#when you answer an ask and you end up writing an entire origin story at 4 AM
Text
i’m drunk, i love you (jk)
𝗌𝗎𝗆𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗒: with only a day before graduation, you make a promise that you will not only graduate from university, but also from your feelings for your best friend of seven years, jeon jungkook.
𝗉𝖺𝗂𝗋𝗂𝗇𝗀: film student!jungkook x med tech student!fem!oc (named sola)
𝗀𝖾𝗇𝗋𝖾𝗌: heavy angst, unrequited love, jungkook as an isko agenda, set in the ph 🇵🇭
𝗐𝖺𝗋𝗇𝗂𝗇𝗀𝗌: this story is fiction. it does not represent the members of bangtan or any of the idols here in real life. all resemblance to real life characters, institutions, associations, places, events, among others are either purely coincidence or depicted in a fictitious manner only. there’s really no warnings for this story other than it’s a self-indulgent fic to get me back to writing. the smut isn’t that severe. just kissing, nipple sucking, and grinding. this is based on the film, i’m drunk i love you, which i highly recommend you watch. i didn’t alter much of the plot & scenes bc i think they’re already great as it is, but i did tweak a bit here and there. i hope you enjoy! let me know what you think by reblogging/commenting. ♡
𝗍𝗈𝗍𝖺𝗅 𝗐𝗈𝗋𝖽 𝖼𝗈𝗎𝗇𝗍: 5,784
You were never quite the believer in love at first sight, but what you felt that night was the closest thing to that feeling.
He was one of the freshmen performers during your orientation, singing Adam Levine’s Lost Stars. Like the entire audience, you were captivated by his heavenly vocals and charisma as he performed on stage with an acoustic guitar one of the seniors lent him. Not only that, Jeon Jungkook wasn’t bad looking either—quite the opposite, really.
However, after the orientation, you didn’t get to see much of the dark-haired handsome boy. You were studying at UP, the biggest state university in the country, and so your paths were bound not to cross. Until, your older cousin, who was a senior at that time, invited you to eat dinner with him and a couple of his buddies after seeing you strolling around campus alone. When you arrived at the eatery, you not only saw your cousin Yoongi’s friends—Yijeong and Woosung—you also spotted the boy who hadn’t left your mind since you saw him over four months ago at that time.
You sat across from him and you tried your best not to freak out as Yoongi introduced the both of you. Apparently, he had already known Jungkook because he was the younger stepbrother of his other friend, Namjoon. During the course of your dinner, you and Jungkook didn’t really talk much. But you would muster up the courage to ask him some basic questions such as his program, why he went to UP, if he joined any orgs yet, etcetera. Jungkook was polite enough to answer your inquiries.
He was a Film major. He went to UP because everyone in his family went to UP so it was the most obvious choice for him and he was a member of the Film society. In return, Jungkook asked the same set of questions. You were a pre-med student, Medical Technology, to be exact, and you went to UP because it was your dream school. You were also a member of the College of Arts and Sciences’ student council.
After your meal was finished, Yoongi entrusted your care to Jungkook as they were going to meet up with some of their friends and you were both living at campus dormitories anyway. So, you hopped into his old army green Toyota Rav4 and needless to say, the ride back to UP was awkward. So, to get rid of the awkward silence, you asked if you could play some music. He said sure and handed you the aux cord already connected to his stereo. Once you had the other end connected to your phone, you played one of your favorite songs—Waltz of Four Left Feet by Shirebound and Busking.
To your surprise, Jungkook also knew the song and just like that, the awkward silence was gone and you became inseparable ever since.
Music became the bridge that connected you and Jungkook. Whenever you would hangout, it was always your topic—your favorite artists, songs, original scores in films, best albums, underrated artists, overrated artists, the current state of music, everything. He also became your gig buddy—seeking out mainstream and indie artists you both liked and going to their live performances downtown bars, jam packed arenas and stadiums.
But your favorite would always be watching him perform. After his performance at the orientation, he naturally became one of the popular students at UP. He wasn’t popular like a celebrity or an influencer, but heads would turn whenever he walked around campus. Also, he still had the luxury of privacy on his side, but if you looked at the right places, you would find small accounts on social media dedicated to him. He didn’t care for the attention, though, and just went about his day as normally as possible.
His performance did land him some gigs here and there. You found it cute whenever he’d turn to you to ask if he should accept the invitation or not, and you would always tell him to do whatever he wanted. Most of the time, he accepted, especially if it was at Route 96, a historic venue for aspiring musicians.
It was here that he performed the first song he wrote by himself called Still With You. It was also during this performance that you began to see him in a different light—quite literally. He was performing with the bar lights off, only the lights on stage and the spotlight illuminated the entire establishment. When the spotlight on him turned purple, you felt a whole new admiration for your best friend. It wasn’t the “Oh god I’m so proud of my best friend” kind, rather it was the “Oh fuck I’m in love with my best friend” realization.
But like every other story where someone falls in love with their best friend, you kept your feelings hidden, hoping someday it would go away. However, you soon realized, once you fell in love with Jeon Jungkook, there was no going back. It was a rabbit hole.
The more you spent time with him, the more you fell in love with him and all of him—from the way he smiles to the sound of his laugh, how he would always annoy the shit out of you when you were supposed to be studying to how he would remember small things about you like your favorite snack at the vending machine, how you’d be the first to know his test results to how you’d be his first audience for the short film they needed to produce for that semester, how he would lend you his jacket when you ate bingsu because he knew you’d get cold easily to how he’d send you random memes he found funny out of the blue.
It was so easy to fall in love with Jeon Jungkook. Thus, everyone else did too. For seven years, you watched on the sidelines as he dated several girls and loved them how you wished he’d love you.
“In one day, you can finally lay your hands on Jungkook,” your best friend, Mingyu, teased as he took a sip from his beer.
You let out a sarcastic laugh, head resting on your palm, elbow propped on the wooden table in front of you, a bottle of beer in the other hand. You were bordering on getting tipsy now as you had been drinking since you arrived at La Union with Mingyu and Jungkook in the afternoon. You didn’t even know why you agreed to your best friend’s idea of going to the province for a music festival when you had your graduation—the very graduation that was seven years in the making—on Sunday.
“Fuck you, Kim Mingyu,” you told the honey-skinned man across from you with a chuckle.
“What? Let this be your final test before finally graduating. Are you ready?” a lopsided grin appeared on his handsome face.
Under the orange light, Kim Mingyu was easily one of the most handsome men you ever laid your eyes on. He was also tall, well-mannered, smart, capable, had a stable job while being a med student, and the textbook definition of a walking green flag. In another life, you could imagine yourself falling for him instead of Jungkook. But in the current universe you were in, he was one of your trusted friends who had known about your crush on Jungkook since first year.
The waiter arrived to bring you your order of another bucket of Red Horse beer. Mingyu took a bottle from the silver bucket and opened it. “Happy horse for the happy whore,” he told you as he handed you the fresh bottle of beer. You gave him a middle finger. He laughed. “What? Am I not right?”
“You’re the whore,” you replied. “I saw you with that cute chinito by the beach earlier. What happened to Mino?”
He rolled his eyes at the mention of his ex—or you believed was his ex. You never really know with Mingyu and relationships. He was the complete opposite of you. While you were a hopeless romantic at heart, he didn’t believe in love—or so he says.
“Seven years,” Mingyu mused, glancing towards the beach. “You didn’t stop falling in love with your best friend. Now, it looks like you don’t even plan to stop.”
You sucked your teeth, tracing the water around the bottle due to the ice with your fingers. “Do I just throw it away?” You weren’t sure if you were asking Mingyu or yourself. “We make a good pair.” You laughed to yourself.
“Except?” Mingyu pointed out the harsh reality.
“Except,” you took in a shaky breath. “He doesn’t love me back. Maybe.”
Mingyu sighed deeply, looking at his watch. “Time check: you still have your hopes up.”
“It’s still early,” you argued. “I still have two days. Just give me time.”
“Give me time?” Mingyu repeated, taking a sip from his beer. “What the fuck are you talking about, Sola? The universe has given you all the time. But you did nothing.”
You groaned, throwing your head back as a realization hit you. “Fuck, Gyu, I just—I just realized. Is it right that we’re here? Was it the right decision to come here? My mom’s gonna be so mad once she finds out I’m in La Union.”
“It’s all you. You’re a raging masochist,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Anyway. Let’s just play a game. Let’s enumerate all the things you did with Jungkook. Those are seven years worth of memories, Sola. Game?”
“Game.”
“What year did you first meet Jungkook?”
A smile immediately creeped up on your face. “2017.”
Mingyu waved his hand at you. “Wow! You can do math! But I just thought of something—instead of just general memories. Let’s make them specific. Let’s list down all the stupid things you did for Jungkook for seven years.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” you let out a scoff, drinking your beer.
“What? Now you can’t remember?” he challenged.
You clicked your tongue. “Fine, you stupid bitch. Ask away.”
Mingyu grinned. “2018.”
You hummed before saying, “Jungkook was heartbroken that year. I was back at home and he was at UP. But I rushed into the city to be there for him. I remember because I was supposed to attend this baptism with my parents but I snuck out and got an earful from my mother the next day. I was completely hungover too because Jungkook and I went bar hopping the entire night.”
“Jesus Christ, Sola.”
“Don’t judge me. It was my decision, okay?”
Mingyu rolled his eyes. “Okay. 2019.”
You stared at Mingyu, laughing as you recalled the memory. “2019. Me and Jungkook walked from UP to Aurora Boulevard just to tell me how Song Areum became his girlfriend.”
He shook his head. “2020.”
“2020—he was sick. I had an exam that day, but I quickly answered it so I could buy him his favorite, Tapsilog from Tapsi ni Vivian, before it ran out ‘cos it runs out quickly, right?” Mingyu nodded. You licked your lower lip then let out a small laugh. “But when I got to his dorm room, his roommate already told me Areum brought him to the university hospital. And I failed my exam ‘cos I didn’t answer the back part.”
“2021, go!”
“I loved him for four years now and counting. Is that good enough?”
“Okay. I’ll accept it. 2022?”
“2022—I’ve been in love with him for five fucking years already, fucking shit!” you exclaimed, feeling the alcohol in you boosting your confidence.
“Okay. We’re in the last year, girl. What about in 2023? What was the stupid thing you did for Jungkook last year?”
You gulped. “I’m two years delayed.”
Mingyu exhaled deeply. A moment of silence settled between the two of you. Then, she asked, “Sola, it all boils down to this: when will you end this?”
You sat up straight, taking a deep breath. “You mean when will I stop with my foolishness?” Mingyu nodded. You purse your lips. “Maybe when I’m done with UP. When I’m done with UP, I’ll graduate from everything—including him. Especially him.”
When you got back to your shared room with Jungkook and Mingyu, you were already tipsy. You almost fell face flat on the floor when you opened the door, feeling lightheaded, but luckily, your best friend was there to catch you.
“You’re drunk, Sola,” Jungkook chuckled deeply. You could smell his expensive cologne—the one you bought for him for his birthday last year and it brought a huge grin on your face, knowing he wore it. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”
“I’m fine, Guk. I’m not that drunk. But I do need to sit down,” you said followed by a set of giggles as you let Jungkook walk you to the bed you shared with Mingyu, and then you threw yourself on it, back against the mattress, arms spread like an eagle.
Jungkook sat down beside you. “Are you still mad at me?”
The question seemed to sober you up instantly. The truth was—you could never stay mad at him. For anything. Sometimes, you’d think he could do the most painful and hurtful thing to you, deliberately, and you would still forgive him even if he wouldn’t apologize.
“I wasn’t mad. I was just… I just wished you would’ve told me the real reason why you wanted to come here,” you replied softly, biting your lower lip.
“Would you have come? If I told you I wanted to go here because my ex wanted to reconnect—would you have come?” Jungkook matched your tone, looking over his shoulder to look at you.
Instinctively, your eyes also darted towards his. The lights in the room were dim, only the lamp, the light coming beneath the bathroom door, and the moonlight outside illuminated the room. Jungkook looked especially beautiful in the dim light—long black wavy hair all messy from his habit of running his fingers through it, hooded eyes staring at you like he was memorizing every inch of you, the gentleness of his features made him look like an angel in this light.
But then you’d see his dozens of piercings in his ears, eyebrow, and lower lip; his tattooed arm and hand, and the way he looked sexy as hell with his thin white long sleeved, sleeves rolled up to his elbow, and his white beach shorts that hugged his strong muscular thighs, and you’d realize he was more of a Greek god than an angel.
“I’ll go wherever you go,” you told him, swallowing the lump in your throat. “You know that.”
Jungkook lied down beside you and you felt your heartbeat racing. His tattooed arm was brushing against yours. His head was tilted, close to yours.
“Will you go with me to the moon?” he asked.
A small smile ghosted on your lips. “I will, Guk.”
“How about Saturn?”
“I’ll be with you there, too.”
“Law school?”
You turned your head to him. He was already looking at you. “Law school? Why?”
He brushed the hair on your face aside with his fingers, making you tense. But you kept your composure. “I passed UP LAE.”
“But,” you began. “What about film? I thought you didn’t wanna become a lawyer like your parents.”
Jungkook looked at the ceiling. “It’s not that bad. Being a lawyer. Besides, I like studying.”
“You’ve always wanted to become a director, though.”
“I’m not good enough for it,” Jungkook scoffed. “All my batchmates are already directing their films and showing them at festivals here and abroad—yet here I am. Still here.”
You turned on your side, propping your elbow to support your head as you looked at your best friend. It was rare for Jungkook to open up. Even to you. He was always someone who kept all his innermost thoughts and feelings to himself. In the seven years you’d known him, it still felt like there was a wall around him that you never managed to climb on or punch through. For seven years, it felt like you simultaneously knew everything and nothing about your best friend.
“It’s not the end of the road, Jungkook. So what if they’re showing their films at festivals? You can do it too. At your own pace, in your own time,” you said. You wanted to reach for his face, to make him look at you, but you were scared. “You’re a great filmmaker, Guk. The best direk ever.”
He looked at you once again. “You’re drunk, Yu Sola. Go to sleep.”
He sat up, carrying your legs over the bed. You let out a groan. “I’m not drunk, Jeon Jungkook. Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?” he asked, chuckling.
“You always cut the conversation when you’re beginning to open up. You always clamp up, Guk. I wish you didn’t do that. I’m your—,” you bit the inside of your lower lip. What right did I have to demand him to open up to me? “I’m your best friend.”
“I don’t clamp up. I just have nothing else to say,” your best friend replied with a shrug, fixing his hair as he looked in the mirror across from your bed. “Go to sleep. You’ll get a massive headache tomorrow. I’m just going to meet with Areum and her friends.”
Then, you blurted it out. It just happened. You didn’t even know how. You always had this grand idea in your mind to do it after the graduation ceremony, that way, you could immediately leave. That way, you didn’t have to see him all the time. You would have enough time to move on and move forward in your life.
But nothing in life truly went according to plan.
“I love you, Jungkook,” you confessed. Your heart felt heavy and you sat up, head hanging low as you picked on your nails. Tears were beginning to form in your eyes. “I’ve loved you for seven years now.”
And you sobbed, burying your face in your hands. Then, moments later, you felt your hands being taken away from your face. You lifted your head and saw Jungkook kneeling in front of you, holding your hands. He let one go to wipe away the tears on your face, to tuck your hair behind your ear.
And then, ever so slowly, Jungkook leaned in and kissed you softly. A tear rolled down your cheek. His lips were soft while yours were chapped and wet from your tears, but he didn’t seem to mind. You were still in shock. This was not the response you expected. Not even in your wildest dreams but it was happening.
Jungkook held your face, tilting his head as he continued to kiss you more—only this time with more need and passion. Your body reacted. You began to reciprocate his kisses, hands wrapping around his wrists. He tasted of toothpaste and mouthwash.
He pushed you onto the bed, one hand remaining on your face while the other held your waist. Your fingers curled the ends of his hair. You could feel his growing member on your stomach and feeling it was enough to make your cunt wet. His lips then traveled on your jaw, down to your neck. You were breathing heavily as he nibbled on your sensitive skin, making a soft moan escape your lips.
His hand made its way under your shirt and your breath hitched, causing Jungkook to lift his head from your neck, and look you in the eyes.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
You nodded. “I’m okay.”
“Okay,” he smiled, making your heart skip a beat. “Is it okay if I take this off now?”
“I—,” you were at a loss for words. Was this really happening? It seemed too good to be true. But it was happening and you wanted it more than anything else. “Okay. Yes, you can.”
Jungkook peeled your shirt off, exposing your naked chest. You didn’t wear bras; found it too much of a hassle and you always hated the feeling. Instead, you wore nipple tapes.
“What are these, Sola?” Jungkook asked with a chuckle, making your cheeks heat up.
“They’re nipple tapes, you dumb ass,” you replied, smacking his arm lightly.
“Okay. Do I just take them off, like, tape?”
He was adorably cute. “Yes, you just take them off like tape.”
And so he did just that. The coolness of the room and your arousal instantly perked your nipples. Jungkook took your breasts in his hands, massaging and squeezing them, making you arch your back ever so slightly. Then, he dipped his head, capturing one of your nipples in his mouth while remaining to massage the other.
The sensation was simply divine. You didn’t know if it was the alcohol in your system, your feelings for your best friend, or just Jungkook in general that made you feel so good at that moment. Your hands traced the outline of his toned biceps through his thin polo.
You were so wet and when Jungkook began to grind his hard cock against your clothed cunt, you felt another wave of wetness. You wanted him—all of him—and so you began to rock your hips against him, making him release a moan.
He lifted his head, staring at you with those doe eyes you have loved for seven years. “Are you sure?”
Those three words held so much. Once you crossed the line, there was no going back, and both of you knew that.
“I’m sure. I want this, Guk. I want you.”
That was all he needed to hear to make love to you the whole night. Once both of you came, Jungkook laid beside you, chest heaving. For a while, the both of you lay in silence.
“Will you be here in the morning?” you asked, turning your head on the pillow to face him.
He did the same. “I will,” he promised. “Go to sleep now, Sola.”
But he wasn’t.
When you woke up the next day, the other side of the bed was empty. You sat up, burying your face in your hands. What the hell have I done? What the hell have we done?
You left the bed, entering the bathroom, and proceeding to take a shower. In there, you cried, because nothing was going to be the same after last night. You couldn’t blame it all on Jungkook either. You also made it happen. You desperately wished it was just a dream—another wet dream you had of your best friend—but the traces of his cum were still on your inner thigh.
It happened. There was no going back. Everything was going to be different now and most of all, you didn’t know if you still had your best friend.
When you finished showering and getting dressed, you made your way down to the beach. You had texted Mingyu while getting dressed and he told you he was there with the chinito you saw him with, Wonwoo. Arriving at the beach, you pulled your phone out of your back pocket, about to text the honey-skinned med student when you saw Jungkook with Areum in the water, his strong arms that held you throughout the night, now wrapped around her waist. Fits of giggles escaped her lips as Jungkook wrestled with her in the water, a huge grin on his handsome face.
Your heart shattered.
You quickly looked away, a fresh set of tears forming in your eyes. As you were about to turn away, you heard Mingyu’s familiar voice which caused you to stop on your tracks.
“Sola, hey, there you—what’s wrong?” The concern in his voice was palpable. You felt his arm around your shoulder as he pulled you closer to him.
“I—I finally told him, Gyu,” you said, taking in a sharp shaky breath. “I finally told him.”
Mingyu didn’t ask for more details. He knew. He led you back to your room, promising Wonwoo to text him later. Once you were back, you just cried on his shoulder. He didn’t say anything and neither did you. He just let you be until the tears finally stopped.
“I’m sorry I pulled you away from Wonwoo. He seems like a nice guy,” you said after a while, voice raspy from all the crying.
“It’s fine. We’ll be seeing each other often anyway,” Mingyu shared.
You looked at him, surprised. “Really?”
Your friend nodded, laughing to himself. “You know, all those times I teased you about your being a hopeless romantic and believing in love—I think it’s backfiring on me now with Wonwoo.”
“You love him?” you asked.
“I don’t know, Sola. But I know what I feel for him is different,” he answered. “It’s terrifying. How quickly someone can change your perspective on something.”
You couldn’t argue with that.
“What’s your plan now?” Mingyu asked.
You sighed deeply. “I think I’m going to head back. My graduation is tomorrow anyway. Do you mind booking the bus ride home?”
“I’m staying here, Sola. I—I want to be with Wonwoo more,” Mingyu confessed, smiling at you apologetically.
“Gyu…”
“Please be a friend to me now, Sola.”
You pressed your lips tightly. Then, you nodded. You wanted your friend to be happy.
“I’m gonna pack now,” you announced.
“Okay. Just text me if you need anything,” Mingyu gave you a hug and kiss on top of your head. “I want you to know I’m proud of you, Sola.”
Once Mingyu left, you began to pack. You didn’t bring a lot of clothes, but you were still biding your time. A part of you didn’t want to leave. You wanted to stay here and never graduate. But that illusion was quickly broken when you saw your mom’s contact flashing on your phone screen.
You sucked your teeth before answering, “Hi mom.”
“Sola? Where the hell are you? Why haven’t you been answering my texts? Your graduation is tomorrow. Everyone is looking forward to it!” she exclaimed frantically.
“Mom, I’m sorry. I’m in La Union with Jungkook and—,”
“What the hell are you doing in La Union?! You better get back instantly, Sola. I’m not kidding. If you don’t graduate now, I really don’t know what I’m gonna do. It’s been seven years! Please let me graduate too.”
“I’m already packing and I’ll catch the bus home soon. I just—Mom, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it in time for the ceremony ‘cos—,”
Your phone was suddenly snatched from your grip. You looked up and saw Jungkook standing beside you.
“Hey tita, it’s Jungkook. Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll take her home. She’ll make it in time. Yes. We’ll be home before the ceremony, tita. Okay. Bye.”
He ended the call and sat down on the bed across from you, handing you your phone back. You grabbed it from him. “You don’t have to take me home.”
“I already promised tita I will,” he answered.
“You didn’t have to,” you muttered, folding your shirt.
Silence. Jungkook was just staring at you the entire time as you folded your clothes and packed them inside your bag. Then, he said those two words.
“I’m sorry.”
You bit the inside of your lower lip. What was he exactly for? For having sex with you? For spending the night with you? For not feeling the same way as you? All of the above?
As if reading your thoughts, he added, “For everything.”
You nodded. “You don’t have to apologize for anything,” you told him. “It’s not your fault you don’t love me the same way.” But why did you kiss me? Why did you make love to me?
Jungkook lowered his head. You zipped your bag. “Let’s go. I still have a graduation to chase.”
“What’s this?” you asked, eyebrows furrowed when you saw Areum standing beside Jungkook’s car with her luggage and bag.
“I’ll drop Areum on the way,” Jungkook announced, grabbing her luggage and putting it at the back of his car.
You pressed your lips in a line. “Fine.” You stepped into the back passenger seat, quickly grabbing your phone and earphones from your bag, and plugging it in.
Lowering yourself on the seat, you rested your head against the window as Areum stepped into the passenger seat while Jungkook sat on the driver’s seat. You caught him glancing at you from the corner of your eyes, but you didn’t look back. Instead, you turned the volume up. Moments later, he began to drive.
You decided to sleep the entire ride. However, when you woke up, you immediately realized Jungkook wasn’t driving in your hometown. “Where are we?” you asked, taking one of your earphones off.
“I’m dropping Areum first,” Jungkook replied.
You frowned. “I’m the one chasing a graduation, remember?”
“Shh, just go back to sleep. Here,” he threw something at you—your favorite candy, Butterball, landing on your lap.
You grabbed it, tempted to eat it, but you threw it back at him and went back to sleep. By the time you woke up again, you were at Areum’s house. She turned to look at you, smiling.
She was really beautiful and kind. You began to feel guilty for hating her so much the entire time. “Congrats on your graduation, Sola. I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Thanks Areum.”
After Jungkook walked her to her door, he came back to the car. “What are you doing there? Come here,” he said, patting the passenger seat.
“I’m fine here,” you replied.
“Sola, come on. Please? I drive better with you beside me.”
For the rest of the ride to your home, you sat beside Jungkook. Unlike before, where your car rides were filled with music and random conversations, tonight it was silent. You didn’t plug your phone into his stereo and you kept your eyes closed the whole time, listening to your music. Once in a while, Jungkook would try to make small talk, but you would only give him short replies, then went back to sleeping.
When you arrived at your family house, you stayed with Jungkook outside for a bit, both leaning against his car.
“It’s your graduation in four hours.”
“Are you not going to come to yours?”
“I don’t see the point,” Jungkook replied.
You nodded and pushed yourself off his car. “I’ll head inside. Thanks for the ride, Jungkook.”
He grabbed your arm before you entered the gate. You stared into his eyes. You couldn’t quite place what held them right now. Maybe you never really knew Jeon Jungkook after all this time.
“I’m sorry, Sola.”
“Why do you keep saying sorry? I told you—it’s not your fault and I’m fine. I’m over it now. See you around, Jungkook.”
You head back inside. Graduation was in four hours.
You wore a traditional Filipiniana dress, a pair of white heels that were already scraping the skin at the back of your feet, your mother’s pearls, and your sablay when your name was called. You came up on the stage with your excited mother, shook hands with your Dean, and finally grabbed your diploma. You always imagined graduation to be something so spectacular, but the moment you received the piece of paper that confirmed you had, indeed, graduated—you just felt the same.
After the ceremony, you went back to your house where almost all your relatives from your mother’s side were waiting for you. A tarpaulin with your graduation picture and the words, “Congratulations Yu Sola!” printed on it and hung outside your gate. You greeted everyone on your way, telling them thanks, before retreating in your room to change out of your dress and into more comfortable clothes.
While you were slipping on your shirt, your phone buzzed on your nightstand. When you grabbed it, you saw Jungkook’s message on the lockscreen.
Let’s go, it said.
You knew it meant one thing: a beer and butterball at Route 96. There was still a part of you that wanted to go because you always went when you received a message like that from Jungkook. It was always a yes when it came to him. But now that you confessed, something shifted, whether he admitted to it himself or not.
So, you put your phone in your pocket, and went down. But as you do so, you felt your phone vibrate again. You pulled it out of your pocket and Jungkook texted you another message.
Please? One for the road. I’m outside.
You bit your lower lip. Then, you made your way out. There, you saw Jungkook wearing his barong and sablay, leaning against his car like hours ago. He smiled as soon as he saw you come out.
“You still have it,” he pointed to your shirt.
You looked down on it and realized you had picked his shirt of all things. It wasn’t anything special; just something he bought at a boutique. But it meant a lot to you because he gave it to you after you spilled beer on your shirt years ago.
“You attended your ceremony?” you asked, crossing your arms over your chest. He nodded. “I thought you didn’t see the point.”
“I changed my mind.”
You wished you were just as quick in having a change of heart.
“One for the road?” he asked, tilting his head to the side.
You took a deep breath and nodded. “One for the road.”
“Shit, I forgot it’s Sunday. It’s closed,” Jungkook sighed, seeing the steel gate at Route 96.
“It’s fine. Let’s just go,” you told him, grabbing the beer he bought beforehand and making your way up to the bar. Jungkook followed behind.
You both leaned in the railing before you, beer in hands. Another silence.
You couldn’t believe this was the culmination of the seven years you spent loving Jeon Jungkook. You thought, after confessing, you would never speak again. He’d distance himself from you but here you were—having a beer with him at your favorite place in the world. You wished you knew what was going on in his mind right now. You wished you could dissect his mind and learn every thought he had ever since you confessed.
Because you never really knew Jeon Jungkook. You were just so in love with him and idealized who he was over the last seven years. Suddenly, all the stupid memories you shared with Mingyu flashed in your mind and made you laugh.
“What’s funny?” Jungkook asked, chuckling.
You shook your head, drinking your beer. “Nothing.”
He nudged your side. “Come on, share it.”
You took a deep breath and for the first time, you looked at Jeon Jungkook and saw him for who he was; not the man you have loved for the past seven years.
“I graduated, finally.”
↪˚ author’s note: if you want to donate to me via kofi or gcash <33 i would appreciate it a lot. thank you & see you in more fics later on.
↪˚ permanent taglist: @whoa-jo @kookieandjoonberries
all rights reserved. 2024. belovedguk.
#jungkook angst#jungkook x reader#jungkook x oc#jungkook fanfic#jungkook fics#bts x reader#bts x oc#bts fanfic#bts fics#jungkook filo au#bts filo au#jungkook smut
791 notes
·
View notes
Text
Part Two - JJK Men And Reader With A Sensitive Clit
♥ Warnings: Mentions of trauma, sexual themes, clit and vaginal fingering, oral sex, use of toys
♥ Summary: Reader with a sensitive clit. What will our men do to work around this?
♥ Featuring: Geto
♥ Word Count: 1653
♥ A/N: This was originally supposed to be part of the first post but I was struggling to write out the scenario. And looking back, this one on it's own is longer than the other two combined! Well, hope ya'll like seeing soft Geto.
Geto Masterlist
Reader with a senstive clit part 1
Geto
There’s no question that Geto loves eating you out. Man could spend eternity between your legs, making you cum over and over until you’re begging for mercy. Both of you put in a lot of effort to keep each other satisfied.
Which is why when he pulls out a vibrator one day, you look at him hesitantly. You’ve hated toys. All your previous boyfriends would set it on the highest mode and hold it against you, almost bored, waiting for your orgasm. Your entire pussy would feel sore and not in a good way. You wince as the memory comes back to you.
“I got it for you. What do you think?”
“What are you planning on doing with that?”
Geto sees your nerves and sets the toy down. “I thought you might enjoy it. Didn’t you say you wanted to try edging one of these days?”
“With your mouth, Geto. Or even your fingers. Not with a vibrator.” Your legs snap closed, leaving him looking perplexed.
“Ok, I’m missing something here. I thought you’d be stoked.”
“I don’t like toys. Did I ever ask you to buy one?”
“No, but-”
“No buts. I hate them. End of story.”
“May I ask why?”
Your voice dies in your throat as you remember how uninterested your past lovers were when it came to using toys. They saw it as a means to get out of doing any other foreplay, and only seemed to want to give you the most basic orgasm in the least amount of time. You would cum of course, but it was a very half-felt orgasm, your clit barely fluttering from the disappointing roughness of the vibrator.
“They just don’t feel good to me. I don’t like the high settings. It’s too much and I get too little in return.”
“And why would I use the high setting if you don’t like it?”
“Because it takes too long for me to cum from the low setting.”
Geto now looks positively bewildered. “Too long? Are you telling me you use the high setting, which you don’t like, because the lower ones which you do like, take too much time?”
When he says it out loud, you hear how ridiculous it sounds. You shake your head, trying not to feel ashamed. “I just… haven’t had good experiences with toys. They feel too harsh and my orgasm isn’t that great with them.”
“Is it because you’ve never tried a low setting before?”
“I don’t want to give up foreplay for the sake of using a vibrator.”
Geto’s eyebrows raise, almost lost in his hairline at your words. “Why would you not get foreplay if we’re using a vibrator?”
You pause, unsure how to answer his question. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s a stupid thing that happened long ago.”
Geto sighs at your tone. “Ok. So you’re not even a little curious at how this would feel after foreplay, at a low setting?”
The look on his face makes you want to kiss him all over. He’s been very patient and adjusting with you, and you don’t know how to put it into words, your trepidation over using a vibrator.
“Can we just test it out at a low setting? If you really hate it, I’ll never bring it up again.”
You still look hesitant and he draws you against him, fingers stroking your bare back. “I promise to be gentle. And when have I ever skimped out of foreplay? Miss an opportunity to make my girl feel good before slipping her my cock?”
A heavy blush settles over your face and you playfully smack his shoulder. “Fine. But if I hate it, I get oral whenever I want. No matter the time or day.”
“And how is this any different from what we currently do?” He tenderly rubs your reddened cheeks and chuckles at the small squeak you make.
“Let me make you feel good…”
He begins with an open mouthed kiss, capturing your lips with his, his tongue mixing with yours, while his large hands stroked your body, coming down the sides of your arms, back up over your shoulders, and down to your breasts, cupping and squeezing the mounds of flesh, thumbs resting on the center of your nipples and nudging them in circles until you whine into his mouth.
Geto lowers his head, trailing wet kisses over your skin before taking one of your aching tips into his mouth, tongue fondling against it, pulling with his lips while your hands curl into his long hair, moaning, feeling wetness gather between your legs.
When he finally parts them, the soft labia are slick and swollen with arousal, the little bud pulsing as he spreads the moist folds. He presses his nose in between and inhales deeply, that tangy, sweet scent making him harden even more.
“Geto…” You whimper, feeling the tip of his nose just a little south of where you need it to be.
“Patience now…I promised I’d edge you this time…and we’re going to do it in more than one way…”
A moan leaves your lips as his tongue swirls over your clit, softly lapping at it. He knows to use it flat to cover the whole bud as it pulses and throbs.
“Geto… Ngh…” Your legs almost close but he grips your knees to keep them open. Every soft lick against your clit brings you closer to the edge. When you feel the small spasms become more predictable and a particularly pleasurable throb courses through you, you grip the sheets. You seem to have forgotten the whole point and Geto pulls away an inch, watching your core spasm as he takes away his mouth.
It takes a second for you to realize what's happening and you try to inch down back to him. Geto chuckles, the vibration falling just short of your pussy.
“I never skimp on foreplay my dear. “ A second later, you hear the soft buzzing of the vibrator and the clicking of buttons as he turns it on to the lowest setting, the buzzing getting softer with each click.
You stay still but feel your heart beat a little faster at the sound. “Geto…”
Without realizing it you're grasping the sheets again but not in the same way as you were before. His warm, large hand holds yours, loosening your tension on the sheet, entwining your fingers together.
“It's all right doll,”he says reassuringly, pressing a kiss to your forehead.
You close your eyes, waiting for him to spread you apart and place the vibrator on your clit. However, he runs it along your thigh, teasing, then along the edges of the outer lips, letting the soft vibrations affect your core.
There's a moment where you pause, considering. It wasn't unpleasant, not even harsh. But it wasn't on your clit yet. You wait… Then gasp in surprise as he tilts the tip of the vibrator to go over to the fatty side, pressing the flesh with the toy and pushing over your bud. The vibrations were pleasantly muted yet stimulating and…Enjoyable?
You shiver softly as the toy does its job on the lowest setting. Geto brings his mouth to yours for a kiss, swallowing your little noises of delight. His wrist starts to move the toy in circles over your lips, clit nestled in between. The soft buzzing fills the air and you start to buck your hips against the ministrations.
It was deliciously slow, and you could feel yourself starting to relax and take delight in the way it felt, his hand movements bringing you to peak closer and closer… You let out a lewd sound… And he pulls it away.
A sound of frustration leaves your lips and you look at him. Geto looks back with a smug look on his face. “I thought you didn't like toys,” he teased.
Your face burns and your body is filled with heat, pussy swollen with need, core leaking and desperate for something more. Geto places his palm over your sex, cooing at you, making soothing noises to calm you down from your ruined orgasm. Once he’s certain, the buzzing starts again, and this time he runs the vibrator over your still hard nipples, the sensation not enough to make you needy but enough to make you give him a look of irritation.
It just amuses him, before he runs it back down between your breasts, then over the fold of fat...Your eyes roll back into your head as you rest against the pillow, feet planted on the bed and whine. It’s still on the lowest setting possible and you were unwilling to admit it but it felt good.
A gasp leaves you as one of Geto’s thick fingers enters your slick heat. Combined with the vibrator, it almost felt like he was trying to tease the orgasm out of you rather than build it up. Your core flutters, wet heat gathering as your body is slowly pushed to the edge. He inserts a second finger, tips curling up into that little patch inside you that has your hips snapping forward.
“Fuck…Geto…” You manage to choke out, teeth clenched.
“Are you close?”
You nod breathlessly, praying he wouldn’t stop this time. Your mouth keeps making the most wanton sounds as he pleasures you.
“Should I just let you cum this time? Make the edging a little longer next time?”
It takes all the effort in your being to nod once more. So close…
“Let it happen then…”
Your eyes squeeze closed as an intense orgasm grips you, muscles clenching and fluttering with delight, sobbing at the pleasure. When it starts to calm down, Geto switches off the vibrator and comes up to stroke your hair.
“Well?”
You look at him and roll your eyes.
“Ok, it wasn’t that bad.”
His delighted laugh carries through the room as he starts preparing you for another round.
dividers by @/cafekitsune
#jjk#jujutsu kaisen#jujutsu kaisen smut#jjk smut#geto suguru smut#geto suguru#geto smut#geto suguru x reader#jjk geto#jujutsu kaisen geto#geto suguru x you#suguru geto#jjk getou#geto x reader#suguru#jjk suguru#suguru x reader#suguru geto smut#soft smut
329 notes
·
View notes
Text
hello all! been a moment since we last discussed some things, so I'm coming online to discuss the progress of Larkin's development and make a few announcements :)
over the last ten months, larkin has gone through a lot of changes, some of which I've documented here--but most of it I've kept pretty private. I realized that over the few short years I've been developing the game, I sort of grew an unhealthy dependence on my presence within the 'interactive fiction' community that I really, really needed to take a step back from and break, all in order to ensure that I could enjoy working on what originally started out as a passion project for me.
since july of last year, I've completely reshaped and rewritten how larkin exists as a project, shifted it's genre and started collaborating with a few others to ensure it can be of the highest quality it can possibly be. uptop, i'd like to mention @tapeworrmart who's taken on the immense task of putting together most of the game art for me, @khiita and @ann1a-1 who have both taken on the roles of my editors (and also sounding boards for when I am being absolutely insane) and my production manager phillip, who without his assistance, larkin would barely exist.
with that, let's do a progress report. the intended demo of larkin, or what i've taken to calling 'episode one' (yes, i said, 'episode,' more on that in a minute) has stretched to just over 200k words worth of content. it stretches all the way from the earliest versions of larkin's original prologue, to the end of the original chapter two. so far, we've completed 3 out of the intended 20 character portraits, as well as some more art that's slowly been in development.
now, on to the announcements. probably the biggest, and the one I am most ashamed of is--due to the fact that I've been slammed with graduate school work and some other external factors, Larkin as it currently exists is not the best that I think it can be. I'm deeply sorry for this, but I want to ensure that you all are getting the highest quality game you could get from me--and right now, I know it's just not that. Which is why I am unfortunately, pushing the release of the demo back until Friday, June 14th, 2024. Patrons will be granted access to the most recent edit of the demo two weeks earlier on Friday, May 31st 2024. In the meantime, I will be working day and night (quite literally) to get what I'm dropping on you up to par and something that I'm happy with.
To make up for this disappointment, I'm planning on repopulating the blog with a lot of content over the coming months, rewriting new versions of old asks, posting art and short stories.
Next on the agenda and also an equally important announcement. I'm changing the rating of Larkin to Mature or 18+ As I've been writing these past few months, working through a lot of themes and figuring out the story I want to tell, I've found that I think the change in rating is entirely necessary. While I don't think I've ever had that big of a minor fanbase--I think that this is just what I am most comfortable doing. There has consistently grown a little bit more of gore, and trauma exploration, which is the main reason for this change in rating, but, this does allow for the inclusion of something that I've been toying with since the intial release of the game. There is going to be explicit sex scenes in this new version of Larkin--all of which, you the player are able to opt out of, or completely avoid if that's something you want--but I just thought a little announcement would be warranted. This does not mean however, I am comfortable with answering thoroughly explicit asks or getting unsolicited sexual messages. The goal is to keep this game blog mainly tame.
Please respect this boundary of mine.
Third thing to be announced. I've also changed the format in which Larkin will be released. Rather than around the twenty-five chapters in one of a series of 'Books'/'Games', Larkin will be released episodically over four 'seasons' with eight-ten episodes of around 200k-250k words each (though, this is just an early estimate--they could grow longer, as I'm basing this purely off the demo/Episode One)
Finally and a little bit of a fun note: there are now twelve romance options throughout larkin, five male, three female, one non-binary and three gender-selectable. With those upcoming asks, you'll hear more about each in the coming days :)
With all that being said, I wanted to lastly thank all of you for supporting me over the years and putting faith and your interest in this project. truly, the support of all of you means the world to me and I can't wait to share more of larkin with you all.
thank you 💖
#larkin game#larkin if#larkin#announcement#game announcement#blog update#interactive fiction#if#cyoa#cyoa game#twine interactive fiction#twine#twine game#sugarcube twine
186 notes
·
View notes
Note
I remember when you first started Replica and I haven't been here in a hot minute!
May you please do a debrief of what it is, the characters and their relationships.
I want to be able to give my friend (who I finally dragged down into this TMNT rabbit hole) a good explanation of your wonderful comic!
(. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)
Aw thank you so much! Hm… I suppose a summary would be good to have on hand. For the uninitiated with no context, here is the basic elevator pitch:
The year is 2044 and the last remaining Resistance of Earth has just fallen to the alien invaders known as the Krang. In a last ditch effort to save the planet, Casey, a freedom fighter is sent back in time to undo the events that first led to the invasion. While he is ultimately successful in his mission, the state of his original fallen timeline remains unknown. The last of the freedom fighters, his family, perished to ensure his safe escape, leaving their world to the mercy of the Krang.
Which brings us to the ultimate question: when you already know the heroes are doomed to fail, what can be gained from being told their story?
For the rest below, I’m going to write with the assumption that the reader has some basic knowledge of the series and the film because I feel that this story is best enjoyed with proper context.
SUMMARY
Replica is a story meant to answer many of the questions the first 4 minutes of the movie left us wondering. It’s to explain the basic history of the bad future timeline and how it came to be. The plot focuses particularly on the later half of the apocalypse, all with the intention of leading up to the opening scene where the Krang wins and Casey Junior is sent back in time to fix the mistakes that Leo and his family could not.
It’s to answer questions like:
How did Leo get injured?
Why is Mikey so old looking?
What were these characters like in the future?
What happened to Raph, Donnie, and April?
Where is big bad Krang Prime in all this?
How did the Resistance finally lose to the Krang?
Did they plan to send Casey back in time in advance?
What happened to this world/time-branch after Casey Jr was sent into the past?
MAIN CHARACTERS
For the most part, the cast is comprised entirely of characters from the series. My goal is to keep this as canon as possible, so no new OC's... save for one (kind of).
Omega Bootyyyshaker 9000 is where this story starts and ultimately where it ends. He is a brain scan AI of Donatello, created to act as both a support system for the Resistance after the turtle’s untimely death and also a key component in a plan that will hopefully put a stop to the Krang should the Resistance fail. Omega is great because he adds some much needed levity to the story, acting a bit more like the aloof but silly teenage Donnie (a side affect of not having to experience the usual physical weariness that comes with being an organic, aging organism in an apocalypse). However, he also adds more weight by being the thing that is supposed to outlast all of them and act as the last line of defense for the remainder of the universe. He claims to merely be a "replica" of Donnie's mind, but whether he's just a digitized scan, his own AI person, or somehow connected to Donnie in a deeper way has yet to be seen.
Leonardo Hamato: the man, the myth, the legend. Casey Junior spins tales of how great his sensei was in the movie, but in this story we really get to see Leo go from his lowest point as a pawn for the government, crushed by the shame of his past actions, to his greatest height as the leader of the Resistance. He is going to fail a lot in this story... but ultimately his greatest success is overcoming his own inner demons and coming to terms with being the father figure he had never asked to be. He cares deeply for his family and Casey... but he thinks he'd be a horrible dad.
Michelangelo Hamato: the only other surviving turtle to see the end of the world. He is the emotional bedrock of the family and a stand in therapist when he's not being a silly little guy. His mystical powers are unparalleled, but in his attempts to regain his lost Ninpo he taps into something far deeper, leading them down a path that intertwines the destiny of their doomed future and a past that has yet to occur.
Casey Jones Jr: a sweet boy taken in by the Hamato family. He strives to become a great warrior like his mother (Cassandra) and his Sensei (Leo). We are going to watch him grow from child to teenager as he slowly takes on the roll of being a fighter in the resistance. Through it all he must walk an unsteady line that allows him to find the strength to weather the storm but retain a certain spark of hope that helps keep his family going.
April O'neil: Commander of the Resistance and another honorary Hamato family member. She is the voice of reason and most emotionally stable of the family. Even after dealing with so much loss, she keeps a stiff upper lip as well as cold and calculating mind that always puts the colony's wellbeing first and foremost.
Donatello Hamato (deceased): The story begins shortly after Donnie’s passing during an infiltration mission against the Krang. He was dead set on planting a probe behind enemy lines that would allow them to spy on the Krang’s movements. However it seems that he had a secret agenda in planting something that would work as a final doomsday weapon against the Krang. What that is exactly, we do not yet know. The man self-destructed in a last ditch effort to avoid being interrogated by the Krang as well as a final attack to injure Krang Prime.
Raphael Hamato (deceased): The eldest brother who sadly passed away many years ago in the fight against the Krang. A boisterous but considerate man whose death sapped a great deal of the fighting spirit out of his brothers. His absence is greatly felt, but he might not be as far gone as he seems.
Krang Prime (One): Our big bad of the story. He is the leader of the Krang that has latched onto this planet like a cancer, using up its resources and assimilating its population. However, unlike the hundreds of planets that have come before this one is particularly personal. He doesn't want to merely assimilate but utterly destroy the descendants that caused his imprisonment thousands of years ago. His current state is unknown after being last seen with Donatello at the time of the man's self-destruction.
NEED TO KNOW DETAILS
All Resistance fighters have tiny self destruct bombs in their brains so that the Krang can not probe their minds to find out the Liberty Colony's location. They go off automatically after Krang infestation reaches a certain percentage, but can also be set off via voice command.
Donnie's brain bomb was far more potent because of the amount of information he knew. He did not want to risk the Krang getting any part of his mind.
The Krang have been searching for the resistance in a frustrating game of cat and mouse which has only become more difficult now that the Resistance easily knows their every move by using Donnie's probe.
Central Park Colony: now destroyed, but was once the last massive human colony in North America, housing both the EPF (Earth Protection Force) and US Government. Racism was a huge problem as most yokai and mutants were either quarantined, tested on, or used as living weapons in the fight against the Krang. It has since been destroyed.
Liberty Colony (aka the Resistance): grew from the ashes of the Central Park Colony. It is comprised of the survivors and lead by Leonardo, April, and several others. It is much smaller and more militaristic, but treats yokai, humans, and mutants equally.
Artificial Intelligence (like Omega and Shelldon) are able to fend off the Krang assimilation that people and tech would normally succumb to. It is for this reason Omega is used as both a protector of the Liberty Colony and operator for a majority of the vehicles so that the tech can no longer be easily taken over by the Krang during attacks.
Leonardo and Michelangelo (as well as Donatello's) Ninpo have all been stripped from them by this point in the story. While Leo can not tap into his family connection at all, Mikey at least has regained the ability to use some of his mystic powers.
Mikey's mystic abilities however come at a price. Since he can not tap into his Ninpo and the fountain of energy from his ancestors, he is instead using his own life force to cast his spells. It is slowly draining him.
TIMELINE
Can be viewed HERE
SOURCE MATERIAL
The video that inspired this all can be viewed HERE
Hope this helps! Sorry it's a bit long, tried to break it up with images. At least there might be a few interesting bits of information other readers may not have noticed. I snuck in a few things that haven't been mentioned yet, hehe.
#rottmnt replica#replica#rottmnt#kathaynesart#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles#unpause rise of the tmnt#q&a#save rottmnt#unpause rottmnt
314 notes
·
View notes
Text
The "Bathtub Story": Why It's a Problem, How to Fix It, When to Use It
Writing a "bathtub story" is rarely a good idea. It often fits right up there with flashbacks; most of the time you shouldn't use them, but in certain circumstances, you can get away with them. Bathtub stories lack immediacy and as such, often bring the narrative to a grinding halt.
Yet they are common for new writers to write. So let's go over them, why they're a problem, how to fix them, and when to use one (if you dare 😉) . . . I also have a little offer for my followers at the end, so don't miss that 😊
What is a "Bathtub Story"?
The term "bathtub story" originates from author Jerome Stern, who talks about them in his book, Making Shapely Fiction. He writes:
In a bathtub story, a character stays in a single, relatively confined space . . . While in that space the character thinks, remembers, worries, plans, whatever. Before long, readers realize that the character is not going to do anything. . . . The character is not interacting with other people, but just thinking about past interactions. Problems will not be faced, but thought about.
A bathtub story is essentially a story that takes place in introspection.
While most novels won't literally be an entire bathtub story, many new writers have bathtub scenes or chapters, where the character simply reflects and doesn't do anything meaningful. While Stern likens this to someone in a confined tub, I would argue these can happen even when the character is moving. The character may be taking a walk or washing the dishes, but the story elements only exist in her head.
Why Bathtub Stories are Problematic
Bathtub stories are a problem because all the interesting stuff is in the character's mind (if there is any interesting stuff). This brings in several issues.
1. The Story isn't Moving Forward
Because the bathtub story happens in a character's head, the character isn't taking action. Instead, she's likely ruminating on the past. While you can have a characteristically lazy protagonist, when it comes to the actual plot, all protagonists need to be problem-solvers. And not just in thought, but in deed. A true protagonist is a driver of the story. She must be actively trying to solve problems (that come from antagonistic forces and conflict). Otherwise, she is a passive victim or passive observer (in which case, she probably isn't the true protagonist, but just a viewpoint character).
If she's not problem-solving, the plot probably isn't moving forward. The protagonist should be in the concrete world, taking action or revealing important information, creating turning points. She should have a goal, and a plan, and should be pursuing them--even if the goal is to avoid something.
When she's stuck in her head, she may be thinking about her problems (or past experiences), but she's not influencing the trajectory of the story.
If she's not acting, she's also not completing a meaningful character arc. A character arc shouldn't be superimposed on a story, it should happen because of the story. How the character responds to meaningful antagonistic forces (which includes how she tries to solve problems), creates the character arc. The antagonists challenge her to change, or test her resolve. That can't really happen if she's not doing anything.
At the end of the bathtub scene, ask yourself: Has the protagonist's goal or plan shifted? Has her belief system been challenged or tested by antagonists?
If the answer is no, you likely haven't progressed the story.
2. The Character doesn't Demonstrate Agency
The protagonist needs to be making meaningful choices. For those choices to be impactful, they will be shown by the character taking significant action or revealing important information. Otherwise, his choice never leaves his skull, and therefore doesn't actually matter. So what if he thinks about what he wants to do? Real decisions will be shown.
We all think about things (goals, plans, or otherwise) that we don't actually pursue. If someone thinks about fixing your leaky roof, but never shows up, who cares? If someone thinks they can help with your relationship problems, but never reveals any advice, does it matter? Not really.
Because the role of the protagonist is to be a driver (and not just the antagonist's passive victim), he needs to act on choices to try to achieve goals and solve problems (which helps move the story forward).
Many writers mistakenly think that making the protagonist a passive victim makes him more sympathetic and likable. In reality, the opposite is true. An active protagonist who demonstrates agency is more sympathetic, because he carries some level of responsibility and accountability for any negative outcomes that happen (plus, he also shows us how badly he wants his goal). We all have random crap happen to us. It's more painful and sympathetic when well-intentioned choices lead to heartbreak. (For more on this topic, scroll down to #4 on this post.)
Not demonstrating agency, again likely means the plot or character arc isn't moving forward (and that your protagonist isn't interesting.)
3. Lack of Immediacy
With the "interesting" stuff happening in the character's head instead of concretely, the bathtub story lacks immediacy. The story isn't unfolding for the audience, and because the character is confined to introspection, she's not impacting anything at hand. A lack of immediacy almost always means a lack of tension. If there isn't a current threat, there isn't potential for problems to happen.
4. Focuses on the Past
Speaking of a lack of immediacy . . . bathtub scenes almost always segue into one or more flashbacks, which are likewise frequently frowned upon. Bathtub scenes at least usually focus on the past (even if there is no official flashback.)
Writers tend to look at the past--how the character got to where he is now, or how the current situation came about. While that can be meaningful for the writer, it's often boring for the audience. Or at least less interesting.
The past has already happened. You can't change it. What the character or antagonist does now, won't influence what happened then. (Well, unless you are writing a time travel story, but let's assume you're not).
Instead, the audience wants to be in the present, which holds more tension (or it should, if you've set up your story right). In fact, they actually prefer to lean into the future on a regular basis. The future hasn't happened yet, so it's more exciting, and what the character does now, will (or should) alter the future. While the audience likely can't verbalize it, they want you to imagine the different paths forward the story could go, and then convey them on the page. This is what creates stakes. Stakes are potential consequences. They are about what could happen if a certain condition is met. And what could happen is exactly the sort of thing that hooks and reels readers in.
Think about it. At the most basic level, hooks work by getting the audience to look forward to a later point in the story--to anticipate something they may read later (or soon). So, they keep reading.
You want to regularly lay out what could happen, and almost always in relation to the protagonist or antagonist. If the protagonist successfully does X, then Y will happen. If the antagonist successfully does A, then B will happen. Now the audience needs to see if the protagonist successfully does X or the antagonist successfully does Y. (Or something of that sort.)
In fact, one of the few times visiting the past works well (including with flashbacks), is when doing so provides insight that could affect the future.
5. It's Abstract
If there isn't a flashback, then chances are the bathtub scene is full of abstracts and hypotheticals. The character is musing or even pontificating about the meaning of life, love, society, or what it means to be a homo sapien.
A story that is full of abstracts, often isn't as interesting. This relates to the "Show, don't Tell" rule. Stories are almost always more effective when they appeal to the senses and render a concrete world.
Even if you do want to write about love, it's usually more effective to "show" it, than tell it. (And if you tell it too much, in the wrong way, the story may sound preachy.)
6. Hurts Pacing
For all of the reasons stated above, the bathtub scene almost always leads to poor pacing. The lack of proper plot elements (and often, the lack of proper structure), paired with too much introspection focused on the past or abstracts, kills immediacy and brings pacing to a grinding halt.
If the story isn't going anywhere, then the reader is probably out before you can say "bubble bath." Maybe they'd rather watch paint dry and do their own pontificating in the tub.
Now that we've talked about all the problems, let's get into how to fix a bathtub scene!
How to Fix the Bathtub Scene
1. Get Out of the Bath
Bet you didn't see that one coming, did you?
Get the character out of the "bath" (or off her walk or away from the dishes) and put her where the action is. Or better said, where the true antagonist and conflict is (and that doesn't always mean a "bad guy" or a fistfight or shouting match (see links)).
2. Give the Character a (Current) Goal and an Antagonist
Give your character a current goal with a plan she can start taking current action toward. At the basic level, there are three types of goals: obtain, avoid, or maintain. Any of them is fine, as long as the goal has an antagonistic force opposing it.
Often big goals will break down into little goals, which turn into scene goals. So really, most scenes should have a goal for that scene.
The (scene) goal should be significant, meaning whether or not the character achieves the goal somehow shifts the direction of the story and influences what happens in the near future.
A goal to shave your legs in a bathtub or wash the plates probably isn't significant enough to merit a scene. It's unlikely those goals have the potential to shift the plot's trajectory or affect the character arc. (If they do, well, that might be a reason for a rule break.)
For a scene, the shift doesn't have to be huge, but it needs to be impactful enough to somewhat alter the protagonist's path forward.
The shift for an act should be bigger.
And the shift for the whole story should be huge (read: super impactful).
If you have a bathtub act or literally an entire bathtub book, you probably have a major problem.
3. Demonstrate Choices, through Action and Revealing Knowledge (Information)
As per #2 above, make sure your character is demonstrating agency. A choice doesn't matter if it doesn't leave his head. His choices should be shown in how he interacts with others and the environment. If he chooses to fix a leaky roof, he needs to actually get his tools and climb the ladder. If he chooses to give relationship advice, he needs to open his mouth and reveal his knowledge there to another individual. Thinking about it isn't enough.
4. Write in the Present
Do you really need that flashback or long introspection about the past? For most newer writers, the answer is no. If the info isn't contributing to the plot (how to get the goal, how to defeat the antagonist, how to resolve a conflict, or how to influence consequences), or the character's journey (her heart's deepest desire or her character arc), or the theme (what the story is exploring and arguing), then there is a 99% chance it doesn't need to be in the story. If it does affect those things, it may be worth including. Ask, does taking it out "hurt" or weaken one of those elements I listed?
If the past info really needs to be in the story, does it have to come through a bathtub scene? Is there a way it can come into the story other than straight-up introspection? Can it be "exposition turned into ammunition"? Can mentioning it contribute to the present, or better, the near future? Is there a way the story can be organized so that it happens in real time? Sometimes the flashback can actually be moved into the present by starting the scene or story just a little earlier (though this depends how far back in the past the flashback takes place).
Strive to focus on the present, and even mention the near future. Sprinkle the past in when it contributes to, and doesn't take away from, what is currently playing out.
5. Be Concrete
Show more than tell. (That's really all that needs to be said here.)
When to Use a Bathtub Story
With everything terrible a bathtub story brings in, is it ever a good idea to write one?
All rules are really more like guidelines and can be broken effectively, when handled with care.
In order to do that though, you have to understand why the rule exists, so you can downplay the costs that come with straying off the proven path.
So, now that we understand why the bathtub story is a problem and how you can fix it, let's marry what we've learned and talk about how to make one work.
1. You're Writing a Frame Story
A frame story is a story within a story. It will open with a character telling a story, and end with him finishing it. It's also possible that more than one story is told by the character.
The main story, is the story within the story, which essentially comes from the speaker's memory, so it is usually part of the past, as well as part of his mind.
I'm personally not a big fan of this method, but it does exist and can be useful in providing additional context for the main story. It's also usually more effective when the main story is affecting whatever is currently or about to happen to the speaker.
Obviously a frame story often acts as a sort of bathtub story.
2. The Antagonist is the Self, and this is Internal Conflict
A bathtub story or scene may work if the character is in (meaningful) conflict with himself. We are often cautioned against using a lot of introspection, but if a character is having internal conflict, then he both holds a goal and is also his own antagonistic force. This can be used to create a sort of rising action, as long as the proper plot elements are in place. It is a wrestle within the mind (or perhaps, between the mind and heart.) The climactic moment, the turning point, is the character coming to a definitive decision.
With that said, however, as Ross Hartmann points out in The Structure of Story, it's usually more effective to dramatize or "show" the internal conflict. Have the character take one action toward one outcome in one beat, and then an action toward the opposing outcome in the next.
But depending on where in story structure the internal conflict shows up, it may be handled better one way over another . . .
3. You're in the Falling Action
Story structure is a fractal. Not only should the story as a whole have a rising action, climax, and falling action, but inside of that, so should each act, and so should each scene.
During the rising action, the character should (almost) always be proactive. During the falling action, almost always, the character is reactive. She's reacting to whatever just happened.
If you are familiar with Dwight V. Swain's approach to scenes, this is essentially what he calls the "sequel."
At this point in the structure, it may not matter too much what the character is doing physically, what matters is how she is reacting, and then, what she decides to do next.
If you are in the falling action, it may be perfectly acceptable to write a (short) bathtub story.
4. It's Focused on the Future
As mentioned above, we are often cautioned against writing a lot of introspection. This is in part because writers often focus introspection on the past.
But when the introspection is focused on the future--what could happen if a goal is or is not reached and/or what the character plans to do next--then it becomes more relevant and more interesting. In fact, not only does it not take away from the story, but it can strengthen the plot. Introspection can be used well to lay out significant stakes. And, technically, this could be done in a "bathtub."
Just make sure having the character think about the future, leads to him soon taking action to try to influence it.
5. The Point is to Show Nothing is Happening
In rare, rare situations, the point of a scene may be to illustrate that nothing important is happening, and no changes are taking place. Such scenes almost never work (and if anything, are usually better conveyed in summary), but, someday, in some story, you may find yourself in need of such a moment. A bathtub scene might arguably work there.
Just don't make it longer than it needs to be to get the point across.
There are a couple of other times you may get away with a bathtub scene: if it's somehow contributing to theme, or if it's super entertaining or intriguing.
All in all, be cautious.
They fail more often than they succeed.
#writing tips and tricks#writeblr#writers on tumblr#writing tips#Let's Write#writing resources#writing#writer stuff
94 notes
·
View notes
Note
so, (SPOILERS FOR FIONNA AND CAKE but its relevant to the question but im gonna put a bunch of line breaks just in case lol)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
so fionna and cake ended with fionna basically being like, you know, youre RIGHT god, if magic came back my wish would simply be twisted and it would suck, there will be no rule breaking miracles! I will now work as a struggling minimum wage employee in seattle and Be Happy about it. i sure am glad the threat of losing everyone i know and love set me straight!! sorry to send u this really random thing the ending just felt like such a slap in the face and i wanted to ask someone who knows that exact Seattle Struggle. this is absolutely me appealing to the Writing Gods to back me up that the ending wasnt very good lmao but if i have a direct line to the craftsgoat i simply must use it for something stupid at least once
FULL SERIES SPOILERS FOR FIONNA & CAKE AFTER THE BREAK!!!
i really disagree with your read on the ending. it didn't feel like "just struggle with seattle minimum wage forever and be happy about it" at all to me! the whole instigating incident was that fionna wanted to transform reality into something that she personally thought would be better, without taking into account the fact that other people exist and have internal lives just as complex as hers. she comes back to her original world to find marshall and gary holding hands, explains to them the magical adventure she's been on and the fact that their world is about to transform into something unrecognizably magical, and they receive this with abject horror! fionna doesn't know whether simon becoming ice king again will erase marhsall & gary's burgeoning relationship, which makes her realize that in her quest to escape the boring, oppressive reality of working odd jobs to make ends meet, she's only ever focused that energy on how to make things better for her.
i really want to dig into this because it's a key theme of the show. there is a destructive selfishness innate to the "heroes" of this universe, who feel entitled to the joyous empowerment of being able to defeat anyone and everyone they see in open combat. cake has a whole musical number about this! simon's arc in the last two episodes was betty grabbing him and shaking him until he finally asked himself, how would my life have been different if i'd just once let the woman i loved steer the ship for a while? and then of course we see the lich in a reality where he succeeded in eradicating all life, only to find himself desiccated and without purpose, begging the god of chaos for an answer it cannot give. brian david gilbert's ice prince seems perfectly put together and successful, until the reveal that he's outsourced his madness to someone who didn't accept the terms of the crown's curse. this didn't solve the fundamental problem, it just inverted the roles of its expression by making princess bubblegum into the mad candy queen. nothing about the status quo has changed, simon has simply given himself a more dignified role in it.
this is a story about what happens when people in struggle behave as though they are the protagonist of reality. when fionna says "this is the world i want to fight for" she's not fighting for the right to get another shitty minimum wage job. i think you've really missed something by accepting that conclusion when cake the cat is right there saying that her magical self IS the version of herself she wants to live as. being a normal house cat for her was, arguably, a form of body dysmorphia, and the show lets her keep that magic at the end! the thing is, their world IS changed by the events of the show! the status quo is altered!
like, what do we actually see everyone DOING when the credits approach? we see this entire disconnected community banding together to rebuild the city together, and we see a huge crowd of protesters outside marshall's mom's place demanding that she lower rents. we see people connecting with other people, including three outcasts from other universes escaping to this more boring one for their own safety. i loved this ending honestly, because it felt to me like an attempted refutation of the very idea that you can magically transform reality into something better overnight. if fionna'd gotten her original wish and made her world into, like, candy world, then... what? let's say they play it as like, at last people are freed from the shackles of capitalism and everyone just gets to be weird funky critters going on adventures or whatever. what would that, as art, actually say? what would that mean to us in the real world? if we're going into this cartoon looking for some kind of revolutionary energy (which IS present in the text, much to its credit), what actionable or symbolically resonant message are we supposed to take from a story that resolves its problems with magic? at that point, it ceases to be relevant as anything more than pure fantasy, because it has abandoned any connection to the material reality WE are trapped in.
i don't want to magically transform the world overnight. this whole show goes out of its way to explore how trying to transform the world overnight, in a world where such a thing is possible, is a really fucking bad idea for a whole host of reasons. regardless, such things aren't possible in our world. so going into the finale, my worry was that they WOULD turn fionna's world into another candy world and just say, ah, the revolution is when you think the right things so hard that the material plane bends to your will.
that's neoliberal thinking. that's like the essence of the failed leftist project of the "end of history" era from the 90s onwards, when marxism was systematically rooted out of academic cultural analysis and replaced with the delusion that if you can just get people thinking the right things, you can affect change in the world. well here we are, it's 2023 and all that magical thinking has got us is a world on fire and a civilization of human beings so thoroughly disempowered that they would literally rather pretend to be a tortured anime protagonist than exist in this boring, shitty, violent reality. you can't think your way out of oppression. raising labor consciousness is, at best, step one. you want to know why unions are winning big right now when they've been completely useless in this country for decades? it's because they've stopped giving a shit about optics they can't control and remembered that the boss's value does not exist without labor. you do not necessarily need marxism for this, marxism is simply the most accurate articulation of the fact that workers who make the things a capitalist sells can kneecap the capitalist by refusing to make the things they want to sell. change doesn't happen with the publishing of a book or whatever, it happens when enough people in real life press their material demands hard enough that someone in charge is left no choice but to listen.
so for me, fionna & cake ending the way it did was a huge relief, because it wasn't espousing magical thinking. the solution to fionna's ennui and economic anxiety was not to just get another job and be happy to live in the world as it was-- it was to create a sense of shared community and struggle, uniting the not-seattleites in their survival of a near-apocalypse and using it as a jumping off point for fundamentally transforming the state of that world as it exists. fionna had to realize that her problems are everyone's problems, and that making her life personally better at the expense of everyone else's agency is just an act of kicking the can of responsibility down the road indefinitely. no one who gets their wish in this show is happy to have gotten it, or avoids punishing others who didn't ask to be involved.
the "canonization" of fionna & cake felt like a reaction to the idea that we in our world are permanently isolated from the fictional realities we create where change seems to come so easy, and the powerlessness that can engender. instead this show is saying, okay, let's say we are in continuity with these fantastical realities. what do we actually DO with that? how do we make this world more fun, more interesting, more fulfilling for everyone to live in? the answer is the same as it's always been, and no other answer would ever feel satisfying: you do it by organizing the workers against the current arrangement of the state with the explicit goal of transforming it for the better.
what does simon do at the end when he gives fionna her world to her? he says that no one person should have that responsibility, that it's been in one person's hands for too long. so he gives it to her in the form of a dandelion, whose blown seeds merge with and become part of everyone trying to survive the scarab's attack. the idea here is that while no single person ever possesses the power to transform the world on their own, the world itself belongs to all of us, and it is within our power to transform it together. those who hoard power want us to believe that this is not the case precisely because the basis of their power is fraudulent and maintained through the violence of the state.
as someone who does live in seattle for better and worse, as much as i do wish i could make literally anything better right the fuck now by whatever means necessary... the fact is i can't. and it does no one any good to labor under the assumption that i or any other individual has that kind of absolute transformative power. the solutions are all right there, and they are simple, materialist propositions whose only difficulty lies in how successfully we've been propagandized to think that the individual is God, or at least speaks on His behalf. there's no thinking our way out of this pickle, and no one's gonna do the hard work for us.
as to the question of how you actually get people in real life to get together and do all that hard work... well, personally i think it's unfair to ask a 10 episode cartoon show to give you any kind of actionable advice on that front. i might even go so far as to say that such an expectation is an expression of the very same magical thinking which the show tries to push back against! in any case i liked it quite a lot and i hope this rambling answer encourages you to revisit the show and reconsider some of your takeaways
161 notes
·
View notes
Text
Two Skeptics And A Believer Walk Into A Haunted Room...
❥ Back to the Control Center
❥ I'm so so so sorry for the shitty and abrupt ending on this one, I just got bored and kiiinda ran out of ideas on where to take the last 20 or so minutes of the video... who knows I might make a pt. 2 and finish the video at some point if I can think of something to add
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
Tommyinnit x fem!reader
Summary: Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke right? But, it just so happens to be a very accurate description of you, Tommy, and Jack entering the Ram Inn for your guest appearance on the Sam and Colby youtube channel
Word Count: 2.3k
Warnings: creepy stuff, hauntings, demons, language, probably an inaccurate spirit box session, inconsistent capitalization, shitty writing.. this is definately not one of my better ones
Dialogue Key:
Y/N
Tommy
Jack
Sam
Colby
James, the tour guide
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
The group of you began in a courtyard of the Ram Inn, Jack to your right and Tommy to your left while Sam and Colby stood before you.
Tom had originally just asked Jack to come with him for the video, assuming you'd want nothing to do with it after how annoyed you seemed during the entire 'uncle nasty' situation. He quickly realized his mistake when you followed him around the apartment for an hour begging him to ask Sam and Colby if you could come along.
"And what about you?" Sam asked, eyes trained on you.
Jack had finished telling the story of his experience on stream and Tom declared his adamancy that ghosts aren't real, but you'd yet to speak.
"Oh I believe 100%" you spoke with a smile, completely ignoring your boyfriend perched beside you staring at you as if you were insane, "I've always wanted to try something like this, I just couldn't justify spending all the money on equipment."
"Yeah" Sam drawled out scratching the back of his neck, "it does get a bit expensive."
"Exactly!" you chirped, gesturing to the two older boys before you, "but since you already have it... now I get to do it free of charge!"
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
You quickly noticed, that despite his insistence that everything was fine, Tom was starting to get jumpier than normal inside the building.
Usually, whenever a camera is around, your boyfriend became a hyper-sugar-high-nighmare that would be bouncing off the walls and jumping all over the place. Now, however, it seemed he barely registered the camera being on at all.
Instead, he seemed dazed, taking special care to analyze every corner of the room and register every individual item placed in the general area. If you didn't know about the demons that were said to call this place their home, you'd say the scariest thing was the way Tom was acting.
The guide soon gathered the group in the center of the room to begin the tour, "There's two main demons, One's an incubus and one's a succubus. John, who owned the building, he was attacked by them quite a lot."
You closed your eyes, lowering your head slightly in embarrassment for what was to come. You'd been dating Tom long enough to know exactly where his mind was at.
"So was he like... into demon..."
You didn't expect that though.
"Why would you ask that?" you hissed slapping his shoulder, before looking back to your guide, "was he though? I am kinda curious now."
Jack mumbled, shaking his head similar to that of a parent watching their kids doing something they shouldn't, "Children."
"No." James responded, drawing out his answer as if deliberating in his mind, "No, no-no."
Tommy looked down at you right as you looked up at him. The both of you stared at each other for all of two seconds before nodding in conclusion.
"Yeah-"
"-he definitely did."
As the rest of the group continued talking over the specifics of the demons in the Inn, it took all of your strength to keep from laughing at your boyfriend.
"So like" Tommy cut off the guide, "what are the boundaries sexually? like I'm not trying to be immature... this is just like really freaking me out-"
"Tom!" you gasped through laughter, "it's a demon! Love, I dont think it has boundaries."
The rest of the group began laughing, everyone but Tommy.
"Well what about my boundaries!" he complained hands splayed across his chest, only making you laugh harder "Don't laugh at me! I'm being serious!"
James, the tour guide entered the conversation, "No, is not no."
Toms's facial expression dropped, one hand going for your wrist while the other continued gesturing out before him as he spoke, "I- Well, mate that's not how that works!"
By now, you were practically on the floor with laughter, the only thing keeping you up was your arm raised high above you in Tommy's grip.
"They're a demon, I don't think they care."
"Well, I care!"
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
"This room by far is the most... decorated?" you spoke, looking around at all the creepy items placed around the room.
"Yeah, it's like theyre trying to make this place scary" Sam agreed, looking down at a dusty mirror desplaying the words 'help me' at the back wall of the room.
Jack took the singular chair in the room, while the rest of the group stayed standing, listening as the tour continued.
Well, continued for all of a few minutes when a candle fell from the table behind where Jack sat.
You jumped, grabbing onto Tommy, "I didn't like-"
You were swiftly cut off by a girl's voice coming from the window, "Nope. I really didn't like that."
The group began freaking out, Sam moving closer to investigate the noise and Tommy tugging your arm behind him, shuffling in front of you. Creating as much space from that general area and you as he could.
"Hello?" he shouted, one arm holding you behind him and the other holding the Minecraft sword before him, "Hello? Can you check the window?"
Everyone began deliberating what was going on, trying to figure out an explanation for what was going on. By now, you were burrowing yourself into Tom's side, one of his arms securely wrapped around you, swinging the sword before the both of you as he tried to get the group to go check outside.
Sam tried to bring up the candle, but Tommy had his mind set on figuring out what was going on. The candle could wait, but if there were people waiting outside messing with you all, they could easily leave at any second.
However, after checking around several times, it became obvious that whatever you heard wasn't outside the hotel.
It had to have been inside.
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
You all decided to cut the tour short and begin the investigation due to the amount of stuff you all seemed to be experiencing.
So, you all began the night in the witch's room with the spirit box.
"Is there anything here that wants to talk to us?"
"Please just say Hi or something" Tommy spoke bouncing anxiously on his feet, "I'm really just not having a good time-"
Ooh
Sam pointed down at the box, a smile growing on his face "Was that just a hello?"
Jack, on the other hand, wasnt as easily convinced, "Eh... it was a very faint something."
"Can you tell us a name? or who you might be?"
After a few moments of silence, Tommy and Jack made up an impromptu rap for the ghosts, and despite a few other unintelligible noises, nothing else seemed to happen in the room.
However, before leaving the room, you set up the REM pod on the bed just in case.
"I just remembered something" Sam spoke up when the REM pod began to go off in response to Jack, "The witch only likes respect..."
"Oh, thats right!" Colby shouted, "That's why we got the offerings-"
You whipped around, facing the tall raven-haired man behind you, eyebrows raised high, "I'm sorry... the what?"
"Yeah! The witch will only talk to people if she wants to. because like, if you're being disrespectful or too stupid she's like 'I don't wanna talk'"
You turned back, clicking your tongue and shrugging with fake sympathy as you faced Tommy. "You hear that?" you sighed, resting a hand on his shoulder, "Looks like we're gonna have to kick you out of this investigation."
Tommy sputtered looking around, "Wha- Why?"
Jack stepped forward, knowing where you were going with this, "Yeah mate," he added shaking his head sorrowfully, "You may have to wait outside for this one."
You and Jack looked at each other with a smirk,
"Ya know," you continued, "to keep you from acting-"
"-too stupid"
"-Too stupid"
Tommy looked at the both of you, mouth agape. "Common now, that was just mean."
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
For the first Estes method run of the night, Tommy volunteered to go under as you all investigated the first floor. The rest of you now stood huddled around him as he sat in the rocking chair with the headphones on.
"Is there anybody here with us? you were just making the REM pod go off earlier"
Get Down.
"Were we being disrespectful upstairs?"
Me and You.
"Is anyone upstairs?"
I need you.
You furrowed your brows at that. Both Sam and Colby brought up the succubus, but neither directly asked the question, so you decided you would.
"Like the succubus? O-or Incubus I guess? I dunno one of the demons?"
silence.
"You said you needed something? What do you need?" you asked again, but still received no response.
You laughed a little to yourself, "Welp I guess it doesn't like me then." your eyes widened, "Actually, uh, ghosts, please do not confirm or deny that statement... I think I'd rather you be silent on that one, I don't really want to know."
The rest of the group, except for Tommy obviously, laughed a little under their breath at your words before continuing the investigation.
"Is there something evil here? something that's keeping you here?"
Going on.
"Something evil going on"
"That makes sense" you agreed, "It's the most haunted place in England right?" you asked looking between the two, "It has to have had something evil going on at some point"
"Yeah" Colby nodded, "this place has had "Evil" for around 5,000 years."
"We hear there's demons here, is that true?"
Earth Under.
"Like... buried?" you asked.
Jack nodded at your words, adding another question for the two boys, "Yeah, because a lot of shit was like, dug up here as well, right-"
Tunnel to the left.
"oh my god," you breathed out, "Isn't that where they dug up that grave?"
"Oh yeah!" Sam exclaimed running over into the next room, "this is where they found the tunnel that used to be a grave, which would've been-"
"-to my left."
The three of you scurried back into the room where Tommy and Colby stayed to continue talking to the ghosts.
"Are you talking about the tunnel in the other room? where did that lead to?"
no response.
Just as you were about to ask a question, Tom yelped, quickly grabbing the headphones and ripping them off due to a low, loud, and deep voice suddenly coming through the speakers.
next under, was Jack.
"What's your purpose here ghost? What do you want?"
The child
You and Tommy both began freaking out at that while Sam and Colby stood to the side somewhat confused.
"Everyone used to call me the child!" he yelled, a vice-like grip on your arm as he spoke to the other two and the camera, "Everyone would call me the child!"
"Woah... whats even weirder" Sam explained, "was the bones they found underneath here were a child's."
"Well, uh, that's good" your voice shook slightly, "that means it might not be referring to you then."
"Do- do you mean tunnel child or- or Tom child?"
no answer.
"ya know," you spoke nervously, "I kinda wanted to try, but now I'm not too sure."
Yes.
"oh no." you laughed, "I-uh, I didn't like that at all."
"Are you sure you do not want to try?" Sam asked, laughter in his tone, "I think they want you to"
Yes.
"Well..." you drawled, "I don't really uh, I don't really know... we seem to be getting a lot here without me doing that.."
"We are going back to the witch's room next to give her an offering" Colby mentioned, "you could do it there if you'd like. We didn't get much activity up there."
"True" you trailed off, thinking it over, "Yeah sure, I'll do it there."
━─━────༺✧༻────━─━
Not too long later, you were now sat in a different chair up in the witch's room, getting ready for the Estes method after giving the witch her new Minecraft creeper and scrub-daddy offerings.
"Nah" you spoke, waving Tom over near you, "You sit right there and give me your hand" you demanded pointing to the floorboards to your side.
"Why?"
"Because I know how you are. No way I'm letting you float around this room to scare me and tap on my shoulders and shit- sit down."
And with that, Tommy sat on the floor, hand folded in yours as you put the headphones on and pulled down the blindfold.
"Is anyone here with us?"
Nothing.
"Elspeth, are you here with us?"
You jumped in your chair, not quite ready to hear anything come through the headphones.
Yes.
"Have you found us disrespectful?"
One.
"One of us was disrespectful?"
"Probably fucking Tom." Jack scoffed, rolling his eyes.
"AY! Why'd you say that!"
"Oh I don't know, you're the one that has been yelling at her!"
"Have not!"
"you just were like two seconds-"
you squeezed Tom's hand, unknowingly cutting off Jack and Tommy's argument as you spoke, "I don't know what it just said, but it sounded like laughing at the end."
Colby tilted his head, eyes furrowing, "laughing? why would she be laughing?"
'm not.
"What do you mean you're not?" Tom pestered, "You just did so-"
Him.
Toms's brow crinkled further, confusion settling into his expression.
"Him?" Sam asked, "Do you mean it's not Elspeth anymore?"
"Yeah, are we talking to someone else?"
your head quirked to the side, confused at the noise coming through the headphones, "It's like a bell?" you spoke, "Yeah like I hear a bell ringing."
"Oh!" Sam yelled, "Like ding ding, that's right!"
"Maybe"
"Who are you then? who are we speaking to?"
Bad.
"You're bad? Or is something here bad?"
Evil.
"What do you mean evil?"
The next.
Colby turned to Sam, realization dancing in his eyes, "The bishop's room. Thats our next stop, known to be a center for the demon-"
You yelped, tearing off the headphones when loud, evil laughter flooded your ears. You squeezed Tom's hand, yanking his arm to get a semi-awkward positioned hug from the boy.
"That sucked" you spoke, voice muffled by his sweatshirt.
"What happened?" he asked you, eyes wide and gaze quickly moving to each of the older guys in the group, attempting to calm you the best he can while freaking out himself.
"There was loud laughter." you explained, gesturing around our head, "it was like thousands of people all laughing all around my head."
Once again.... so very sorry for the shitty ending- I couldn't think of anything else to put...
229 notes
·
View notes
Note
I think the idea of George introducing (y/n) to his parents is totally cute and I think your style off writing would rock that.
Happy new year by the way!
All the best for you and your stories :)
This is my first ever request. I had such fun writing it. I hope you enjoy it!
Warnings: brief allusion to sex, one mention of alcohol
~•~
Meet the Weasleys
~•~
"Ugh, gross. Why are my palms so sweaty?" Y/N muttered to herself, grabbing a paper towel, to wipe the sweat from her hands. Her early morning boost of confidence was gone, leaving her pacing from one end of the kitchen to the other.
She tossed the used paper towel in the trash and looked out the window for the 982nd time. George would be here any minute to take her to have lunch with his parents at his childhood home. A place called the Burrow.
Never in her life had Y/N been so anxious about meeting someone's parents. George seemed confident that she'd "be a hit." But, she wasn't entirely convinced. What could she, a "muggle," offer to people who could perform magic, real magic, with the simple flick of a wand? She glanced over at the apple spice cake she'd baked for dessert and hoped it would be enough.
~•~
Four months earlier
George woke up with a craving for one of the chocolate filled croissants that Ginny had purchased from a muggle bakery for James' second birthday party. Luckily for him, he had the address, and it was his day off.
The Pie in the Sky Bakery wasn't too far from Diagon Alley, so George decided to walk and enjoy the warm summer morning. Whistling as he went, he just knew it was going to be a good day. And he was right.
He didn't notice Y/N at first, distracted by all the enticing baked goods.
"Can I help you?" Her voice floated over to him, soft and melodious.
George turned and nearly stumbled over his own feet. The owner of that sweet voice somehow managed to brighten the already sunny shop even more. He was mesmerized.
"I-uh, hi." George stuttered and gave a goofy wave before clearing his throat and starting again. "Do you have any chocolate filled croissants today?"
"Of course! They're right over here. How many would you like?" Y/N bounced to the far end of the counter while George followed, a big, dopey grin spread across his freckled face.
He paid for two croissants and an espresso. Then, rather than taking a stroll, as he originally intended, George sat down at one of the little bistro tables and spent the rest of the morning exchanging shy glances and flirty banter with the lovely lady behind the counter.
When he could no longer make excuses for lingering, George approached Y/N. "Could I interest you in dinner tomorrow night?"
"Yes! I'd love to have dinner with you!" She answered, her brilliant smile melting George's heart into a puddle.
~•~
Two months later, to Y/N's delighted surprise, George confessed he was a wizard. And today, for the first time ever, he was taking a girl home to meet his parents.
George was practically bouncing off the walls.
"Hey mate, try not to leave any George-shaped holes in anything," Fred joked.
"I'll try!" George yelled from his bedroom. "But, I can't make any guarantees."
Fred shook his head and chuckled. He hadn't seen his twin this elated since he came home from the bakery four months ago gushing over Y/N.
"Ok, how do I look? George asked, suddenly appearing in front of his brother.
"Like a crazed lunatic who just broke out of the asylum."
"Ha, ha. Very funny." George deadpanned.
"Seriously though," Fred continued, scrutinizing his brother. "You look great. It's just..."
"Just what?" George looked down at himself.
"You seem a tad nervous."
"Oh that," the younger twin responded. "Well, I am bringing a girl to meet mum and dad for the first time ever. And mum didn't fancy the last two girls you and Bill brought home."
"Georgie," Fred retorted. "The reason mum didn't like Lizzy is because she had a mohawk and tattoos. And as far as Fleur goes, once mum realized she wasn't after Bill for a quick fling, she warmed right up to her."
"Yeah, you're right. I know you're right." George agreed. "I'm just overthinking again."
Fred patted him on the back. "It'll all work ou--" Fred stopped mid-sentence, closing his eyes and putting his fingertips to his temples. "Wait! I'm getting a vision...I see...you and Y/N together...in a house...and..and, there's something else. Hold on, it's starting to come into focus...yes, that's it! Loads of ginger babies!"
Fred opened his eyes to see George standing with arms folded, his lips quirked up in amusement. "Are you done?" George asked.
"Yes, quite." Fred said, lifting his chin in the air and sauntering away.
George snorted, wondering if Fred knew he was secretly eyeing a cute, little muggle flat halfway between his shop and Y/N's.
~•~
George arrived at Y/N's oozing his usual easy confidence. "Ready for this, my love?" He asked Y/N as they walked to his car.
Y/N took a deep breath, then smiled. "Ready as I'll ever be."
"Don't worry, darling." George said, bending down and planting a kiss on her cheek before opening the car door for her. "They'll love you."
~•~
The closer they got to the Burrow, the faster Y/N's heart raced. George seemed to sense this, and reaching out, he clasped her trembling, sweaty hand in his warm, steady one.
Y/N sighed as a wave of calm rolled over her. A small smile crept across her face, and she began tracing little circles on his hand with her thumb. He squeezed her hand in return, as his own small smile made an appearance.
Neither one spoke the rest of the drive. There was no need. Everything that needed to be said was conveyed through that one simple gesture connecting them to one another.
~•~
Y/N didn't have time to marvel at the impossible higgley-piggleyness of the Burrow. As soon as she stepped out of the car, Mrs. Weasley pulled her into a hug. "Oh my goodness, look at you. Cute as a button! You know, George talks about you all the time. It's so good to finally meet you! He tells me..." Mrs. Weasley's non-stop chatter faded as she led Y/N into the house, leaving George and Arthur to collect the cake.
George released a long breath he didn't know he was holding.
"Relieved, son?" Arthur asked.
"Yeah, actually." George admitted. "I was afraid she'd give Y/N the cold shoulder like she did to Fleur."
"Ah, you needn't have worried about that." Arthur began. "Bill sprung Fleur on us out of nowhere. We had no idea he was even dating anyone. But you, George, you've been talking about Y/N for months. Your mum has had time to get used to the idea. Not to mention," Mr. Weasley added with a chuckle. "She’s ecstatic that Y/N's a baker. Now she has someone to talk shop with."
The same dopey grin that had spread across George's face the day he met Y/N returned, and to Arthur's amusement, his son practically skipped into the house.
~•~
A wonderful lunch turned into an impromptu bake-a-thon with George bounding around the kitchen "helping" Y/N and Molly as they made one treat after another. His unrestrained joy was so sweet and infectious that neither of the women were upset when he accidentally put a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar into one of the batters, rather than the other way around.
Even Arthur, who generally stayed out of the kitchen whenever Molly was cooking, found himself pulled into the mélee by his giddy son. By the end of the day, they were all covered in flour, frosting, and a vast array of sprinkles, thanks to George and Arthur getting a bit too happy with sprinkling the colorful little confections.
~•~
"This ranks as one of the best days of my life," George commented as he and Y/N relaxed on the tiny balcony of her flat, sipping whiskey and nibbling on chocolate chip cookies.
"I have to agree, Georgie." Y/N concurred, using the nickname reserved only for her and Fred. "I can't believe I was so nervous. Your parents are wonderful."
George smiled and lifted her hand to his lips, leaving a lingering kiss on her knuckles. Then, he turned his gaze to the moon. "It's getting late."
"It is." Y/N responded.
"I don't want to leave."
"You know my bed is always open to you." Y/N said with a cheeky grin.
"I know." George's eyes twinkled as he uttered the next words. "But, I mean, I don't want to leave ever again."
"I know, love. We never want to part at the end of the day." Y/N responded, still not quite catching on.
"Exactly." George said, jumping right to the heart of the matter. "Will you move in with me? I know it might seem too soon, and if you aren't ready, that's okay, we can w--"
Y/N ended his ramblings with a kiss that made him forget everything he'd ever learned for a few brief moments.
"Of course, I'll move in with you." Y/N said, once they pulled away.
"R-really?"
"Yes, really."
"Yes!" George exclaimed and fist-pumped the air. "This calls for a celebration," he said, picking her up bridal style and carrying her to the bedroom.
#george weasley#george weasley x reader#george weasley x y/n#fred weasley#arthur weasley#molly weasley#the weasleys
574 notes
·
View notes
Text
something in the way she moves
with Jack Hughes
for the summer fic exchange 2k23
a/n: I’ve been in my Taylor Swift and Jack Hughes era all summer, so what better way to write my exchange fic for @wyattjohnston than to combine those two subjects into one project for her? this one was originally inspired by “Question…?” and ended up tying together several Taylor songs all at once – check out the companion playlist for all of those and more songs that inspired the fic! also, shoutout to Brady and Emma’s wedding for providing the perfect backdrop for this story after I stalled out with ideas for the perfect present-day setting. lots of special guests appear in this one! finally, some people might hate the flashback format with all the jumping around, but I’ve been watching a lot of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” so you can thank the show for that! hope everyone enjoys… but especially @wyattjohnston. this one’s for you, my friend! endless thanks to you for putting on this wonderful exchange for us all, and for inviting me to be part of it. (and thanks to the lovely @laurenairay for the assist!)
tropes: whirlwind romance, exes to lovers, fluff, angst
warnings: swearing, alcohol, mention of breakup, arguing / conflict, sexual references but nothing graphic or detailed, quinn and luke and brady and matthew being pests, miles wood being a drunken hooligan lolol
word count: ~8,500+ (hey who knew I still knew how to write long fic)
_____
July 21, 2023 – present day – Brady and Emma Tkachuk’s wedding – Peapack-Gladstone, New Jersey…
“Can I ask you a question?”
Jack tucked his chin to his chest, busying himself with studying the pattern of the brick patio beneath his smart white sneakers. Whatever question Francesca had in mind, he was absolutely sure he was unprepared for it. But he nodded anyway.
Fran stared at his profile as he shuffled his feet beneath him, but as he lifted his head to look at her, she looked away, unable to meet his eyes as she forged ahead. Her gaze settled across the horizon instead, the moonlight casting a glow across the rolling green hills of Natirar.
She sighed, then bit the bullet. “Does it feel like everything’s just like… second best now?” she inquired listlessly.
Jack chuckled sadly, fiddling nervously with the neck of his amber beer bottle. Anybody who knew Jack knew he was never nervous. Except for where Fran was involved. She was the only person who had ever been able to do anything remotely resembling rattling him.
“What, after that meteor strike?” he asked sarcastically.
That’s what it felt like, at least – that night two years ago, when his team was out celebrating the end of their abysmal season before separating for the summer, the very same night her roommates had dragged her kicking and screaming from Fordham’s campus, across the Hudson, to see some indie band for one last hurrah before they went their own respective ways until fall semester, and Jack and Fran found themselves in the same crowded Hoboken bar. It felt like a meteor had crashed directly in his path that May night and blown up his entire life as he had known it.
He nodded wearily before answering his now ex-girlfriend’s, as well as his own rhetorical, question.
“Yeah, Fran. Yeah… it definitely does.”
Because second best was all that anything could have ever been, following the sensational rise and the staggering fall of Jack Hughes and Francesca DeLuca.
He’d never forget the very moment he first laid eyes on her…
___
May 1, 2021 – two years earlier…
From Jack’s perch at the bar next to Nico, nursing a Moscow mule, the girl in the pale yellow halter dress was impossible to miss.
He’d never believed in love at first sight, but as he surveyed the way that dress hugged her curves as she danced with her girlfriends, belting out the lyrics to “Peaches” to Justin Bieber, he thought for the first time that he might be completely wrong about that notion. He watched her hips sway enticingly, her olive-toned skin glowing beneath the bright multicolored lights, dark curls bouncing along with her every step.
Before he knew it, his feet were taking steps of their own, ditching Nico mid-sentence as the young captain stood dumbfounded, arms flung out to his sides in annoyance as Jack sauntered away. As he watched Jack approach a circle of dancing young women, he zeroed in on the one in the yellow dress right away, knowing immediately that she was the reason for the abrupt end to his conversation with his teammate. As he saw Jack approach her, Nico could only smile and roll his eyes as he wandered off to find the rest of the Devils crew, assuming they’d lost #86 to the girl in the yellow dress for the rest of the evening.
Meanwhile, for once, Jack didn’t have a plan, no course of action – didn’t have a pick-up line prepared, didn’t have anything clever in mind to say when he reached the girl in the yellow dress. When he finally did, she had her back to him, and it was only thanks to her perceptive friend, who pressed her lips into a straight line and tapped the woman on the shoulder, pointing to where he stood, that she even turned around and noticed Jack over her shoulder.
And when she finally did lay eyes on him… well, she was as sunk as he was.
Nothing was said between the two for a few moments, only bashful smiles exchanged. The girl took a few steps toward him, and he eventually found the wherewithal to open his mouth, praying that whatever was about to tumble from his lips wouldn’t make him look like a complete idiot.
“Hi… I like your dress.”
Okay, could’ve been better, could’ve been worse.
The girl’s lips spread into a grin, one that made Jack’s stomach flip over itself.
“Thanks,” she said, glancing down to what she was wearing as if she herself had forgotten. Then her eyes scanned his outfit. “I, uh, I like yours, too.”
A giggle escaped Jack before he could stop it, and instead of making things awkward, it seemed to endear the girl to him further.
“Thanks,” he muttered. And then no other words came to mind.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, he berated himself. Say something else, you jackass.
Thankfully, the girl saved them both from complete and total disaster and rescued Jack from himself.
“I’m Francesca,” she said, raising her voice above the thumping music which seemed to get louder with every passing moment. “But everyone calls me Fran.”
Jack extended a hand for a gentlemanly shake, making Fran smile as she grasped it in hers.
“It’s nice to meet you, Fran,” he said, ducking his head close to her ear so that he, too, could be heard above the music… and maybe because it provided the perfect opportunity to be closer to her. “I’m Jack. And everyone calls me Jack.”
That earned a full-on chuckle from Fran which warmed Jack from the inside out. He watched her, grinning from ear to ear, amused by her amusement and encouraged by the fact that him introducing himself hadn’t seemed to spark any instances of the often inescapable “don’t I know you from somewhere?” or “you look so familiar” or, worse, “you play hockey, right?” He could be jinxing it, or she could just have a really impressive poker face, but it seemed that Fran truly had no earthly idea what he did for a living… and that delighted him to no end.
“It’s nice to meet you, too, Jack,” she replied, still allowing her hand to be enveloped by his. “Are you from around here?”
Jackpot.
He fidgeted with the cocktail glass in his hand, making the melting ice cubes clink against the side. “Ah, kind of a long story,” he admitted truthfully with a smirk.
She glanced at her wrist as if checking her watch, though there was no timepiece to be seen.
“Well, I’ve got time,” she retorted playfully. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Jack shook his head emphatically. “Absolutely not, but I’ll buy you one and tell you all about it,” he said, nodding in the direction of the bar. “After you.”
Fran eagerly took the lead, heading straight for the bar as he followed close behind. Once they reached the counter, she rested her elbows on its edge and waited patiently for the bartender to take the orders of the other patrons who had been waiting far longer than the two of them.
But as Jack sidled up to her, resting one arm dangerously, though comfortably, close to hers against the cool aluminum bartop, his chest pressed just close enough to her back to be noteworthy but not overbearing, she noticed that the bartender’s eyes flickered toward him immediately, an immediate smile crossing the woman’s face. Francesca was even more confused, and admittedly disheartened, when the bartender ditched the entire far side of the bar in favor of beelining it toward Jack.
“What can I get you, sweet cheeks?” the bartender said in a syrupy cadence, leaning over the counter as if to make sure Jack noticed her sizable chest on display in her black sports bra.
Blegh, Fran thought. Maybe this guy isn’t such a good idea…
Unfazed, he asked, “Hey, can I please get another vodka cran and then…” Jack motioned to Fran.
“Uh, Bud Light, please?” she ordered, repeating the same go-to drink she’d already had half a dozen of.
Jack pursed his lips to attempt to avoid a full-blown grin. He couldn’t help but love a girl who loved her beer.
The bartender nodded, knocking on the counter and turning toward the taps.
Fran tried to put the awkward encounter with the bartender to the back of her mind for the moment and turned 90 degrees so that she could face Jack more easily.
“So, you are or you aren’t from around here?” she asked, returning to the question that had led the two of them here originally.
Jack smiled, weighing his options. This question was always a complicated one to answer… but something about explaining it to Fran put him oddly at ease.
“So we, uh, we moved around a bit because my dad was a hockey player before he had kids, and then a coach for years while I was growing up,” he began.
“Oh, nice! I don’t know much about hockey,” she told him, shaking her head. “Big on playing sports but never big on watching them.”
Oh, my god, he thought to himself as he nodded, trying to seem casual. It’s like this girl was built in a lab just for me.
However, he didn’t know whether this next part would seem better or worse to a girl who wasn’t a sports fan. But it was his reality, so he decided to lay it bare.
“Gotcha, um… so, I… also play hockey.”
Francesca’s eyebrows shot up.
“Wow… really?”
Jack nodded again, then cleared his throat.
“Yeah, uh, that’s actually why I’m here tonight,” he explained. “All my teammates are here. Our season just ended and everybody’s about to separate for the summer, so we came out for one last night together for a while.”
It was Fran’s turn to nod as the bartender approached, and Jack thanked her and pushed a large bill across the counter. Fran busied herself with running her finger along the rim of her glass, pretending like she didn’t notice the generous denomination. Jack leaned an elbow against the counter to face her, in hopes of continuing the conversation.
“So… wait, you play for, what, the Rangers? Islanders?” she asked, pulling the names of the teams she vaguely recalled from the cobwebbed recesses of her brain.
Jack smacked a hand to his chest dramatically as if he’d just been shot.
“God, Fran,” he hissed, “you really know how to wound me.”
“What?!” she asked, sputtering with laughter. “I dunno! Are those the wrong team names?!”
Jack shook his head, entertained. “No, no,” he assured. “You were right – those are NHL teams, but I play for the Devils. They play just over in Newark.”
“Oh… right,” Fran said softly, biting her lip and tucking her chin to her chest, praying she somehow didn’t look as stupid as she felt.
Jack lowered his head to try and meet her eyes, squeezing her elbow gently. The simple touch alone sent a bolt of electricity through her being.
“Hey, don’t be embarrassed,” he said with an easy chuckle. “Trust me, it’s way better having to explain all this to you than having you come up and recite it all to me like some creepy walking encyclopedia.”
Francesca forced a tight smile, but still stared at her shoes. In a gutsy move, he reached his thumb and forefinger to grasp her chin and gently tilt her head upward.
“C’mon, lemme see that pretty face,” he said in a gravelly tone, one that made her spine shiver.
Just as she found herself leaning into his touch, she saw a tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered man approaching Jack from behind, unsteady on his feet. She assumed that this was one of his teammates, as the taller man went to sling a noodly arm around Jack’s shoulders.
“Uh, look out-” Fran warned… but it was too late.
The man’s hand flung Jack’s glass clean out of his grip, sending its red liquid contents splashing all over Fran’s chest and stomach before hitting the floor, thankfully hitting a sopping wet rug beneath the bar, which was the only thing that kept it from shattering into a million pieces.
They both gasped in the process, and Jack instinctively grabbed her by the forearm.
“Oh, my god! Omigod, fuck, Fran, I-I’m so sorry,” he lamented. “Woody! Fuck!” he yelled to the drunken man who apologized apathetically, then disappeared into the crowd.
Fran blinked quickly, her mouth in a tight “o” as she set aside her beer. As a wincing Jack stupidly patted her torso with the flimsy cocktail napkin that had been handed to him with his drink, he took in her expression and felt sick to his stomach.
Well, there you have it, he thought to himself. No way she’s ever gonna see me again after this…
What he hadn’t accounted for, though, was that after the initial shock of wearing the cold drink faded, Fran would throw her head back in uproarious laughter, eyes screwed up tight in hilarity.
Jack let one nervous snicker escape him, and then another, and then another… and by the time thirty seconds had passed, the two of them were breathless in fits of giggles, Jack keeping a firm hand on the crook of Fran’s arm.
“Are you okay?” he managed to utter as they finally began to settle down.
She nodded, wiping tears of hysteria away with her wrist.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she promised, splaying a hand on her chest as she glanced down at the maroon stain on her yellow dress. “I’m just dying because this is my roommate’s dress and she made me swear not to spill anything on it,” she admitted, erupting with laughter all over again. “So much for that.”
Jack’s eyes glittered as he watched her chuckle. “Well, the blame lies squarely on me, so I’ll apologize to her for that one,” he told her, beaming. He cleared his throat before venturing forward. “Hey, my place isn’t far and I think I’ve got some club soda in the fridge… whad’ya say we-”
Before he could finish his thought, Fran picked up where Jack had left off before the drink had been spilled, pressing a hand assertively to his cheek and leaning forward to plant a firm kiss to his lips. Neither of them knew how much time had passed before she eventually pulled away, biting her bottom lip coyly.
“Is that a yes?” he asked, smoothing the back of his finger across her cheekbone. He watched a Cheshire grin spread across her now-swollen lips, and she offered an enthusiastic nod.
He trailed his fingertips down her bare arm, sending chills across her skin despite the heat and humidity of the bar, before he reached for her hand.
“Then let’s go.”
After a short cab ride brimming with stolen glances and squeezes of hands, the two were practically sprinting through his front door, Jack not bothering to even turn on the lights in favor of keeping his hands securely on Fran’s lower back, holding her desperately close as his lips danced across hers with simultaneous ease and desire.
Eventually, he carefully backed her into his kitchen and hoisted her onto the counter, feeling her quiver when the cool marble hit the backs of her thighs.
He smiled against her lips and said roughly, “I gotta get you that club soda.”
She shook her head without breaking away from his kiss.
“It can wait,” she whispered insistently. “Just get me outta this dress.”
Jack smirked, his fingers immediately following orders as they searched for the zipper in the middle of her back.
“Whatever you want, baby,” he retorted, finally pulling the zipper down, allowing him to tug the dress over her head. He offered it to her, one last chance to take care of the task they came here under the guise of doing – removing the maroon stain from the gauzy garment. Instead, she tossed it aside, watching as it floated to the tile floor before grasping Jack’s shoulders purposefully, leaning in to speak against the delicate skin of his ear.
“I want you,” she admitted, nipping at his earlobe.
And after he carried her to his bedroom, she had him, had her fill of him – just the way they both wanted, their union the perfect balance between urgent and reverent, as if they both already knew that whatever this was between the two of them was something meant to be cherished.
More than an hour later, after making the mutual decision that it was time for a snack and a little something else to drink in order to replenish their strength, Jack left her alone with her thoughts in the quiet of his bedroom as he made his way back to the kitchen, donning only a pair of sweats, smiling when he picked up the now-rumpled yellow dress and placed it in his spacious farmhouse-style sink. He secured the drain stopper and retrieved the club soda from the refrigerator, still smirking to himself as he poured the stain-fighting liquid over the fabric to ensure it was completely immersed.
As he turned back to the fridge on the hunt for a satisfactory snack, Jack saw Fran emerge from his bedroom wearing nothing but one of his white dress shirts and a clean pair of his boxers.
She grimaced, and he sensed her unease even from a few yards away.
“I’m sorry, I just kinda put on the first things I found in your closet,” she said, one eye squeezed shut as if it pained her to make the admission. “I hope that’s okay. I swear I don’t make it a habit to put on a guy’s clothes like I own the place, but I, uh… didn’t exactly have a dress to put back on,” she pointed out.
Still distracted by the sight of her in his clothes, he shook his head rapidly.
“No, no, of course… I’m taking care of that as we speak,” he assured, nodding his head in the direction of the sink. “And you can wear whatever you want of mine – I should’ve laid something out for you, but… this is perfect.” He took a few slow steps toward her, his hands coming to rest on her hips. “You look amazing,” he said, his voice deep once again.
Francesca bloomed under his praise, preened beneath his touch as he reached out to stroke her cheek, his thumb coming to rest on her plush lips.
“Thank you,” she whispered, pursing her lips to kiss the pad of his thumb.
It took every ounce of gentlemanly will in Jack not to throw her over his shoulder and haul her back into the bedroom again. Instead, he forced himself to take a step back and motion toward the adjacent living room.
“Go on and make yourself comfortable,” he urged as she glanced toward the expansive space. “I’ll grab us a couple things and be right over.”
Fran nodded and obliged, entering the inviting area and finding herself immediately drawn to the vintage Victrola on a shelf on the far side of the room.
Meanwhile, after coming up empty in the liquor cabinet and noticing that the refrigerator was fresh out of beer, Jack opened a crummy bottle of wine he was certain Ty had bought once for a date but had never been touched. He poured two glasses and set them on a sturdy wooden tray, then scrounged through the cupboards to find some crackers that weren’t stale to go along with the Gouda and sopressata he’d found in the fridge. Pleased that he accomplished his mission, he arranged all of the items on the tray and carried it into the living room. As he set it on the coffee table, he found Fran admiring the shelves displaying his substantial collection of vinyls. Upon hearing him approach, a glass of wine for her in hand, Fran turned his way.
“You have quite the record collection there, Mr. Tough Guy Hockey Jock,” she teased, brows raised as she gratefully accepted the glass. “And not just the trendy new stuff, the good stuff – Sinatra, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, Pink Floyd. I’m impressed.”
Jack smirked. “Thanks – to be fair, I inherited a bunch of them from my parents and grandparents. They’d move and they’d always threaten to sell these on eBay but I wouldn’t let ‘em,” he explained. “Go ahead, put one on – anything.”
His request was easier said than done, and as he turned away to close the blinds throughout the room, chomping on cheese and crackers, she faced the impossible task of choosing one, eventually settling on James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves.”
He smiled when he heard the first strains, and her eyes met his when she turned away from the record player after setting the needle.
“Great choice,” he praised, the two of them crossing the room toward one another as if at the mercy of some magnetic force.
“One of my mom’s favorites,” she explained, fingers toying with the hem of the dress shirt as the folksy melody swirled throughout the room.
There's something in the way she moves
Or looks my way, or calls my name
That seems to leave this troubled world behind…
When they were no more than a foot apart, Jack opened his palm and held it out toward her.
“Dance with me,” he less invited, more demanded, not that Fran minded. She instantly slipped her fingers into his and took a step nearer so that their chests were pressed impossibly close.
She in his shirt and boxers, he in a pair of sweats, neither of them in shoes, they twirled around his living room as if attending a royal ball, until an unmistakable scratch signaled the end of the record… but by then, Jack and Fran were already locked in each others’ embrace again, the only sounds in the room the panting breaths escaping their lips between fiery kisses.
They never did make it back to the bedroom that night, didn’t even ever find sleep where they stayed curled up together in the living room, talking and laughing through the wee hours. Instead, when the sun rose, their only hint that morning had already come, they were sitting on the hardwood floor, laughing with her feet in his lap like he was her closest friend and not some random boy she’d met at a bar mere hours before.
“How’d we end up on the floor anyway?” Jack said, rubbing at a kink in his neck as one hand stayed fixed on her ankles.
Fran lifted the empty bottle of wine next to where she lay, and his eyes reluctantly traveled away from her face and toward her hands.
“Your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top rose, that’s how,” she retorted, reminding him of the bottle they’d shared after all the drinks they’d already indulged in at the bar.
“Mmm…” he hummed with lifted brows, both of them chuckling at the culprit as she set it back down on the hardwood. “So… coffee?” he inquired, desperate for this night – or, well, now morning – not to end. Desperate for Fran to stay here, with him, and never leave.
To his delight, she cocked her head against the throw pillow and offered him the warmest smile he’d ever seen.
“I’d love some,” she answered simply, realizing she’d be content to never see the outside world, anything beyond the walls of this Hoboken house, again.
They saw each other every day for the next year and a half after that, and starting with that very first one, Jack had painted all Fran’s nights a color she had searched for since.
And still, to this day, she couldn’t remember who she was before him.
___
July 21, 2023 – present day…
“This day,” that is, being Brady and Emma Tkachuk’s wedding day. Which after the breakup, Fran had never anticipated being present for.
But then came the phone call in the dead of winter, just weeks after she’d ended it with Jack. She was still reeling, trying to push through the pain while focusing on excelling in her last semester of undergrad, but anyone who knew her could see that she was struggling, including mutual friends of hers and Jack’s. Which soon made its way back to Emma via Brady.
And when Fran saw Emma’s name on her screen that day as she studied for an exam, she smiled. She hadn’t talked to Emma since before the split, and despite knowing it was more than likely going to be a covert check-up call, Fran was happy to hear from the girl she’d become so close to in the last two years.
___
February 18, 2023 – five months ago…
Fran tapped the “answer” button and lifted the phone to her ear.
“Hi, Em,” she said warmly.
“Hi! I miss you! Brady’s here, too,” Emma explained.
“Franny D!” he called over the speakerphone.
“Hey, B! I miss you guys, too,” she said sadly. “How are you guys?”
“We’re good!” Emma answered. “Neck-deep in wedding planning. I know it’s gonna be fun but it’s honestly kinda brutal.”
“Brutal, Franny,” Brady echoed dramatically. “It’s torture.”
Fran chuckled. “What, B, not enjoying picking out linen colors? Did you go with eggshell or warm white?”
“Couldn’t tell ya, Franny,” he replied. “If I had it my way, none of the tables would be covered and everybody’d just be playing beer pong on ‘em.”
Fran swore she could hear Emma’s eye roll. “You’re such a dude,” Fran complained.
“He’s not kidding about making that suggestion, either,” Emma said, feigning (or maybe not) weariness. “But, um, that’s not why we’re calling. First of all, we, uh… we just wanted to see how you were.”
Fran swallowed, staring out the window of her apartment, watching the snow swirl among the towering skyscrapers and across bustling streets. She’d been having trouble answering that question at all, let alone honestly. She reached to rub her palm up and down the length of her shin, suddenly feeling cold.
“I’m, um… I mean, I’ve been better, that’s for sure,” she told them. “I just… I really never thought this would happen, to be totally honest.” Her voice was quieter now, the familiar lump in her throat quivering.
Emma made a sound of understanding.
“Us either, Franny,” Brady gently concurred. “And I know you don’t wanna hear this right now, but I know Jacky didn’t think so either.”
Fran sighed, dropping her chin to her chest as her eyes fell to the azure crewneck with the maize Michigan logo emblazoned on the front, which Jack had left behind once after a trip to visit Luke. She had never returned it, and he eventually noticed it in the background of a FaceTime call while he was on a road trip and told her to keep it because he was certain it looked better on her anyway. And now it hurt to look at it, and it hurt to wear it, and it hurt to not wear it, so she went with wearing it, because even though she’d been the only one to don it for a year, she swore it still smelled like him. Unconsciously, she closed her eyes and breathed deep.
“I know,” she said softly.
“We didn’t wanna make you sad, Fran, but the other reason we were calling is just to say that we’d really like to invite you to the wedding in July-”
Brady interrupted his fiancee. “No, we are inviting you to the wedding, no question,” he said firmly. “But we just want you to know that it’s completely up to you whether you wanna come.”
“Yes,” Emma jumped in again. “We would absolutely love to have you there, because you mean so much to both of us, but we totally get it if it’s too much. Quinn’s in the wedding and we’re inviting their whole family, so… obviously Jack will be there.”
Her eyes fluttered open and she cleared her throat. “Y-yeah, of course, as he should be,” Fran managed. “I really appreciate the invitation, you guys. Seriously, it means so much to me. I’ll check the dates on my calendar, but I’d really love to come-”
Before she could even finish her thought, she heard a loud clap and a “FUCK YEAH!” from Brady, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
“You’re the best, Franny D,” he said. “And I’ll promise Quinny’ll keep Jacky on his best behavior.”
“Plus Ellen’ll be there, so you know he’s not getting away with shit,” Emma offered.
“You guys are too much,” Fran said affectionately. “It’s your day – I don’t need you worrying about me and J.” She felt a stab in her heart at her own use of the retired pet name, one that was once used so frequently and so fondly but was now avoided like a plague. She swallowed that lump in her throat again. “We’ll be fine.”
“We know you will,” Brady said softly. “Well, listen, we’ll let you go but, uh… thanks, Franny. I really hope you can make it.”
“Yes, we really do!” Emma reiterated. “We love you, Fran. Talk soon.”
“I love you guys, too,” she told them. “Thanks for calling.”
And Brady must not have been able to keep the news to himself, because within a few hours of agreeing to attend the Tkachuk wedding, her phone had buzzed four more times with text messages from four members of the Hughes clan:
Lukey: yooo B just told me you’re coming to the wedding!!! hell yes, sista 👊 see you soon
Quinny: Franny D, super happy to hear you’re coming to B’s wedding. we love ya, no matter what. can’t wait to see ya
Ellen: Hi, my sweet girl 💖 Chantal just told me that you’re planning to come to Brady and Emma’s wedding. I’m so happy to hear it! I’m counting down the days until I see you. Love always 💋
Jim: Hey Franny! Can’t wait to see you at the Tkachuk wedding this summer. Really glad you’re planning to go. ❤️
The only member of the family that her phone didn’t sound with a message from that night?
Jack.
The one that it hurt the most not to hear from.
She set her phone aside that night and swallowed, hard, pulling her legs to her chest and resting her forehead on her knees. Preparing to see Jack in person for the first time in months was going to be impossible enough, but seeing his entire family… that just might be enough to break her.
Because she’d never fallen out of love with them, either.
___
July 21, 2023 – present day…
And today, after a heartbreakingly long hug with Ellen before the ceremony, and affectionate but melancholy greetings from Jim and Luke, here Fran stood in the midst of Brady’s reception, in front of the middle Hughes son who never did text her leading up to this moment. When he’d seen her approach his family’s seats a few minutes before today’s ceremony, he had only just stood up from his chair at the far end of their row to try and make his way toward her when the processional music started, leaving both of them frozen in place, staring helplessly at one another. She’d mouthed sorry, and he’d nodded and mouthed we’ll talk, as his family sat still between them, awkwardly trying to avoid making eye contact with the estranged couple lest they make the moment even more painful for them than it already was.
When Fran turned to find the nearest single seat, she could feel the tingling heat creeping up her neck, and it wasn’t from the summer sun. She’d spent months agonizing over what she would say to Jack when she finally saw him again, and she still couldn’t believe that the first thing she’d spoken aloud after they’d found each other on the deck for a quiet moment alone was “can I ask you a question?” But how else was she supposed to begin the conversation, anyway?
And at least he’d agreed – conceded that nothing had yet felt as good as the two of them had. For the past six months, she’d been terrified that nothing ever would, and she had to admit, it felt good to know that he seemed to share that same belief.
It felt good and it felt awful all at the same time.
Fran sighed, lifting her gaze to the shimmering stars far above their heads.
“Why are we doing this?” she whispered, half to herself and half to him.
Jack gave her a quizzical look; she was all over the place right now… not that he didn’t feel completely undone and frazzled himself.
“What? Talking? I dunno, Fran, I can go back inside, but I wasn’t just gonna sit in there all night and ignore y-”
Fran stopped him, shaking her head. “No, that’s not what I mean,” she said, a noticeable exhaustion in her tone, one that Jack recognized in his own voice often these days. “I just mean… this hurts so bad, J. And it doesn’t have to – didn’t have to. We were so good together… why did-”
“Because you said it was too much, Fran,” Jack accused, sharply though accurately, remembering how the pressure of being in a serious relationship with one of North America’s most heralded professional athletes at such a young age had often left her curled up in a ball in the corner, something that at 20 and then 21 years old, he had found himself completely unprepared to handle.
“And I made the wrong choice!” Fran admitted, her voice rising an octave by the end of the sentence as her emotions took over. “At least I can admit it. Can you? I mean, you’re the one who left my house in the middle of the night, without even trying to put up a fight. Can you admit that you were in the wrong, too?”
Yeah, I can, he immediately thought to himself, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it.
Instead his mind flashed to the very moment in time where he knew he had indeed made the wrong choice.
___
April 3, 2023 – three months earlier…
Jack was trying his hardest to pay attention to his date. He truly was.
In a well-meaning but doomed-from-the-start attempt to help him get over Fran, one of the team WAGs had set him up with her college roommate who had recently moved to the city. So here he was at dinner following a Broadway show he’d never even heard of before, which he had bought tickets to specifically because he knew he wouldn’t have to speak to the girl for at least a couple of hours but would still come away looking like the hero for dropping money on expensive tickets for date number one.
What he hadn’t accounted for, when she had unsurprisingly suggested that they grab a bite to eat after the show at Sugarfish on 56th and Broadway, was that he’d spot, through the front window, Francesca walking down the sidewalk hand-in-hand with some guy, laughing with him as he told what were no doubt painfully lame attempts at jokes to try and impress her.
Jack’s blood ran cold, his jaw muscles flexing as he clenched his teeth together, his date still rambling on about her so-called career as a “business owner.” (See also: owner of an Instagram account where she posted regular thirst traps and tagged the brands she wore, unprompted. See also: a quasi-influencer. See also: a Kardashian wanna-be.) Which provided him the perfect opportunity to get lost in his own spiraling thoughts.
Granted, this restaurant wasn't that far from Fran’s apartment on 52nd, a fact which Jack was painfully aware of throughout the entirety of the show and the meal. But goddamn it… this city was filled with eight million people besides her and that dickhead guy, but they just happened to be the two who caught his gaze.
Which maybe wouldn’t have bothered Jack so much if it didn’t look like Fran was actually enjoying the guy’s company.
He slouched in his chair and spoke as few words as possible for the rest of the meal, and when it had finally, mercifully, ended, he called her an Uber, waited until she had gotten picked up, sulked to his car, and deleted her number.
___
July 21, 2023 – present day…
“Well? Can you?” Fran repeated, losing patience as she wondered where his mind had just wandered off to.
“Yeah, I can,” Jack said simply, deciding to lay all his cards on the table at the recall of the recent memory.
Fran’s head snapped toward him. Being that he was by far the most stubborn person she had ever known, she hadn’t expected him to fess up to that. Her mouth opened as she thought of what to say next, then closed it when nothing came to mind quickly enough.
“I can tell you exactly when I realized it, too,” Jack said with a smile devoid of humor, licking his lips – the very same lips she used to call home. “I saw you with some guy walking down 56th a few months ago. And it felt… fuck, it just felt like I was out of time.”
Francesca blinked repeatedly, confusion etched on her features. Though she knew who she would have been with that night, she didn’t even remember the exact instance he was referring to, so it obviously hadn’t left all that much of an impression upon her. But that’s not the information she wanted to inquire about.
“W-what do you mean, ‘out of time’?” she asked, her volume much lower now.
Jack met her with sad eyes, pursing his lips. He shrugged a shoulder.
“I dunno, I guess… I guess I was holding out hope that somehow, we’d work it out,” he replied, his voice suddenly sounding hoarse. “I just always thought it would be us in the end. But seeing you with someone new, I… I just lost that hope.”
Tears pricked at the backs of Fran’s eyelids and she looked away, swiping at her eyes with the side of her hand.
“There’s never been anyone else… I mean, not… not really,” she was suddenly saying, caught off guard that she was opening up so much. “That was the closest I got, but it was only for a few weeks, and he ended it because he said I was being distant. And he was right. I just, I wasn’t in it. Not at all.”
Jack watched her the entire time she spoke, then nodded slowly. He understood that feeling all too well.
“I get it,” he said softly. “Trust me.”
As the two of them let their respective admissions hang between them in the thick summer air, falling into a contemplative silence, unbeknownst to them, a tipsy Luke had made his way back to the open bar at the edge of the dancefloor, which was situated just inside the tall French doors leading to the venue’s back patio where his brother and Fran stood alone as the party raged on. Luke’s eyes never left the acrimonious pair as he ordered himself not one, but two more gin and tonics, then darted, drinks in hand, across the room to where his parents and Quinn sat at a table chatting.
“Luke Warren Hughes, you’d better slow down on the double fisting,” Ellen warned in her best mom voice.
Luke waved her off. “Yeah, whatever – guys, listen to me, this is important,” he urged, out of breath. “Jacky and Franny are outside by themselves talking.”
“What?!” Quinn exclaimed, jumping up from his chair so quickly and so forcefully that it would have tipped over if not for Jim’s quick reflexes, as he shook his head in disapproval. As he watched his eldest son jog to the same door Luke had just been standing near to peer through the panels for himself, Jim scoffed.
“You guys need to give them their privacy – they’ve been through enough,” he stated firmly.
“Yes, and you wouldn’t like it if your brothers were spying on you and a girl,” Ellen pointed out.
Luke swallowed a gulp of his cocktail and beamed.
“Yeah, but… it’s not just some girl. It’s Jack and Fran,” he declared, shaking his head in excited disbelief before following after his brother.
Having lost both their sons to espionage, Ellen and Jim’s eyes met, and they shared a knowing, hopeful smirk.
“It is Jack and Fran,” Jim repeated in a voice near a whisper, tipping the rim of his beer bottle toward his wife, who clinked it with her champagne glass.
“Cheers to that… no matter what happens,” she said softly.
Back outside, ignorant to the fact that they were being carefully watched, Jack was surprised when Fran breathed a laugh through her nose, finally breaking the silence. Her cheeks warmed at the memory replaying in her mind.
“Remember that first night we spent together, at your place in Hoboken? What we did after Miles made you spill that drink on me?” she asked, unaware that he had played those sacred scenes over in his mind hundreds if not thousands of times in the past two years just as she had, particularly when they were each alone in their beds in the dead of night.
“Of course I do,” he replied quietly. “It’s kinda… all I ever do. Well, that night and… a-and lots of other nights after that.” He caught her stare and somberly confessed, “I feel you no matter what.”
Fran took a few daring steps closer, her hand brushing his. She leaned in so close that her lips nearly grazed the shell of his ear.
“Do you wish you could still touch me, Jack?” she whispered, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on its end.
He slowly exhaled through pursed lips, trying and failing to steady his now-racing pulse.
“Every fuckin’ day, Fran,” he said with little hesitation, turning his head so that their noses were mere centimeters from each other.
“Is it too late to do something about it?” she asked, her eyes locked with his.
“With us?” he let out a singular chuckle. “It’s never too late with us, Fran.”
She smiled so wide it made her cheeks ache, and she ran a hand down the lapel of his jacket.
“Good, because you look really fuckin’ handsome, and I’ve been wanting to tell you that all night,” she said, her voice low and sultry.
He hummed appreciatively and nuzzled his nose against her temple.
“Funny you say that, because I’ve been wanting to tell you all night that I, uh… I like your dress,” he whispered, recycling the very first compliment he ever bestowed upon her before pressing a kiss to the skin just in front of her ear as she giggled, but the laughter died on her lips as Jack kissed a line from her ear, across her cheekbone, to the tip of her nose, to the corner of her mouth, and finally, to her eager lips, which matched the fervor and neediness of his own. It was as though the pain of the past six months melted away as they each attempted to demonstrate how deeply and passionately they had missed the other, hands in hair, chests flush, soft moans being captured by the other’s mouth…
But it wouldn’t be an important moment in Jack and Fran’s story if there weren’t loved ones meddling nearby.
Now it wasn’t only Luke and Quinn at the doors watching the marvelous scene unfold, but it was Matthew, and Ellie, and Taryn, and Robbie, and all the Fitzgerald kids, and Brady, and Emma. Someone pushed open one of the doors, flooding the patio with a cacophony of cheers and jeers from those closest to them.
“Get a room!” “Finally!” “Jack, this is a family wedding!” “Hand check!” “Oww owwww!”
God… embarrassing.
Reluctantly pulling away from the kiss, Jack growled, resting his forehead against Fran’s as she giggled nervously, before whipping his head toward their audience.
“Don’t you all have a wedding to get back to?” His head swiveled to Brady and Emma. “Especially you two?”
Brady shrugged. “Hey, we already had our kiss, man. You go ‘head,” he encouraged.
Emma giggled, one hand wrapped around her groom’s bicep as she swatted nonchalantly toward Jack and Fran with the other.
“Yeah, carry on. Don’t mind us!” she sang.
Jack rolled his eyes, but all inhibition and worry faded away as Fran grabbed him by the collar and pulled him down to meet her lips once more, feeling his frown literally turn upside down into a smirk as he sunk into her, hand finding a familiar home low on her back, dangerously close to the curve of her ass.
And at that, the crowd they’d drawn erupted into a fit of laughter and applause, Quinn and Luke in the middle of it all, pumping their fists simultaneously before clapping their palms together and leaning in for a hug.
They got their sister back.
“What are you kids doin’ over here?” came a booming voice from the back of the group. Jack and Fran watched as the seas parted and Keith Tkachuk made his way to the door, following his younger son’s pointed index finger to find the reunited couple embracing on the patio. His eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead.
“Well, can’t say I didn’t see this one coming!” he bellowed, a jolly twinkle in his eye. “Now, you boneheads have had your fun,” he addressed the group. “Leave these two to have their own.” With a wink, he turned away, and their crowd of clamoring cheerleaders dispersed, whispering animatedly among themselves.
Jack exhaled swiftly and rubbed the back of his neck.
“Shoutout Big Walt,” he declared, clearing his throat.
Fran nodded, snickering, and pulled him in by the waist.
“Gotta love ‘em, though, hmm?” she mused, nuzzling her nose against his.
“Mmm, yeah, whatever,” Jack dismissed, a tenacious hand on her cheek as he leaned down to press his lips to hers once again. “Now, where were we?” he teased in a whisper as she smiled against his mouth, her hands traveling beneath his suit jacket, across the familiar expanse of his sculpted back. His hands found their original target and slipped down the small of her back, finally reaching the arc of her rear.
“Mmmm… hello, old friend,” Jack murmured in her ear, earning him a playful smack to the hip.
“Shut up,” she sassed him, but she didn’t mean it, and they both knew it. He fixed his lips to hers over and over again, and though the party roared on inside, mere yards away, it was as if Jack and Fran were the only two people on the face of the earth, their bodies fusing together as if they had always been intended to be one.
It was always like that for the two of them.
Nothing could have pulled them from that moment… except the first strains of “Something in the Way She Moves” by James Taylor echoing from the speakers inside.
The pair froze. She pulled away to hold him at arm’s length, in utter disbelief.
Jack ogled at Fran, the pure longing in his eyes mirrored in hers. His siblings and friends were meddlers, sure… but had they been so thoughtful as to remember that this was their song — had been since that very first night? Or was it simply fate?
Either way, Jack could do nothing but extend his upturned palm toward her.
“Dance with me?” he asked softly.
Suddenly self-conscious, she smoothed a hand through her curls, then swiped at the damp corners of her eyes.
“God, Jack, I’m a mess,” she said with a halfhearted chuckle. “I don’t think I can go back in there right now.”
Jack shrugged. “So what?” he asked, taking hold of her hand and pulling her in, his other arm winding around her. “We’ll dance right here.”
She rested her free hand on his chest, melting at the sweet sentiment. Then, she relaxed into him, tucking her head into his neck where it fit perfectly — always had.
He pressed a kiss to her temple, then rested his cheek atop her head as the song carried on...
There's something in the way she moves
Or looks my way, or calls my name
That seems to leave this troubled world behind
If I'm feeling down and blue
Or troubled by some foolish game
She always seems to make me change my mind
And I feel fine anytime she's around me now
She's around me now
Almost all the time
And if I'm well you can tell she's been with me now
She's been with me now quite a long, long time
And I feel fine…
Jack’s heart soared, his joy permanently etched on his face, as he swayed side to side with Francesca in his arms. In his wildest dreams, he could have never hoped to have her here with him again like this.
He glanced down at the girl he’d loved since the first time he’d laid eyes on her, saw her eyes fluttered closed in blissful contentment, and brushed his lips across her brow as he whispered, “Fran, you know for me, it’s always you, right?”
He watched the corners of her mouth pull upward even further, and she tipped her face up to meet his.
“I hoped so,” she admitted roguishly. “Because for me, it’s always you, too.”
#the summer fic exchange 2k23#my writing#jack hughes#jack hughes fic#jack hughes fanfic#jack hughes fanfiction
186 notes
·
View notes
Text
He is
Vampire Terzo x FReader | NSFW
Art by the wonderful @tasty-ribz
For @ghostchems on her birthday! To be a little bit soppy as much as I love ghost for being ghost it has also brought me some incredible friends. We bonded over loving terzo and love island and now you are my favourite person to scream about awful men with every day. I hope everyone is making you feel a special as Terzo would today because as far as we are concerned yours is the only important birthday happening this month 💜
Now a best selling author thanks to your experience at Crowley Manor you find yourself struggling to muster up inspiration for the sequel. Will returning to the place it all began help you? Or just confirm the none of it was real? A sequel to Cirice
Warnings: blood, rough sex, hints of mind control, pinv sex, cunnilingus, lots of dust hehe
With a huff of frustration you scratch out the poor excuse for a sentence and drop your pen. There were more scribbles across the page then there were words and you needed a break or you might end up throwing your note pad across the room. Abandoning your desk you wander over to the window for a distraction from your writer's block. The evening was drawing in, street lights flickering on one by one as people hurried home from their day whether it be work or leisure it was still an unwelcome reminder of your lack of productivity. Turning from the view you scan across the room, your home office, hoping for something to spark your inspiration but your mind remains unhelpfully blank. You ponder just giving up for the day, shutting the door and giving yourself over to your evening but deadlines are approaching and there is still so much to do. With a reluctant determination, you turn to your inspiration board and will it to do its job.
When you had decided to write a follow up to your best selling debut novel, you had carefully gathered all the things you knew you would need to refer to to build the story. There were your photographs from Crowley Manor, newspaper clippings about the house and the area, quotes and key plot points from the original story, a couple of photos of bela lugosi, the closest you can find to how you remember him looking - although you have sketched what you recall of the facepaint he wore over the top with a marker - and in the centre, the note; the only thing you have that proves that it was real. Well, that and the two small scars on your neck. You rub your fingers over them absentmindedly as you try to remember anything more but even as the scars faded, so did your memories to the point where you are not entirely sure any of it was real. Reading over the words again.
A candle casting a faint glow
You and I see eye to eye
Can you hear the thunder?
How can you hear the thunder that's breaking?
Now there is nothing between us
From now our merge is eternal
Can't you see that you're lost?
Can't you see that you're lost without me?
-iii
You hum the tune to yourself, the melody you had only heard once and yet it plays through your dreams so frequently you have never been able to forget it, always accompanied by a dark shadow and the sense that you are being watched. Your experience at Crowley Manor - whether a true encounter with a dashing vampire or a figment of your imagination - had changed your life. You were a writer now; a successful published writer. Your vampire romance novel had been an instant best seller, ‘the mysterious vampire luring in unsuspecting victims until one stole his heart’ earned a loyal fanbase and quickly. In interview after interview you were asked if you had based him on someone real, probably assuming he was an older man you had a crush on, but you always answered no because how could you explain that he was a man you had most likely conjured up in a dream.
But that had all brought you to where you were now; attempting to write the much anticipated sequel. The heroine of your story had left the manor in a similar way to you but after having spent much longer with her vampire lover, and as much as you wanted to see them reunited you were struggling to find the narrative. Unlike you she had been offered forever with him and had chosen to return to her normal life, so without a justified reason, why would she return? Your thought process hits a brick wall once again as you rub your tired eyes. There is only one thing left to try before you may be forced to give up. The familiar pull in your gut that you had been resisting since the day you left was finally winning. You had to go back.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The gate is rusted and stiff, so you have to push hard to create enough space for you to slip through and even then you almost trip on the piles of rubbish littering the driveway. You step over the buckled historical society sign with a sigh - even they had given up on the place and for some time by the looks of things. Tall weeds were growing through the now sparse gravel, even more windows had been boarded up and there were layers of faded graffiti covering the front door. It is already ajar but you have to shove it open, pushing it past the built up leaves and dust trying to wedge it closed. Although the state of the outside had saddened you, it is the interior that makes your heart sink - it was never nice to see a beautiful old house fall into ruin.
The floorboards still gave their familiar creak under your soft footsteps, but that was about the only similarity. The sconces, once filled with dripping candles were now empty and shrouded in cobwebs, and dust motes thick enough to choke you floated in what little beams of light that made it through the windows. Without the soft piano luring you further into the house you took your time to properly look around, cautiously walking through room after room. What little furniture that hadn’t been stolen or vandalised was covered in dust sheets. The shelving sits almost empty in every room; you pass only a few odd books and trinkets still in place but almost unrecognisable underneath all the grime.
Towards the back of the house you come to what looks like a music room and a feeling of deja vu washes over you. The grand piano still dominates the room, but when you run your fingers across what little keys are left it only lets out reluctant, discordant notes as neglected and decaying as the rest of your surroundings. The fireplace is a yawning chasm on the back wall without the welcoming fire filling it, but you remember laying on the soft rug before it where he had given and taken unimaginable pleasure from you, well at least you thought. Because it was seeming more and more likely you had imagined it. You pull yourself from your thoughts and that is when the portrait catches your eye. How you never noticed it before you don’t understand, but it hangs perfectly above the mantel and crushes the last shreds of hope you were clinging onto.
It is him. His distinctive face paint, his perfectly styled hair and his intense mismatched eyes. At least now you know what really happened on your last visit to this place. Before you had fallen asleep you must have seen this portrait on your last visit, striking as he was and then your mind had concocted the whole fantasy. You are not sure exactly what you had been expecting returning to Crowley Manor, but you couldn’t avoid the cutting disappointment that was slicing through you. All that was here was an empty old house and a painting of a man. With one last longing look you take your leave as you fight the knot of feelings solidifying in your chest. There was nothing else for you here. You reach the foyer where the light of dusk shines around the edges of the open door, illuminating your exit from this house and your return to reality, when you hear it…
We're standing here by the abyss…
That voice. The words were different and even the tune was different, but that voice. There was nothing else it could be but him. The alluring sound drifts down from the upper floor to where you stand and you don’t even try to resist his siren call as your feet carry you towards the grand staircase.
And the world is in flames…
Your footprints disturb the thick layers of dust covering the once grand carpet that leads the way up, but you continue unconcerned by the trail you are leaving in your wake, your only thought finding your way to the source of that beautiful sound.
Two star-crossed lovers reaching out…
It gets clearer as you reach the upper level, but you still haven't quite found him yet. Along the landing are multiple doors that you consider as you walk, but once your eyes land on the ornate double doors at the furthest end you know inherently; that is your destination.
To the beast with many names…
The floorboards creak as you get closer and closer even as you attempt to keep your steps measured and even, but if that didn’t give you away then you are sure your laboured breathing and thundering heartbeat would.
He is. He's the shining and the light without whom I cannot see…
The singing stops when you reach the doors and with barely a brush of your fingertips,they swing open revealing only a dark room within. Your eyes struggle to adjust to the gloom, but even that doesn’t make you hesitate to enter. It is as abandoned as the rest of this cursed house. All the anticipation you had felt soured inside you and tears pricked at your eyes as you circled in the centre of the room taking in the dusty bed and empty fireplace. Your back is turned when a sudden bang startles you, the doors slamming shut. You cry out in fear, turning in an instant and rushing towards them. Pushing and pulling is futile and they will not budge. The knowledge that you are trapped fills you with a shiver as a chill falls over the room.
“My little lamb returns,” he growls in your ear, appearing as if from nowhere. His arms box you in against the door, his white gloves the only part of him you can see. You try to turn, to see him but his body presses close, cold and unyielding as stone behind you. You should do something, anything but fear and lust paralyse you as they tear through you in equal measure.
“You are real,” you barely whisper before his fangs sink into your neck, the sharp shock of pain stealing your consciousness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
When your eyes flutter open you find it hard to believe you are even in the same room. You are lying in the centre of a four poster bed, propped up against a mountain of airy pillows and as you shift the sheets feel unbelievably soft against your fingers. The heavy drapes are tied to the frame on one side giving you a clear view of the fireplace and the figure silhouetted against it. His back is to you, seemingly unaware that you are now awake so you take your time admiring him.
It is undoubtedly him. His hair is slicked back, familiar in both your memory and in his portrait you had not long discovered. This time he wears a white suit with gold trim that glimmers in the firelight and it is certainly one you have never seen before. He turns in your direction giving you a glimpse of his striking profile still covered in his unusual skull-like face paint. He clears his throat glancing at you and you realise he is also holding a book up to the fire light. Not just any book. That is your book. The one you had written about him. You sit bolt upright but a wave of dizziness stops you from acting any further.
“His touch feels like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. It scares you how much you crave it; how much you want him to keep touching you and to never stop. Your heart feels like it’s beating out of your chest, despite the overwhelming feeling of comfort that has fallen over you.” He smirks as he reads your words back to you with an arrogance that can only come from knowing it was written about him.
“How did you get that?” you hiss at him, the mortification you are experiencing seems to break some of the spell he has over you. He chuckles darkly in response, snapping the book shut and placing it on the nightstand so you can see the very suggestive illustration you had commissioned for the cover clearly.
“You have a way with words, agnellino.” He leans against the bedpost, running his eyes over you and watching how you react just to his presence. “Do you still crave my touch as much as you wrote?” His elongated teeth peek out of his mouth with how wide his smile is, clearly enjoying having this additional power over you. You almost miss not so long ago when you believed he had been a figment of your imagination.
“It’s called creative licence,” you snap back breathlessly, trying your damnedest to keep your composure but you make the mistake of meeting his mismatched eyes and you are pulled under all over again. It’s like he can worm his way into your very soul and convince you of anything he desires.
“Why did you come back?” He looms over you at the end of the bed as he waits for you to answer him. As subtly as you can, you try to sit yourself up to make yourself feel less vulnerable but your limbs are weak and uncooperative.
“I’m writing again,” you start. It is the truth - or at least part of the truth - but you can tell he doesn't believe you, fixing you with his intense stare, waiting for you to be more forthcoming. “Last time I was here it was very… inspiring.”
“I see, I see.” He starts to pace next to the bed, giving you a reprieve and a chance to breathe but you sense it is by no means the end of your interrogation. “Just ‘professional interest’ then?”
“Yes, that is all. I should go.” You try again to sit up and ease yourself off the bed but before your feet can touch the ground he kneels in front of you, blocking you from moving any further.
“Ah ah ah,” he scolds, wagging his finger at you like he was disciplining a wayward child. “You come into my home uninvited - again, I might add.” He leans close enough you can feel the cold radiating from him, his teeth bared threateningly. “I need the truth.” Fear makes you tense but somehow you know he would never really hurt you - at least not in a way you wouldn't enjoy. You start to think his irritation is more directed at your refusal to admit how much you want him rather than the fact you broke into his house. Again.
“You lured me up here! You could have just let me leave.” That thought boosts your confidence just enough to push back. Just a little. He didn't have to reveal himself to you everytime you were here, and yet he did.
“No I couldn't, little lamb,” he whispers, a softness falling over his face. “I could never resist a chance to taste you again.” His attention drops to your feet, helping you out of your shoes before he stands again before you. “Tell me why you are really here.” He had given you your chance to tell him of your own volition, but now you could feel his will influencing you and bringing forth the truth. He eases his jacket from his shoulders, leaving it on the floor where it falls. He makes quick work of his bow tie adding it to the pile of clothes at his feet.
His cuff links go next, freeing him to turn up his sleeves and then his collar sliding one button free at a time until it hangs open. His toned chest is covered in thick dark hair and it's all you can do not to reach out and bury your fingers in it. Even without his vampiric lure, you would struggle to resist him. He crawls over you, forcing you to scoot back onto the bed to make room for him and you find yourself unable to speak as you get lost in his eyes.
“Tell me…” He is intoxicating and you find you no longer have the willpower to resist him. You had forgotten how powerful he was, his presence alone narrowing your mind until all you can think of is him. The words are on the tip of your tongue, but somehow they still won't come.
“Why are you here agnellino, eh?” He holds himself over you, the only thing touching you are the open tails of his shirt, denying you any more until you obey him. “Did you miss me?”
“I wasn’t sure if you were real any more,” you admit reluctantly and his eyes alight at your delayed admission.
“Shall I remind you how real I am?” There is a voice in your mind somewhere telling you to say no, but with every other part of you screaming a resounding yes it is easy to tune out - though you still can’t quite bring yourself to say it. So you nod and he wastes no more time. His dexterous fingers make quick work of your trousers and your underwear, pulling them off you in one swift motion and then he is on you. His strong hand grasps your ankle, pulling you even closer so he can press his lips to your bare skin.
He starts at the sole of your foot, lavishing you with open mouthed kisses and grazes of his dangerous teeth. He seeks out parts of your body you had never even known were sensitive before, whether it was his plush mouth sucking at them or tracing them with his tongue. The curve of your calf, the dip behind your knee and the crease of your inner thigh. His cool breath raises goosebumps across your skin and he chases them with his mouth, only pausing to suck on the beads of blood that bloom where he allows his fangs to nick your skin. The contrasts make you needy for more of his touch, the warm and the cold, the pleasure and the pain. When he eventually reaches your core he ceases all his teasing and devours you, his groans of pleasure vibrating through you as he laps at your entrance and sucks on your clit.
“Every part of you tastes exquisite,” he moans again at your skin as he pulls at the hem of your shirt, allowing himself access to even more of your skin. Your bra is pulled roughly aside so he can latch onto your nipples one after the other. Losing himself in his lust, he pinches them roughly as his teeth make deliberate shallow slices in your cleavage. He suckles at them harshly, milking all the blood he can from such a surface cut.
Eventually he reaches your neck pressing a deceptively gentle kiss to your scar from your last encounter before seeking out the fresher puncture wounds from earlier in the evening. He probes them harshly with his tongue disturbing the newly formed clots enabling him to drink freely from you until he is positively drunk on you.
“You are so warm agnellino,” he moans, reluctantly pulling away from you only to tear off his loose shirt and rip off his trousers. He fits himself back on top of you, desperate to be as close as possible and ruts his aching length against your hip, his mouth latching back onto your neck. He rears back giving you the opportunity to see him for the hunger ridden monster he is, but it only makes you want him more. His face paint is smudged across his face, the once precise lines blurring and blending with what remains of your blood and your juices, and his eyes sparkle with something dangerous that you can't resist. With a snarl he forces your legs wide so he can see all of you, his fingers digging a bruising grip into your soft thighs.
“After tonight you will never again doubt my existence,” he growls as he fucks into you in one long, hard stroke. There is no waiting for you to grow accustomed to him filling you; he just takes you hard, pushing the air from your lungs every time he fills you. He is rough and demanding and you crave every part of this more animalistic side to him. Your blood loss and his body worship have pushed you outside your own body, the pleasure and the pain meeting and blending and pushing you into a euphoria you had never experienced before.
Even as his control was slipping even further away, his cock aimed perfectly, fucking into you in exactly the right place over and over while the drag of him inside your tight heat forced sobs and gasps from both of you. In the state he had you, you knew you would do anything and everything he wanted and if you hadn’t been so light headed, you might have realised that that was exactly what he wanted. He grunts as he pulls you closer, angling your hips just so that he can fuck into you even deeper, your moans of satisfaction harmonising as somehow your pleasure grows stronger than you ever thought possible.
“Has anyone fucked you like this since me, little lamb?” He is panting, hardly able to get his words out, somehow seeming more human even in the midst of his monstrous lust.
“No,” you whine. There is no use denying it, because who could possibly compare to him?
“Bene,” he snarls, a possessive sneer crossing his face. “No one will ever, ever fuck you like me.’ You sob in agreement as the burn in your core grows, bringing you so close. Babbled nonsense falls from your lips. You can only hope he understands how little you need to push you over the edge.
Thankfully something you said must have made sense, because in the next moment his thumb is stroking your clit in time with his ever more frantic thrusts and the wave of your climax begins to crash, sweeping you along in its powerful tide. Your vision greys at the edges and vaguely, somewhere amidst the buzz, you feel him reach his peak just behind you as his thrusts stutter before stilling as he fills you.
Inelegantly he pulls away, landing beside you on the bed. He pulls you to him stroking your hair and dotting your forehead with sweet kisses. Contentment surges through you as you rest against his chest, his lack of heartbeat barely registering.
“You are so very sleepy, little lamb,” he breathes into your hair, and you can only spare a thought to agree as you succumb to the overwhelming pull of sleep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The cold and stale morning air lures you from your sleep this time, a much less pleasant awakening than your last. Your whole body aches as you shift and try to take in your surroundings. You are alone. The dawn light spilling through the drapes allows you to see, and the bedroom appears dusty and abandoned, not the cosy boudoir you had experienced last night.
The dusty sheets cling to your clothes as you try to stand but every movement reveals a new bite mark or bruise until you are on your feet. The worst pain though, is the ache in your heart. This should have been expected and yet the fact that he isn't here hurts. Rather than satisfying you, this second encounter only made you yearn more for this terrible, mysterious man. Your only consolation was that now at least, you will have plenty more to write about.
You don't try to call out to him, already knowing how futile that would be, so you look once more around the room, trying hard to commit it all to memory when the night stand catches your attention. A single white rose sits atop a folded piece of paper. You pick them both up, carefully making sure to avoid the sharp thorns and unfold the paper to see that unmistakable handwriting.
We’re standing here by the abyss
And the world is in flames
Two star-crossed lovers reaching out
To the beast with many names
He is
He’s the shining and the light without whom I cannot see
-iii
His words were cryptic as ever but you let it fill you with uncertain hope. Maybe you were the star-crossed lovers? Or maybe not. All you knew for now at least, was that you felt you were still at the very beginning of this story…
…and you couldn't wait to see where it would take you.
116 notes
·
View notes
Note
Can I ask what pushed you to end Hounds the way you did? It's a fantastic ending, but I'm curious. I expected the Fates to revive Dream, or allow him to inhabit a new form (such as one made by Daniel, so that Dream becomes a dreamthing), etc. But instead, his death is made to have never happened. Which makes it partly feels like Hob's whole road trip journey was for nothing since he lost all those memories and connections with Matthew, the Corinthian, Delirium, Despair, Desire, Death, etc. (thank god he kept the farmhouse). But it's almost like he traded all those memories and connections for Dream. Unless I missed something while reading (I was crying very hard).
Again, fantastic ending, and I'm also glad it's a happy ending. But I'm curious as to why you didn't go in the other direction
howdy! thanks very much for the ask — an excellent query, one which i’m happy to answer
(verg of the future: this answer ended up long! there’s a short form at the top here and at the end <3)
in brief: he did make that trade you described! but not strictly for dream — it was the price of swapping genres!
an explanation:
what i had in mind while planning and writing was less the idea of erasure of prior narrative action and more a subversion of the expected genre, in particular the genre tropes that follow dream in the original arc of the comics, where his story is very classically tragic (with the understood weaving of hob into that tragedy, this being a dream/hob telling and all)
for reference, i also drew a lot of inspiration for hob’s road trip odyssey from the aeneid, an epic that is, yes, about the founding of rome but also (at least to my reading) a fundamental tragedy — the cost of founding rome is aeneas’ home, many of his friends, much of his core family, and the very end of the story is not some victorious depiction of the glory of rome to be (which we do get earlier in the book, with the ekphrasis on his shield) but aeneas, overcome with fury and loss, killing a man who begs his mercy. i’ve always felt that the aeneid, while certainly stepped in the expected amount of roman nationalism, is centrally about a single man and his singular suffering as an instrument of higher destiny.
i wanted to model hob’s arc around the aeneid (minus, y’know, some of the chunks that are strictly battle sequences <3) both because intertextuality is a huge part of how i wanted to handle hounds (story about stories, made of other stories, etc), but also because hob and aeneas are fundamentally parallel characters — nomads with exceptional ordinances, permanently displaced by the passing whims of higher powers, men who are made to reckon with both extraordinary wonder and extraordinary tragedy regularly while still, at their core, just being human. that’s what makes aeneas so compelling — he’s just a man. and so is our beloved hob — that’s his whole thing, his whole narrative function and his whole central ideal, humanity
so then, approaching hounds with both the thought of the sandman’s original tragic contours (see: the whole lead-in to daniel. christ above is the way that goes devastating to read) and the man vs fate core of the aeneid, i was considering a lot of things about how to mess around with both notions without gutting them entirely. i tend to dislike tragedies that become un-tragic without some sort of Serious Payment For It (not to say i don’t like happy stories because i very much do! but i get ticked off when high stakes get deflated too quickly) and i didn’t want to undermine the very real fact that the Fates are typically not versed in notions of empathy and/or leniency, and that dream and hob and those around them did experience and endure devastation and loss, and that death is a fact typically immune to argument.
the world of sandman is not one with easy answers, and to my mind there’s no such thing as a bargain with the Fates where you break even. for hob to get what he wanted, something had to be given, something dear and vital and real. there’s more to what hob actually gives the Fates than he verbally stipulates, which i tried to address largely via the corinthian and his perception of the situation, especially those last conversations with dream in the “swamp”. i have a lot of options about the corinthian in his function as “dark mirror” having a blistering clarity of understanding much of the time, which is why i foisted the onus of those complexities onto his dialogue, rather than hob, who (and i say this with love) is a creature of bias and often blinded to greater repercussions of his actions insofar as they extend beyond his immediate objectives/enjoyments, or dream, who can see the bigger picture but i think often really keeps himself from doing so when it comes to anything at all that’s personal (king of stories has a blindspot for his own). what hob gives the Fates actually costs him almost nothing, in the long run, if we operate with the idea that he cannot remember, nor is there any lasting effect from, his 600-ish heavily-relived years. there’s narrative and symbolic weight, of course — he gives them love as an oath and as nostalgia (sidebar: his driving force is an almost pre-nostalgia, a continual love of the moment as the moment is passing, but anyway) (cuff links), he gives them in a captured moment the lovely discomfort and simultaneous brilliance of being alive (the hook, the finger prick the blood), and he gives them a rich and complicated experience of humanity (those 600 years). but practically, what is actually taken from him that he doesn’t just get back?
only those few months — and in them, a web of real and known connections, all of which matter, and all of which change his understanding of and relationship to things like grief, and loneliness, and fear, and forgiveness. those are important changes, real changes, that would affect how he operates in the world going forward. that development is gone. he returns instead to the (of course, fought-for and hard-won) stasis of what was, which becomes what will always be. in making the Fates and their judgement more complex, he has actually made his own life less complex. now, i’m not going to sit here and argue that “suffering has inherent value” or some shit like that because i think that’s bullshit! pain is just pain. but he does lose experiences which would have shaped him in new ways, and, i think, good ways. even important ways
and he may well be shaped towards similar courses with dream (especially re: learning that lesson about loneliness — i think hob suffers from the curse of always, ultimately, being alone (immortality etc there’s so much discourse about this), and the road trip was in part about him learning that though it is the simplest path it is neither the sole nor the best path), but he certainly doesn’t learn them the same way, with the same faces, with the same acuity and clarity and intensity.
the thing with the Fates (to me anyway) is that you don’t ever just win. maybe you can get what you want, but it’s not easy (it make take a thousand repetitions of your lifetime until friction and the touch of your hands wears the sisyphean boulder down to a pebble — like the parable of the bird scraping its beak on the mountain), and it’s sure not free.
so yes, those months are lost. that’s a big part of the price. and we don’t know, at the end, how much of that thing he really gave ultimately comes back — his new relationship depths with deanna or cori or the other endless, those things aren’t seen. the main arc is resolved — hob and dream — but there are still pieces missing. he loses a piece of his human experience, he gets tossed back around through the wringer of his life (which is often distinctly not pleasant), and he is, as he ever was, a character with a path whose impetus and dictation rest heavily on external forces. even in attempting to channel his life elsewhere, he still has to bargain, and is still subject to the choices of the fates, and in some ways the story remains irrevocably a tragedy, in that one way or another it has loss in a central place. in the latter half of hounds hob really became my attempted version of an aeneas type — a man with a quest and a fated directive, a deeply human and flawed individual, who can alter the path and even irrevocably change the genre of his own narrative, but only at cost.
of course let’s be clear! some of all the actual rendering of this ended up as it did partly because i am not always a clean writer, and for that i apologize! but i did genuinely want that sense of gaps — of faces and voices given over to the gravitational well of the principal narrative arc of hob/dream versus the Fates. i think those things are gone. the narrative is forcibly re-centered around hob and dream, and in doing this — in shifting the story genre — other ties and bonds are not just cut, but unwoven entirely. when you change the kind of story you’re telling, the change is done at the expense of something else. kind of like how there’s a fixed amount of matter in the universe? you can’t create or destroy matter — to make something new you have to take from another place. (sidebar: wow i’m realizing something about my fundamental storytelling beliefs right now! laws of physics! anon your ask has really got my cylinders firing, and most sincerely thank you <3)
still, they might come back. though i didn’t write it as fully as i could have (i will freely admit there was a great deal of burnout at play towards the end there), i had a lot of thoughts re: repetition and density, namely that if you stack a thousand repetitions of a lifetime against each other it’s the equivalent of writing a word over and over and over on a page. when you erase it, the channels remain. language flows most naturally in the direction once etched for it. maybe hob learns those same lessons and knows the same people in the same way — maybe he and the corinthian find that odd patch of common ground, maybe he takes a long drive with delirium through rural maryland. maybe there are echoes. maybe even if it is gone what was still shapes the topography. maybe a kindness or a word exchanged still ring out when you can’t see them or remember them. while the milestones of our lives rippled the most visibly, i think we’re shaped a thousandfold ways by accumulations of small things we can’t distinctly remember. only a feeling of a thing, or the negative space it leaves.
well. tl;dr — i didn’t want to let hob get away without actually giving anything up, nor without his choice to bargain affecting others besides himself in equally irrevocable ways (sidebar: at his core is a selfishness that is both charming and ignoble — he wants to do a good thing for dream but also he makes a call that changes a plenitude of lives other than his own, and i don’t think he really asks, he just does — grey areas are his whole gig to me), because nobody makes a deal with the Fates for free, and changing genre has a price tag. it was my effort to make the tone of the whole beast more authentically sandman-esque, since sandman does a lot of that sort of water-muddying, especially when using understood narrative models/archetypes/etc etc
i am. sorry this was as long as it is! jesus! but i’m sending it off all the same. anyways, anon, thanks very much not only for your lovely kind words and the high honor of your tears (no pulitzer could mean more to me than knowing a thing i wrote really moved someone, seriously thank you) but also for giving me a blank check to go buck wild and ramble about my own damn writing and Things I Just Think <3 i hope you have a lovely day/morning/noon/night, and thanks a bunch for dropping by <3 <3 <3
#the sandman#hob gadling#dream of the endless#dreamling#hounds#vergil says hello#vergil says way more than fuckin hello tbh#vergil writes a manifesto woukd be a better line for this#anon has given me the greatest gift: License To Monologue#fingers crossed any of that actually answered the question at hand#thanks for saying hi and asking things because i love both experiences immensely#<3 <3 <3 <3 <3
37 notes
·
View notes
Note
Will we have an update soon?
Tumblr won't let me make normal posts for some reason, so the update will have to be in form of an answer to this ask smh. Anyway:
Hey everyone!
This post is long overdue, I know. I’m really sorry to those who have been worried about my wellbeing, as well as those who have been waiting around for an update for so long.
I’ve put off writing here because this “update” is something I’ve been wrestling with for a long time. But I can’t keep going back and forth on it forever, which is why I’m now letting you all know that the Shadow Society is officially discontinued.
I know that this might not come as much of a surprise to anyone at this point. I’ve tried to salvage the story by remaking it into something I’m happy with through a rewrite. But I’ve rewritten the rewrite itself more than once, and no matter what I do, I’m just not happy with the result. Rewriting something that’s already published with all the coding it involves is a lot more tricky than I initially thought it would be.
This is not a case of me being needlessly harsh on myself, however; it’s simply a truth I’ve come to realize after struggling to find a way to keep going with the story. I’ll never be fully content with it, or even content enough, unless I’d be able to completely remake and rewrite everything from scratch – and consequentially, I will never find enough motivation to continue because of how unhappy I am with it.
I’ve seen some speculation about my reason for rewriting the story and my long absence, and that they’ve had to do with comparisons to other IFs (well, you know which one). This isn’t entirely the case. While the comparisons did happen and probably still do, and while they were discouraging in the beginning, I can definitely understand where people have been coming from when making them. I talked about this more in-depth in the forums right after the release of TSS.
The main reason for why I can’t continue is that it’s not a series I feel passionate enough about to work on. My tastes have changed, and so has my writing to some degree. I’ve tried to convince myself that I am passionate about it. It’s hard to admit that you’re not when it’s been in your head for so long, when you’ve tried for so long to make this work and when you know that one part is published and that some people are anticipating a continuation. But it had to be done sooner or later.
Other reasons:
-While I don’t think that my writing style has changed drastically, I feel like it is somewhat different from how I wrote back in 2018 (which is a GOOD thing). Whenever I tried working on the rewrite or second book and attempted to emulate the writing of TSS, it just didn’t sound right anymore, and that took a lot of fun out of it.
-With everything that has happened with CoG over the past few years, they are no longer a company I want to write for.
Please know that none of this has discouraged me from writing in general. I still love doing it. If anything, this has taught me a lot about what I actually want to write and the writing process in general. Whether I end up publishing anything else in the future or will simply do so for my own enjoyment we’ll just have to see, though.
I still have the idea of a shadow-like world in my head, and maybe it’s one I will revisit at some point. Maybe there will be another version of TSS someday, albeit very different from the original one.
But for now, I can only thank you all for the overwhelming love and support over the years, and apologize for any disappointment this has caused. If people are interested, I’d be happy to share parts of the rewrite and unused ideas. The Tumblr page will still stay up at least for some time, but I will probably not be answering any asks from here on out.
EDIT: Forgot to add, but if anyone wants a genuinely amazing IF read you should check out my friend's wip here: https://uroboros-if.tumblr.com/ ❤️ Play the demo here: https://mistyriousness.itch.io/uroboros
208 notes
·
View notes
Note
hey guys it’s me again…i was wondering if we could see a (non-spoilery!) glimpse of your planning doc? i’d love to see how you guys are keeping the story going smoothly through the three of you and also just. what it looks like. if that’s ok.
ok love uuuu bye running into the sunset
since we got a couple of asks about this i'm just going to answer them together :-) it's been a hot second since we've talked about our writing process and since we have a few chapters now and are no longer at risk for spoiling Everything in one fell swoop, attached are chapters 1-5 from our official outline document! this is the one we use to actually navigate and reference for the fic as we write, but we've had two or three versions before this where we did the majority of the actual planning/going back on forth on scene ideas. those got really difficult to navigate after a while, so we cut out a lot of the commentary (we are hilarious. #trust) and fluff and made this one pretty bare-bones, but we have the entire fic planned out this way and have had it planned out before any of it was ever written! it definitely helps with continuity, because other than some minor changes to the dates and stuff (we realized at one point that like three chapters all occurred within the span of one week lol) and some retconning to some vestigial scenes from our original fic concept - which was very different in some aspects when we first thought of it back in january - we've stayed pretty consistent to this outline while writing. we also have a million other documents as well - playlist organization, an entire document we used to plan out titles lol, a google slides presentation breaking down the timeline, etc etc. thea and andi are much better outliners than i am because i rarely do it for my own fics but this process might have converted me fr. to some extent. anyways! enjoy snooping! or don't. lol. hope you like my commentary xoxo
(side note: chapter 5 probably had the most retconning of the chapters so far - the closet scene was one of the first ones we thought of for the fic and therefore heavily relied on how we originally imagined their dynamic to play out, which was really really different than how we ended up writing them! needless to say i definitely struggled with it lol. but it worked out fine. i think.)
#hopefully this satiates some curiosity#if anyone had it#this outline doc is not the most interesting i apologize#a lot of commentary was taken out so that it would be more consise and so we could scroll through it without getting lost#but our other one is too much of a mess to share. and also the commentary comes w spoilers#so. here#enjoy#asks#writing process#is that a tag we have. ik we have one#whatever i'll check later
139 notes
·
View notes
Text
Happy Birthday, Miles!
A short and late birthday story for Miles inspired by my recent post about Miles and Gwen. (Please forgive me for any writing errors, I have not written fanfiction for almost a year now so I might edit this out along the way as I notice any grammatic errors while rereading.)
----
In a familiar rooftop where she had met both the older Morales's, Gwen nervously paces around waiting for her boyfriend to arrive, her heart drumming a fast rhythm as she rethink this whole surprise. Yesterday evening, she had shared this idea with Mrs. Morales who of course, had wholeheartedly supported it and even thanked her for being such a caring lover for Miles. And now, she can't help be more anxious about Miles's reaction.
She knows she shouldn't pressure herself, besides who was she kidding, this is Miles Morales that she's thinking about. The sweetest and kindest man she had known her entire life, a man with the purest of heart who without hesitation would risk himself for others. Gwen knows that anything she gives him is something he'll cherish for on and on. Which is why, she wanted to give him an evening dedicated to just the both of them, an evening where they can lay under the stars and just be Miles and Gwen instead of Spider-Man and Spider-Woman.
---
In the early sunrise that day, Miles was woken up by the softest melody from a piano being played in his dorm. It was one he didn't recognize, a lovely lullaby of piano keys played together that he could tell was professionally and gracefully played. With how gratifying the music was, Miles had almost fallen back asleep until he realizes that he doesn't have a piano in his dorm and Ganke doesn't play one..
So how in the?
He begins sit up from his bed, carefully listening to music while slowly reaching up to the door then finally hears words, lyrics rather being sung and he had immediately recognized that comforting and gentle voice.
I never thought you'd be the one / To hold my heart / I never knew I'd think of you / Each time that we're apart.
Gwen? Miles peeks outside his dorm room to find his lovely girlfriend gracefully playing a massive piano (how it got there? he'll have to ask later) with her sitting down with her eyes closed but her body facing towards Miles's room. He stares in marvel at the scenery in front of him, completely awestruck with how captivating and pretty she looks playing and singing a the same time. He steps closer to her hoping to get a better hearing and look. The girl smiles in recognizing the boy's footsteps but she doesn't open her eyes yet, her fingers pressing on to the black and white keys with so much grace.
Each Day / I'll be the one missing your face / And all that you are / Save me / I promise I'd stay here by your side / And I know from the start.
Then as she begins to play the chorus she opens her eyes only to be greeted by a lovestruck Miles Morales, beaming at her breathtaking little concert and carefully listening to the lyrics. Their eyes met and Miles's smile grew even more as his heart beats to the slow rhythm of the piano. He hummed along with her and she continues on to sing softly whilst Miles just stares and listens. Her eyes fall back to the piano when she finally hits the last chorus. The dorm becomes a stage in the eyes of the birthday boy, he is the audience and she is the performer, the art, the star.
Miles is more focused on the lyrics and the unfamiliar song. Had Gwen recommended this to her yet? Or is it an original piece? Whatever the answer is, Miles felt that she was not merely singing for him but for everything they are.
When you're here I realized / I'll be the one to testify / Baby / Say that you're mine tonight.
Gwen had ended the song with one last key, looking back at the young man who had stars in his eyes and a gentle smile on his lips, she beams back at him chuckling at how adorable he looked. "Happy Birthday, Miles." she whispers in the most loving way imaginable.
Ignorant on his surroundings, he flinched at the shout of a "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" from behind him, now noticing the other people in the room carrying a little SpiderMan cake with candles lit up. A soft laughter produces out of Gwen at Miles's reaction while he examines them all and saw that both his close friends from the Spider Society and his family had all gathered up here today to surprise him with big smiles on their faces and presents on their hands. He instantly began to burst into tears his mom runs over to embrace him whilst peppering kisses on his cheeks and forehead.
He started to thank everyone for being here with him on his birthday especially his Spider friends. Hobie comes up to him and greets him with a pat on his head, telling him that it was Gwen's idea to have everyone come over and celebrate with Miles for his 16th birthday. "I thought you'd love the idea of having them all with you on your special day," Gwen clarifies, finally standing up from the piano to stride closer to Miles, "they are important to you after all." she finishes.
Miles smiles adoringly at her while also taking in on what she's wearing now that she has stood up fully for him to admire her clothing. "Thank you so much, mi preciosa. You look very gorgeous in that dress, it suits you a lot." Miles compliments, taking Gwen in to give her a massive hug after he was done admiring her look. A moment later, they head back to the Morales's apartment and had started to celebrate. Miles glances around to see his other relatives on the rooftop with magical decorations that drove Miles to burst into tears again. They really had planned this so well. This was most definitely his best birthday yet.
With his spider friends all dressed in casual clothes to blend in with the crowd while thel had the time of their lives, his parents and relatives coming to him to greet and blab short about how he's matured so much, his mom embarrassingly taking out baby photos of hin to show to his friends as he tries to stop her (he failed), and how Gwen had went with him to his Uncle Aaron's burial to pay respect. The sky becomes dark and his friends had decided to call it a night going back home to their dimensions.
Gwen had also excused herself but explained that she'll be right back to grab something from her dimension. She gives Miles a quick peck on the lips and leaves in a rush which brought in a doubtful look on Miles. While waiting for Gwen, he used his time to spend it with his parents chatting about his life as Spiderman and that even though they were terrified of the responsibility and danger, they were proud of him for trusting them and being honest with them.
And honestly, Miles was content with what he has.
After the events of what transpired, he had become more confident about himself. Sure, it did take a while to bring back into his spirit when Miguel had ruined him so badly on both his mental and physical health, but he has his loved ones who had wholeheartedly supported his decisions and everything that he is.
Of course, it also did take a period of time for him to trust his friends again. Gwen had almost.. almost fallen to her fate like the other Gwen Stacy's. Miles will never forget the day she had suddenly said goodbye and "I'm sorry." out of nowhere making Miles worried when she ran off over to the Green Goblin. Hobie had thankfully warned him about the destiny and tragic deaths of every variants of Gwen which that made him manipulate the canon events in order to save her.
.....just in time..
When Miles finally caught her hand, he held onto her, clinging like onto her and pulling her close to his chest yet still somehow not close enough for him. He embraced her so close as if she'll really disappear if he let go, if he hadn't made it in time, she might have been. A waterfall of tears streaming down his cheeks silently hoping that she would open her eyes.
And she did. Gwen had whispered his name, opening up for Miles to see her beautiful ocean blue eyes as she looks at him in longing, causing Miles to whisper affirmations in Spanish whilst she clings into him, falling back unconscious and in tears. Mrs. Morales saw it happened right before her own eyes, the uncontrollable sobs this Spiderman (which she later finds out is her son) had displayed in horror of losing Gwen. She had offered to help which resulting to Miles turning back to her unmasked revealing his identity. But he didn't care, he was too focused on the unconscious girl in his arms.
Her safety became his top priority.
Many months of being the only spiderman had ended and he had been greeted by amazing new people he can rely on and talk to about his troubles. He had managed to break his own canon event and Gwen's. They had spoken about it in the hospital, all those pent up sentiments and feels were both let out and heard, hugs and apologies were exchange, then that was the day they had shared their first kiss... It took Gwen by surprise, but Miles had to find a way to stop Gwen's nonstop apologies for what she did and how she doesn't deserve his forgiveness so Miles did what he had always wanted to do since that day at the rooftop.
Of course, it may have taken the young girl by surprise but she did return the kiss with much sweetness and softness, falling into their own rhythm and setting up their own pace as they test the waters.
"Mi amor, let's go talk to other umm.. spider people," Mrs. Morales closes the door after she takes a peek at the happenings inside, letting her son and Gwen have their moment. "I'm sure you have some questions to ask them." Jeff agrees without hesitation and leaves to check on the others. The moment they come back, both have fallen asleep in each other's embrace, Miles never felt happier that day.
---
Half an hour had passed and Gwen hasn't come back yet. Miles tries to contact her through his watch, no response. He begins to worry, so he goes out of his room only to be met by his mom who had wanted to him to follow her back to the rooftop. "You'll see, Miles." Rio had gently replied to Miles's constant curious questions. As they got nearer, Rio steps ahead to unlock the entrance for her son to witness the shimmer in his eyes when he saw his one final surprise.
On the rooftop was a rows of fairylights hanging above to light up the whole rooftop. He examines more, observing the small sunflower petals scattered all over the floor and leading to a path in front of him. He hasn't noticed yet, his mom left and closed the door whilst his eyes was too busy processing this magical sight in front of him. He took in the amount of detailed decorations everywhere then brings his gaze back to the petals, that leads all the way to a makeshift blanket fort with his one and only girlfriend, sitting on the opening with that familiar delicate smile and her hair gently swaying with the breeze.
"Happy Birthday, Bambi." She welcomed him using the nickname she used for him since he had compared him to a baby deer. Although Gwen usually uses the nickname as a taunting joke, but she said it so softly and filled with fondness that Miles cherished the name more than ever.
"Gwen!" He ran into her arms resulting to them both tumbling back into the fort, lying down on the soft blankets that wraps the floor with an enormous amount of pillows. He was practically squeezing her out of bliss that Gwen couldn't help but laugh and returning the hug with much energy. A couple of instants after, he shifts away sufficiently just to give her the sweetest kiss on lips, "I don't know how you did this but I adore you even more for it." Miles whispers in astonishment, his face near to Gwen and lays their foreheads on one another, he can see the soft tinge of pink rising up from her neck to her cheeks.
"I'm glad but I have 1 more gift for you." Gwen murmured quietly, unhurriedly sitting up with Miles to grab her gift just right underneath a distinctive sunflower pillow with a baby deer's head in the center of the flower.
Miles will have to snatch that later.
Whatever the gift was, it was small that Gwen had suppressed it in her fist, not a single clue of what's inside. Curious, Miles peeks at Gwen and notices how her cheeks had darken into a pretty shade of pink as she seizes one of his hands and gives him—
A USB?
"It's not really much but I just thought tha— that you know—"
Miles darts back at Gwen, encouraging her to take her time responding even though curiousness is ingesting him up on what this gift is about. "I always noticed how much you love listening to music. So I thought that whilst Miguel starts assigning me into more missions, I wanted to explore each of those dimensions and listen to their music and also gather songs that made me think of you and songs I know you might like." Gwen describes slowly to Miles, he bobs his head and smiles then finally understands what the gift is for.. "And I also added songs I wrote about you in it so you could hear them." she looks away in embarrassment, but she couldn't see how Miles was flustered and in tears.
He was complimented at the understanding that Gwen paid attention to these songs and instantly thought of him or figured out that he'd enjoy them. She seized on many assignments just so she could compile this much songs for him to enjoy and listen because it's what he loves. Gwen knew how much music means to him and she collected these all just for him. It was overwhelmingly endearing of her, so precious that he gently grabbed her face and started peppering kisses in every single portion of it, causing Gwen to chuckle in shock. He never felt so lucky to have her.
Later that night, Miles had insisted that they both listen to each playlist of songs. Giving their thoughts and feelings about how they felt about it. And as they reached the playlist of songs that were written by his girlfriend, he requested if she could maybe sing it to him instead. Without delay, she did what he had pleaded for and he slowly fell asleep in the warmth and comfort of her voice, Gwen shortly follows suit. In the early morning hours, Rio had gently covered the blanket on both of them and took a quick picture for Miles that now served as his new phone wallpaper. Miles had downloaded the songs onto his phone and would listen to them constantly when Gwen was away, sketching every vision and meaning with a big smile on his face...
The End.
- "He draws the stars in his lover's eyes as they only appear when they're together in each other's company."
- "The melodies were sweet and bright as he was that made her adore him more than ever."
#ghost spider#across the spiderverse#ghostflower#gwiles#miles and gwen#miles x gwen#milesgwen#gwen x miles#spider gwen#atsv#miles morales#gwen stacy#they're so precious#they're in love your honor#my precious babies#I NEED THEM TO BE HAPPY#Happy Birthday Miles!#i dont know what i wrote#i need sleep
136 notes
·
View notes
Text
Roll the Die 2: Be Kind Rewind
So my old Magic Die ran out of juice, but get this. Apparently I have a great-uncle who I never even knew about, and when he passed he left me his entire collection of dice and VHS tapes! The dice seem normal, but it's a really weird VHS collection. It has EVERYTHING. Like, literally. It even has movies and shows that came out after they stopped making VHS tapes. Stuff that's currently in theaters, too. And even streaming shows on Netflix and whatnot!
I decided to open up a rental shop. A stipulation in my great-uncle's will says I have to include one of the dice with each tape I send to people. I have no idea why, but I have too many, so I'm not sad to see them go! But here's where I need your help. I need to start renting tapes out online because I've run out of local customers! I had a few come in, but they never came back!
I even checked up on one of them, a guy named Justin, who lived right down the street. He'd rented that James Bond movie From Russia with Love. It turns out he had gone missing! All the police found when they searched his apartment was a half-drunk martini (which was weird, because I'm pretty sure he said he doesn't drink).
So yeah, if you want me to send you a tape, I just need some info for my customer records. Please tell me a little about yourself (age and general look/vibe is always helpful), let me know which title you want me to send, and then tell me which character in that movie/TV show you have the biggest crush on. Then I'll send the tape along with your special die! We have literally every title under the sun. Including From Russia with Love. I could have sworn I just had the one tape, but I found another one in the back just after Justin disappeared...
[Out-Of-Character Notes:
*These will be short stories tailored to whichever (18+, male) character you have a crush on. Whatever happens, you will end up in the movie/show's universe, but I will randomly roll a die to determine your ultimate fate.
Here are the possible results:
1: You will become your crush's soulmate
2: You will become your crush
3: You will become a different character in the movie/show's universe
4: You will become a family member of your crush
5: You will become an original character that fits within the movie/show's universe but doesn't know your crush at all
6: You will become your crush's anti-soulmate (nemesis, bully, etc.)
*PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR REQUESTS VIA "ASK ME ANYTHING" If you send it via a direct message, I will ask you to re-submit
*I will not be able write a story for each and every request, so if yours is not answered, I apologize in advance. I will try and write at least once a week (no promises), and no more than one story per person. I will prioritize shows and movies I am more familiar with, so feel free to submit requests for multiple titles, and I'll choose the best one for me to work with.]
43 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writing Likable Characters
Hey y’all! How is everyone? It’s your girl, @thecomfywriter, back after… a long time. Let’s not talk about it lol I have no excuses and you’re not here for life updates. Anyhow, I’m back! And today’s topic is a doozy, not because it’s complicated, but because for some reason, it’s unnecessarily difficult to actually make a character likeable and worth rooting for. Considering most stories want readers to emotionally invest themselves into their characters and like them— well, we see the issue, don’t we?
In this post, we’ll explore the fundamentals of character development, why it's important to create likeable characters, and how to create characters readers can emotionally invest in. There’s a great benefit to creating characters readers actually care about, whether they’re protagonists, side characters, or even (shh….) the antagonists. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Topic Overview:
1.0 Why Have Likeable Characters?
2.0 The Common Characteristics
NEXT POST: Is it possible to create an unlikable character worth emotionally investing in?
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.0 Why Have Likeable Characters?
It seems obvious, but once you break down the purpose of a likeable character, it becomes easier to identify the fundamental characteristics and traits that most likeable characters possess.
Suppose you go to a dinner party with your friends one night. There, you meet a variety of new people. ‘A’ is a tall brunette, with wide eyes and an even wider mouth. ‘B’ is a short and plump woman, with curly blonde hair and the occasional grey streak in between. ‘C’ is a scrawny man with a long face, a crooked nose, and a bow-legged stance. And ‘D’ is a blue eyed man with spiky green hair, tattoos all up his arms, and a silver septum piercing in his nose. Now, I’m going to ask you: ‘Who of these four people do you like ?’
Pretty freakin’ hard to answer, huh?
Now suppose I gave you the same scenario, but I tweaked it just a smidge. You go to a dinner party where you meet a variety of people. ‘A’ is a talkative woman who only stops to take a deep breath and inhale a gulp of her red wine. She is loose and flamboyant while she talks endlessly about the various adventures she’s been on during her time off as a travel nurse. But while her extravagant storytelling is more than entertaining, you find it difficult to get a single word in when talking to her because somehow, the conversation always steers back to herself.
Meanwhile, ‘B’ is a preppy and bubbly woman who works as an elementary school teacher, but you never really discovered that until the end of the conversation, when your mutual friend asks her how ‘the kids’ are, and the origin behind her soft-spoken tone and expressive eyes clicks in place. Your conversations together mainly center around your mutual love for animals— her with her dogs and you with your cats. Though she overapologizes and tends to be a bit more passive with all other topics of parley, the conversation is otherwise lighthearted. She is the first person to leave, however, cutting your time together short when she realizes the time and suddenly her dark circles seem to get darker. She is the one to redirect you to ‘C’, who is a professor at a prestigious university in a neighboring town. He looks quite formal and acts even moreso when he offers to shake your hand and requests the full length of your name and background.
As a complete contrast to ‘B’, ‘C’ is entirely reclusive and apathetic— outwardly, that is. There is an aire of stiffness around him, with his tall posture and unintentionally impressive vocabulary. Your conversations deviate from topic to topic, never dwelling too long on one discussion but always exploring it to a level of depth that surprises you. Whatever point you make, ‘C’ presents a counterargument, and what could have started as a regularly subjective opinion transforms into an interesting delve into the nature of peaceful arguments. While the conversation is more than cordial and definitely leaves you feeling a bit more intelligent and curious than before you met him, you can’t help but notice the lack of impression or reaction from ‘C’ whenever you spoke. It is only when ‘D’ swings around and introduces himself to you that you feel more assured, as he informs you that everyone who talks to ‘C’ leaves the conversation feeling a bit judged.
‘D’, you discover, is a freelance photographer who asks you if you would like a photo of you and your friends. You end up talking about his photography career, looking through his portfolio with awe— he is remarkably skilled and filled with a plethora of experience. Like your conversation with ‘B’, the tone is lighthearted, but this time, a banter is exchanged between yourself and the extremely witty ‘D’. His little quips are sassy, occasionally sarcastic but the follow-up laugh and pat of the shoulder relieves you from taking anything too seriously. While ‘A’ was entertaining, ‘D’ has a sense of humour that wonderfully matches your own. He is touchy, with every joke he makes being paired with some form of physical contact, but you discover he is like that with everyone as he expands the conversation to the entire dinner party circle. Occasionally, when his joke doesn’t land, he’ll do an awkward chuckle and make a self-deprecating comment to release the tension. But the tension never really dissipates when he makes jokes about his ex. Nevertheless, his smile is bright and his body language is always oriented towards the person he is talking to. You can’t help but feel properly heard when talking to him. The eye contact is unwavering and his every response is a testament that he was genuinely listening.
Now, if I asked you— who of the four do you like? Is it a bit easier to respond?
The difference between the two is a bit obvious (intentionally, to make things a bit clearer). The amount of substance allotted to each character increased with the second scenario. While the descriptions of the characters in the first example were confined to their appearance, the second scenario offered interactive exchanges with each character that allows you as the reader to fully imagine this person, even without the physical descriptors, and visualize the interaction with them beyond a surface level. In short, the first scenario gave you caricatures; the second scenario gave you people.
Why do I give you this very obvious statement? Because the more you think of your characters as characters to be liked or disliked, as opposed to the actions and interactions they have with their peers (in story) and their audience (the readers), the more shallow they will seem and the harder it will be for readers to connect to them, much less emotionally invest in them.
If you want to create profound characters, expose your characters to scenarios that showcase their interactions with that environment and the people in that environment. Allow the readers to feel like the character is someone they know in their life, someone they can relate to or envision, whether it be themselves, their mother, or their chatterbox coworker from HR.
Real characters evoke real emotions.
—-
2.0 The Common Characteristics
Before we get into a general list of likeable characteristics, let's highlight two terms and define them to differentiate them. Introducing… charm and charisma! Similar, but not the same.
Charm: this is your golden ticket, and also the hardest to nail. Charm is essentially the presence a person carries, and how attractive it is to outsiders. Not attractive in the sense of romantic interest. Attractive in the sense that this person has a draw to them. Their personality is inviting, unique, and confident. They have an ability to put other people in ease in their presence and are welcoming and inviting while also keeping people engaged. Charming people are attractive because their personalities and presence in a room makes you want to stay near them.
Charisma: the way I define charisma is magnetism. Its one of the components to charm that acts as the hook, line, and sinker. Charisma is a person’s humour, their body language, their tone, the way they look at you when they speak, whereas charm is the agglomeration of charisma, style, confidence, and personality.
Okay, now for the list. You can pick and choose characteristics from the following list to create your own unique combination for your characters, but its not enough to have characters “have” these characters. Remember part one of this post. How your characters demonstrate these characteristics is fundamental to how charming and charismatic they are. Also, the influence these traits have and relationship they have with other characters.
Likeable traits:
Intelligence: people generally respect intelligence in a person. There are different types of intelligence though
Wit: how quick-thinking a person is. Think of someone who is witty— they’re quick with their responses and multifaceted. IMPORTANT: multifaceted. If you’re just quick with your responses, you’re quippy. But to be witty, your responses have to display intelligence through introspection or observance in a humorous tone. It’s a hard thing to master, which is why witty people are usually highly respected and considered inexplicably charming.
Shrewdness: think of this through the example of schemers. Shrewdness is a meticulous, detailed type of intelligence that is sometimes used in negative connotations to describe people who are cunning and use their intelligence for malevolent intentions. But in general, shrewdness is about being practical, decisive, and considerate of multiple factors before coming to a decision. It displays thoroughness and patience in deliberating one’s thoughts and actions. Personal opinion that is not at all unpopular: shrewd villains >>>> MWAH!
Cleverness: I like to think of these people as atypical with their intelligence. They find out-of-the-box solutions to problems and are able to apply creativity to problem-solving.
Knowledgeable: this is what people think of when they think of trying to make an intelligent character. The typical approach to writing a genius is making them know everything. And while many intelligent/smart people are knowledgeable, it's typically because of the underlying traits they have that drive them to pursue knowledge (i.e. curiosity, focus, passion, wonder, skepticism, objectivity). Focusing on those aspects of your character rather than what they know itself is what will sell your character as intelligent rather than a human encyclopedia.
Introspection//Observation: this is emotional intelligence. Being able to assess people’s intentions, their emotional states, predict their reactions, and also being able to understand and connect to their own emotions. Emotionally intelligent characters are honestly so lovely, so refreshing, and such an underrated type of intelligence. To be able to read and predict human behaviour is so extremely impressive and also allows your character to alter their behaviour depending on their audience, which can add to their charisma and charm
Kindness: no one likes an asshole. It’s really as simple as that. People enjoy the company of people who are tender, caring, compassionate, empathetic, and not mean. It’s safe company, and company that makes others feel better about themselves. Entirely welcoming, which is why its so charming to be kind and gentle.
Humour: I could do a whole separate post on different types of humor. But to summarize it lightly, to write a character, it’s more important to try to humor the reader than the other characters. Humor is subjective, but adding genuine comedy rather than ingenuine reactions from other characters and telling the readers that ‘Character A is funny’ doesn’t have the same effect as inciting genuine laughter from the reader. Different types of humor include:
Witty humor: as I mentioned earlier, it carries an added advantage of intelligence to the mix. These can include light jabs between friends, but if done incorrectly, can make the character seem mean. So good luck lmao
Dark humour: hard to pull off tastefully. General rule with attempting dark humour though? It's all about boundaries. It's dark humour if you're joking about your own experiences, traumas, or something personal to you/your character. Doing it on the expense of someone else's experience is called being an asshole.
Sass//sarcasm: use this sparingly. Sass is fun with banter, but imagine hanging out with someone who answers everything with sass or sarcasm. Sounds exhausting? That’s because it is. Also, quick differentiation: sass has personality and a bit of zest to it; sarcasm is deadpan and mocking. Compare the following dialogues:
Sass: “Hey Jocelyn! Jeez… Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” “And clearly someone else woke up on the right side.”
Sarcasm: “Hey Jocelyn! Jeez… Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” “You don’t say.”
Trustworthiness: the most inviting thing about a person is knowing they’re not a backstabbing, shit-talking, macking asshole. Someone you can trust your secrets with is someone you can be vulnerable around, which is one of the foundations of creating intimate relationships. Having a character who blabbles off other character’s secrets, or even just petty gossip, is not a demonstration of trustworthiness. Valuing a person and truly listening to them while they speak, and then asking them about how private they want to keep that information— oof that’s a keeper right there.
Good listener: just to bounce off the last point, being attentive and showing your character cares about the people around them, their interests, and what they have to say is such a likeable quality because it appeals to the part of everyone (including your reader) of wanting to be sincerely heard. Your character doesn’t have to be devotional. But it’s about being respectful.
Okay, a bit more of a condensed list now so I can wrap things up:
Empathy: understand others’ emotions and being considerate towards other perspectives
Humility: no one likes an arrogant prick. Don’t make them Mr. Humble either (Mr. Humble in the sense of being humble to the point of being rather pretentious or being a doormat. Like, a person can acknowledge their achievements, be proud of themselves, have confidence, and ALSO be humble by not being braggy and arrogant about it)
Honesty: telling the truth, yes, but also being sincere in how they conduct themselves.
Reliability: no one likes mr. flakey lol. Being able to depend on someone strengthens relationships, and the moment a character exhibits this quality for the reader to view, the reader is able to attach themselves to this character
Optimism: optimism is fun! Optimism makes people feel hopeful. Yeah, pessimism used for comedy with sarcastic characters is a whole trope. But it’s only likeable if executed correctly. Otherwise, pessimism can be a drag. Think of pessimism as the risky route vs optimism as the safe route.
Resilience: showing a person’s willpower and their will to live by enduring hardship is one of the most respectable qualities, because its a quality we all wish to emulate in our real lives and understand takes a great deal of effort to actually be successful in.
Generosity
Patience
Authenticity
Open-mindedness
Courage
Gratitude
Adaptability
Selflessness
Fairness
Integrity: what are your character’s values? How true do they stay to their values? How strong is the needle of their moral compass? This one is massive to creating a character who reader’s respect, because efining a person’s value system allows them to become intimately familiar with the character’s perspective of the world, their ethics code, and their morality. Even if they cannot agree with all of the values of the character, a character who stays true to their values and has integrity is commendable, and therefore in most cases, respectable (hint hint, this is a huge transition to my next post lol)
Essentially, creating likeable characters is about trying to charm your readers with your characters' personality and presence, to the point where the reader would genuinely want to be friends with this person in real life. Having their actions match their narrative description and their in-story reputation also adds to your reliability as a writer. If you’re trying so hard to convince me as the reader than Jonathan is a real stand-up, charming guy who is a huge womanizer; smooth-talker all around to the point where he is able to get positions and extort favours from people because he has such a way with words… but then all of Jonathan’s dialogue sounds like a piece of wet cardboard was brought to life, I’m going to start thinking you as the author are rather delusional, think I’m dense, or have no idea how smooth-talkers actually sound. But what I’m not going to believe is that Jonathan is what you say he is.
—
Okay! That’s all for today, folks! Stay tuned for my next post on writing unlikable characters that readers still want to root for. Also! I’m thinking of short story prompts for you guys to practise your writing with on this account, now that I have the chance to be a bit more active.
Why do I have more opportunities to be more active?
I FINISHED MY BOOK, BABYYYY!!! LETS GOOOOOO :D
Yeah, so I might post some excerpts of my own wip here. Currently though, I’m in the editing phases, and then querying!!!
Okay, anyways, toodles! Have a great rest of your day or evening! <3
#writers#writing#wip#writing community#writerblr#fiction#writers tips#writing tip#tips and tricks#writing tips#character development#charming#character#characters#ocs
23 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
thegoodpicturesstuff
Untitled
gngmodels
gngmodels
recopilaciondefragmentosrotos
'G' Penguin
electric-katz
manic-k arts