college football. But in the end, is any large enterprise we consume a pure endeavor? We can answer "no" rather quickly because these all deal with human beings, and the fallibility humans show, particularly in college football, is both unsurprising and a reflection of bigger problems in society as a whole. However, with all this considered, knowing everything I know, being witness to how the sausage gets made and unable to simply be blissfully or willfully unaware of the blotches, I continue to watch. Not only that, I get excited to watch, I get animated when I see something online about my team or other teams that are meant to elicit a reaction. I won't say that I can't help it, or that I am an addict. It is a conscious choice to continue to consume college football. Despite the negatives, it is a great spectacle, with great story lines, characters, traditions, and a following that evokes every emotion imaginable. I don't watch in defiance of the apparent negatives, but with the acknowledgement that I am experiencing something I love, that I wish it will to strive to be better, and that is imperfect.

#college football #college sports #sports in society

0 notes

unholyhelbiglinked · 7 years

Text

Vice| Chapter Five

A sharp pain moved through the base of my back, my jaw aching as I let out a small grumble. The magazine was still draped over my chest, my alarm blaring in my ear as I felt around for my pillow. I moved the cool fabric to my face, screaming loudly into the plush down. I hadn't gotten any sleep last night- and the alarm going off at 7am, was no help to anyone.

I rolled over, hitting the snooze button as I stared up the ceiling. I was not ready for today. I know the Monday before all of this, when Mamrie had stormed into my house, I was quick to make a noble deal with the devil. Now I was regretting my decision a bit.

I slowly raised from the bed, pressing my hand to my hairline as I let out a thick sigh, letting the rest of my morning routine wash over me almost fluently. I grabbed a towel and headed into the shower, almost numb as the water moved over me.

The outfit was something I hadn't planned much for. I wasn't usually so conscious about what type of clothes I wore. Every t-shirt I had in my closet was stained with black grease. The cleanest thing I had now wasn't very 'proper' for a small county town- but then again, neither was I.

Eventually I slid on a pair of dark blue jeans, a simple white shirt, and an olive green button down that I left open, rolling the sleeves up to my elbows. I laced up my brown boots before starting to stock pile my school supplies in my leather bag, my freshly straightened bangs falling into my eyes.

"Grace?"

I shot up, letting out a breath as I slung my bag over my shoulder- relaxing at the sound of my mother's groggy voice. "Sorry if I woke you," I mumbled turning around as the rising sun hit my eyes- making me blink quickly.

"You didn't," she sighed "are you taking the bike or the car?"

"Car," I clenched my jaw, swallowing "mind if I pick Hannah up on the way?"

"Do what you need, I won't be home when you get back."

"Yeah mom, I know."

All eyes seemed to be glued to me as I all but drew blood on Hannah's arms. She attempted to pry my hand from her arm before we got out of the car, but I was quick to find it again. We weren't even close to walking away from the parking space before she whipped around and grasped my wrist.

"Grace, calm down, huh?" she raised an eyebrow, prying my hand away from her forearm, wincing at the small sting "do you want to go in here with a clean slate, or do you want to be labeled as a butch gay?"

"Hannah, if you don't-"I felt a small wave of frustration rush through me, distracting me from the ball of nerves that hit, my sentence faded with the smirk on her lips. Damn, she was good at that. She knew how aggravated I got with her being so hard on her sexuality. I shook my head, breathing out coolly as she started to walk forward again. I followed her, ignoring the stares and the distant whispers.

The people here all looked like normal kids. They're eyes looked accusingly at me, but other than that- they were just teenagers like me. Mamrie and her pack... they were a different story. They were in no way human.

From just walking into the doors of the school, I could tell that they already worked their magic. There were the usual curios glances of course, but then there were the scared expressions that made me uncomfortable in my own skin. I know the tattoos were a little intimidating at some point, but it's not like I had naked women inked onto my arms. There were clocks, and a few other symbols, but nothing ominous.

"Uh," Hannah looked my way, biting her lip as she readjusted her pack "I'm just going to stick with you for the morning if that's okay?"

"Uh huh," I played with the bottom of my shirt "defiantly okay Hannah. I am 100% okay with that. If there was a point past okay, I'm there." I let out a sigh "Trust me, super there."

Hannah shook her head with a slight smile as we walked towards our lockers. We had analyzed the schedule I picked up the month earlier past it's point of real meaning- both of us being able to recite the classes. Hannah had neglected to tell me much about the people that actually attended the school- but I was lucky enough to have my first two classes with her. The second half of my day would be challenging. We had different lunch periods, but she agreed to meet me right out by my car at the end of the day.

"Hey, hot stuff" Sawyer jabbed Hannah in the ribs as he fell in line with us, his dimple showing as he nodded my way. "Hannah, I almost didn't notice you."

"Shove it, Sawyer" She grumbled, but kept the smirk on her lips "everyone is noticing Grace though."

"Well you are the talk of the town," he directed his words back to me as Hannah stopped in front of the long row of blue lockers, her hand moving to mine as she slammed her elbow into it, shrugging when it opened almost effortlessly.

"I don't see why." I sighed shoving a few books into the metal locker before Grabbing the supplies for American History and Chemistry, "I'm sure you guys have had new kids before."

"Not murderers." Sawyer kept his back against the lockers beside me, Hannah glanced his way in confusion, my jaw dropping open slightly as he shrugged. "You're not one, are you?"

"No," I said a little too loudly, earning a few odd looks. I flushed, lowering my voice "Why the hell would people think I'm a killer?"

"Because everyone is saying that you are." The dark haired boy lifted an eyebrow "You didn't hear the whispering?"

"No, she didn't." Hannah slammed her locker "This is alpha bitches doing. Just ignore it, Grace."

"Ignore it," I sighed, shaking my head "right. Ignore it. I can do that."

Turns out ignoring it was a lot harder than it was made out to be. I tried to keep my focus on my breathing, tried to keep my fingers from shaking with my voice as each teacher had me stand up an introduce myself.

I almost lost my resolve in my first class while I began to stutter out my name, the word 'killer' being whispered as rumors spread right in front of my eyes. I shook my head clear quickly as my eyes met Hannah's, she was biting down hard on the end of her pencil, a thick glare in her gaze as she looked at everyone in the class. The teacher had no idea what was going on- shrugging it off just like I was told to do.

The rest of my morning classes seemed to crawl by in the same manor. I was growing accustomed to the stares, but the whispers still set chills down my spine.... To me, everyone here was foolish.

As soon as the alpha declared it, it must be true.

So of course a teenage girl with a few tattoos was called a killer.... Back in jersey, you weren't accused until you dawned orange and took a few mug shots. That wouldn't happen here though, I wasn't even sure this place had a jail- especially if said sheriff station closed on weekends at nine.

My thoughts were racing enough during the end of second period to not even bother with eating at lunch. I had somehow sat myself in a corner, leaning heavily against the wall as I leaned back in my seat with a sigh, my breath shaky. I had to keep telling myself to remain calm. That jumping in my truck and peeling out of the parking lot wasn't the answer.

A sharp clatter of a tray made me jump, my hand moving up to my chest as my eyes wondered to Jocelyn looking at her perfectly primed nails as her other hand went up to her own chest in mock surprise. A kid with snowy hair had his tray pushed up to his stomach, the mystery stew dribbling down the front of his shirt and sloshing on his shoes.

I found myself on my feet, already close enough to the trash can to be standing right next to the boy with the thick glasses. He stood in complete fear, not even moving the tray. The stew smelled rancid, but not as rancid as the look on Jocelyn's face.

"Are you okay?" I mumbled to the kid, taking the platter from his hands as he nodded meekly, running his hands across the broth that soaked into his clothes. I set the now empty plate on the table to my side, my glare finding Jocelyn.

"Oh hi, Grace." She smirked "How's your first day going? I heard you've made a killer impression on this town already. You do realize that you're already the main event in this freakshow of a school."

I could feel my fists clench by my sides as the snowy haired boy watched the both of us carefully, not saying a word. I could feel a slight anger boil up inside me. Not because of the little omega standing in front of me- but the fact that her leader broke my little deal already.

"Does that make you the ring leader?" I cocked my eyebrow, earning a thick scowl from her.

"Whatever." She sneered "Same time tomorrow, Ty." She waved her fingers at the boy before clicking off in her heels. We both let out a collective sigh as soon as she was out of earshot. The boy quick to turn to me as I stared at his sopping wet shirt, biting my lip I started to walk towards the bathrooms, knowing he would follow me.

"I've never seen anyone speak to her like that."

"Does she do that every day?" I questioned turning back towards him as I made slight eye contact.

"Not every day. I'm sure she was just feeling extra bitchy today."

I pulled the guys bathroom door open, earning a shocked look from the boy as I rolled my eyes and pulled him in behind me- almost running into another guy who just grimaced as he stepped out.

"What are you doing?"

I ignored his question "People in this town aren't very open minded are they?" I peeled off my button down, following his shocked eyes as I grasped the base of my t-shirt, lifting it over my head. He looked at my bare arms and stomach as I outstretched my palm with the fabric in it towards him.

"Really?" he cocked an eyebrow.

"yeah, it's men's it should fit."

He clenched his jaw, taking the warm shirt as I started to button my own green shirt back up, smoothing my palms down the front of it as he watched in wonder. "You're not normal."

"You smell like chicken broth," I pointed out "no one's perfect."

#GraceHelbig #MamrieHart #Mace #fanfiction

0 notes