i usually don't speak too much about my personal life on here. I’ve always kept it pretty separate from here, and being anonymous makes it easier to keep things at a distance.
but disappearing the way I have without saying anything… hasn't sat right with me.
so, the truth of the matter... I haven’t been okay for a while. around the same time I mentioned work picking up, things were also getting heavier behind the scenes in ways I didn’t really know how to explain. I tried to push through it, to keep things normal here, but it caught up to me.
more recently, I ended up in hospital for a bit. it pulled me out of everything. I didn’t have it in me to be online, to respond, to write… even though I thought about it a lot.
and I know what that probably looked like from the outside. silence. inconsistency. another blog that stopped showing up.
I of course have long seen the shift, people drifting, engagement slowing down, and I don’t blame anyone for losing interest in 'Simmer' because of that. it's probably the part that hurts the most, but I understand it.
I just feel really sorry for have gone so quiet, especially after genuine attempts of announcements I would be on more.
This space, our space, means more to me than i can never fully articulate, and not being able to show up for it… or for you… has been weighing on me.
I’m starting to come back to myself a little, slowly. I will get to messages. and if anyone is still here, still interested, I do want to keep writing Simmer.
Every way Vi turned, she was there, but never more than a moment. Vi would turn sharply and see Cait in her stolen clothes from their first jaunt into the Undercity. The costume that Vi had taken for her was one of a dozen attempts to get rid of the mousy, timid little burden that was getting in her way as she hunted for her sister, for answers, for Silco. For someone made of meat that would bruise and split under her knuckles until she could beat ten years of her life out of them, ten years in hell.
Once she saw her dancing, free, without the grief that weighed her down like a suit of armor and choked the life and joy from her. This was another punishment- to see flashes of the girl she was before Vi’s *bullshit* wrecked her life. So full of life, so devastatingly beautiful, dancing in the dark with her skin aglow, and then she was gone and some shitbag was making over on her and got a broken jaw for his effort.
Cait was there when the world spun from the booze, and when ham sized fists cracked ribs and bruised organs to the point of bursting, when the grain alcohol scoured her throat with hot whips and hard knuckles chipped her skull and scrambled her brains. When her cheek hit the dirt she would come in brief flashes, soft fingers curled lovingly around her chin, huge eyes liquid with grief.
On those nights she made it home -or at least, crawled back to her shithole flip house- she would lie on her side and see Cait’s face filling her vision again, only to slide inevitably into nightmares and dreamscapes made torture by her absence.
She had done everything wrong and Cait was gone.
Most of the times. Sometimes she raged. That Piltie bitch promised she wouldn’t changed but she’d lied, she already had. Vi had given her everything, everything! Her name was shit down here, her family gone, her life gone. She was nothing but a rabid dog mauling other beasts until one day she’d get her throat torn out, just more trash. What had she called them? Animals?
She’d scream her name in a rage as the bottle shattered on the wall and plead for her as she gulped from the next one. Eventually even Loris stopped coming around.
“I’m not going to let you kill yourself, Violet. I’m definitely not going to help.”
“Then fuck off,” Vi snarled.
She didn’t know how long that had been. Down here in the lowest parts of the undercity, day wasn’t much different than night. She crawled back to the pits. She fought. She won, sometimes she lost. With blood knuckles and a feral grin or a busted lip and a feeling of coming apart inside her ribs, she’s take a bag of coins, give a few to the landlord and spend the rest on drink.
It was Cait’s voice she heard in the dark.
You’re not even eating.
“Go fuck yourself, cupcake,” she’d mutter, and some sump rat would stare at her like a madwoman, sometimes run his yap and get a pop in the jaw for it.
Eventually it’d happen. The booze-rot would eat its way to the outside, or something would break inside, or she’d throw hands with someone with a blade or a club and be too tired and drunk and fucked up to fight it and she’d be fucking free.
No more ghosts. The living do not haunt the dead.
She wasn’t sure how she got back here. She wasn’t even sure if she won the last bout. They were all melting together in a stew of pain, the meat within falling to shreds from boiling too long. Vi stared at herself in the cracked mirror, one little Vi surrounded by a dozen little ones, all splitting the same face, drawn and waxy and pale and marred by sooty black. She took a drink of her poison and shook the bottle, hearing the hollow slosh of the dregs, and tossed it, uncaring of it broke or not, if there were enough coins in the black bag to buy another.
Vi fell more than sat on the bed. Gravity did the rest and she fell on her side, wincing at the explosion of pain radiating from her flank. Cracked rib, most likely. She remembered now. She’d been careless, slow, tried to trap an uppercut meant to crack her sternum and kill her and took it in the rib instead. Every breath hurt. It would be easier to just not to, but she couldn’t stop.
Of course she was there. Cait lying in a silken heaven, big liquid eyes drinking Vi’s soul, full of such compassion and love. No one had looked at Vi like that since she was a child, looked past the grime and the scars and the hurt to just see her.
No one but Cait, and Cait left her.
Vi closed her eyes, ready as ever not to open them. When she felt a soft brush of fingers on her cheek she brushed them away. The visions could fuck off, she was tired.
“She’s not waking up,” Cait said, her voice tight with concern, stretching the clipped professional tone she used round her subordinates to its limit.
“She’s hurt badly,” a man said.
“Commander, we have to go. If someone spots you here they’ll tear us apart.”
“Loris, help me carry her.”
The worked carved red lines of pain through her as powerful hands lifted her from the bed.
This was odd. She’d imagined Cait everywhere but she’d always been alone. Why the hell was she hallucinating Loris? Sure, he was a fine drinking buddy and reminded her a little of Vander but he was hardly-
Oh.
Vi forced her eyes open, a struggle with how gummy and dry they were. The big man was carrying her in his arms and Maddie was comically struggling to carry an oversized bag weighed down by Vi’s atlas gauntlets.
Cait.
Cait was there. It was her. It was really her. Vi could feel her fingers probing her broke rib and see her and God she could smell her, Cait smelled like lilacs and how could anything smell so good in this fetid shithole?
“Cupcake?” she rasped.
“What is she, hungry?” Maddie muttered.
“Cait, get your hood up,” said Loris. “Vi, stay quiet. We’ll take the ventilation shafts, stay out of sight.”
Vi obliged the request by passing out.
It felt like hours in the dark. She’d wake, not knowing if she was in the dream world or the real, if these figures were carrying her to Piltover or hell. She would hear Cait’s voice, soft words to steady her and a gentle hand clasping hers when a jolt made her cry out in agony.
It was strangely easy to sleep while someone as carrying you.
When she woke, she knew she had to be in a dream. She’d dreamed this before- opening her eyes and seeing the elaborate silk canopy of Cait’s expansive bed in her palatial bedroom, big enough to build a Zaunite tenement inside. She would sit up, and Call Cait’s name and hear no answer. She’d rise and wander the halls and eventually make her way to the gardens and still no one would reply.
Vi would wander in an empty world forever, a specter with no one to torment.
No, it was different this time. She’d never dreamed of a thin tube connecting a bottle hanging over the bed to a needle taped in place on her arm. He dreams had never had the constricting feeling of bandages around her trunk, or wrapped around a dozen cuts on her arms and legs. In dreams her lips had never been dry, her throat never parched. The dream world traded in other kinds of pain.
She tried to speak but it was like her tongue was sandpaper, so she moved to sit up instead, gasping in agony as pain exploded in her side. She felt like shit, skin clammy with sour sweat, hurting all over and her head was pounding.
“Try not to move,” Cait whispered, suddenly there, a gentle hand pressing her back down. “You’ve a broken rib and internal injuries, and the withdrawal.”
“Caitlyn?” Vi managed to choke out.
Cait gently lifted her head, guided a glass to her lips. The water was ice cold and it was bliss. She closed her eyes and savored it as deeply as a fine wine. Not that she’d had much experience with that.
“Where am I?”
Cait hesitated.
Vi’s eyesight was clearing now as she blinked the gum away. Cait was pale and drawn, dark circles under her eyes from nights without sleep. There was a deep weariness in her eyes that made Vi’s heart ache. She looked for the spark that had always been there, but saw only faint embers, ready to be swept into nothing by the slightest air.
“I brought you home.”
Vi closed her eyes.
“You should have left me where you found me.”
“I shouldn’t have left you at all. I’ll never forgive myself.”
Cait curled her fingers around Vi’s, and squeezed.
and happy chrysler all you COTN fans. it’s another fic-ception situation where I write a oneshot set in @flowerslut’s COTN/WITD universe! This one contains spoilers up through the most recent chapter of WITD.
anyway the background here is that shannon refuses to accept my Vision of how her story should go so I fixed it for her. I gotchu bestie <333333
1.8k words
jalice + kate/garrett + tanya
rated T for discussion of sex
iii. the scandal
Alice had come closer to death than this last year, so the incident with James was far from her first rodeo. She knew the drill—the swarm of helpful Containers and less-helpful human officials and reporters, the various top-secret debriefings. And of course the lectures—a concerned one from Carlisle and Esme forbidding her (again) from acting on her own, a thermonuclear one from Rosalie about the utter fuckfest going on in the press, a mild one from Josie about using her health as an alibi for ‘silly heroics…’
And then there was Jasper, whose cocktail of terrified fury and frantic, aching relief kept seeping out and giving Alice emotional whiplash even when he wasn’t actively lecturing her. It was strange to have their roles reversed—last year she’d been the one anxiously hovering, afraid to let him out of her sight for a moment. Now she could hardly step out of her room without an interrogation, or so Emmett teased her (“serves you right,” said Edward when he caught her mentally complaining about it.)
Only Bella was, as usual, blessedly quiet about the whole thing, welcoming Alice back with a hug and a simple “I’m glad you’re okay.” Trapped at home under Rosalie’s “lay low and stay out of the public eye, for fuck’s sake” edict, Alice found herself retreating more and more often to the second floor sitting area that served as Bella’s unofficial reading room for peace and quiet. She and Jasper had a tacit understanding that whenever she went to sit with Bella, it meant she wasn’t in the mood to talk about the James Incident.
Unfortunately, Rosalie had no such understanding, and certainly no scruples about launching into another tirade three feet from where Bella was trying to finish The History and Future of Reading.
It was late afternoon, the three of them alone in the house, and Alice had been curled up on the couch, flipping through another of Josie’s oh-so-subtle wedding magazines. She abandoned it with a sigh as Rosalie launched into her latest theme, which was listing off all the things Alice had yet to do, working up to what she obviously thought was her coup de grace:
“And I can’t believe you were going to die a virgin!”
Alice looked away. “Um. Actually…”
Rosalie froze mid finger-wag. Bella looked up from her book at the sudden silence. “What’s happening?”
“No,” said Rosalie slowly. She crossed her arms. “No way. You didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” demanded Bella.
Were Alice human, she would have been bright red. “We did.”
“Did what?”
Rosalie made an earsplitting sound of pure indignation. “Do you mean to tell me you finally fucked Jasper and didn’t even tell us about it?”
“Ohhh,” said Bella. She opened her book again.
“It didn’t seem important!” protested Alice.
“Not important? Alice, he hasn’t gotten laid since 1976!”
Alice threw up her hands. “I was kind of preoccupied with my sister getting kidnapped, Rose! You know, the whole thing where James almost killed me?”
“Oh, forget James,” dismissed Rosalie. “We want to hear about Jasper! Details, now.”
“I’m not giving you details!” Alice’s voice was on its way to a pitch only bats could hear.
Rosalie’s eyes narrowed. “That bad, huh? I guess I can’t blame the guy. I wouldn’t be able to last longer than a few seconds either if I’d been celibate for fifty years.”
“He didn’t—that’s not what happened!” spluttered Alice.
“Oh?” said Rosalie. (Bella’s eyes appeared over the edge of her book.) “So it wasn’t bad?”
“Of course it wasn’t—wait a second.” Alice cut herself off. She crossed her own arms, mirroring Rose’s posture down to the glare. “Nice try. You aren’t getting another word out of me.”
Rosalie groaned. “Come on, Alice! After the 24/7 PR nightmare you two have stuck me with for the next decade? You have to tell me something. Bella, back me up.”
“Well…” said Bella, shooting Alice an apologetic smile. “I have to admit, I am a little curious…”
It was Alice’s turn to groan. “Not you, too!”
“Maybe you can give us some more, ah, impersonal details. Like, where did it happen?” Bella suggested.
Alice let out a huff. “If I tell you, will you leave me alone?”
“Yes,” said Bella before Rose could reply to the contrary.
“It must have been in Denali, right?” supplied Rosalie. “Unless…don’t tell me you joined the Mile High Club.”
Alice laughed nervously. “Not quite,” she hurried to answer before Rosalie could jump to conclusions.
Rose and Bella exchanged a significant glance. “What does ‘not quite’ mean?”
“Nothing happened on the plane!” Alice lied.
“Then it was in the Denalis’ guesthouse,” assumed Rosalie. “Nice choice. Classy place. Emmett always says if Carmen and Eleazar didn’t want us to fuck there, they shouldn’t have provided a king-sized bed.”
Alice laughed again. “Um. Yeah. Funny you should mention beds,” she stammered. She checked the immediate future and saw that if she wanted to get this conversation over with, she was going to have to fess up. “It was actually on a couch in the library,” she finished in a rush.
Rosalie’s mouth popped open. Bella’s book slid into her lap.
“The library?” said Rosalie. “You had sex in the actual library?”
“Mm-hmm. The third floor,” Alice confirmed.
“Wow,” said Bella quietly.
“No way,” said Rosalie. “Em and I have always wanted to fuck there! I can’t believe Jasper of all people agreed to it.”
“Well, we didn’t make it a full month, it’s true,” said Alice, sounding a little too pleased with herself. “But he hadn’t had an episode in weeks and I could see that he wasn’t going to hurt me—”
“Not that,” scoffed Rosalie. “The cameras.”
Alice frowned. “The what?”
-
The security room in Denali was woefully outdated, Tanya knew. Aside from the periodic ripping out and replacing of its monitors, the place hadn’t been refurbished since the 80s, and it showed. The wood-paneled walls, the godawful brown carpet…luckily, no one ever came in here but the five of them, and now Garrett. It was Garrett who had come up with the ingenious new system whereby whoever had lost a bet most recently had to review the past two weeks’ security feeds. Tanya had to admit, it was more fun than drawing straws.
Still, watching the feeds was monotonous work on the best of days. Ten floors of bookshelves and file cabinets didn’t exactly make for a visually dynamic experience.
Which is why today’s viewing experience was so very, very notable. So...interesting. Tanya fired off a quick text to the group chat.
“What is it?” wondered Kate, poking her head in a few minutes later. Garrett lounged against the doorframe beside her.
Tanya beckoned them in. “Take a look at this.” She hit play on the black-and-white feed before her.
Garrett and Kate watched, silently at first. Then Kate said, “is that—?”
“Yep.”
Garrett leaned closer. “And are they—?”
“Yep.”
Kate let out a low whistle.
“Damn,” said Garrett, raising his eyebrows at the monitor. “Who knew Whitlock had it in him?”
“I always suspected,” said Tanya thoughtfully. “I mean, Maria must have kept him alive for something.”
“You realize we could make a killing off of this?” Garrett mused. This was followed by a yelp as Kate shocked him.
“Mmm,” agreed Tanya. “It would make Kim Kardashian’s look like a flop.”
Kate nodded her reluctant agreement. “There was a thinkpiece last year about how searches for ‘spinner’ on pornhub increased by 190% after Alice’s first press conference. Do you think she reads her instagram DMs?”
“Doubtful,” said Tanya. “Surely Rosalie has that sort of thing moderated.”
“God, imagine the audacity it would take to send a dick pic to Jasper Whitlock’s girlfriend,” chuckled Garrett.
“Probably the same amount it takes to watch security footage of them fucking in a library,” said Tanya dryly.
“Don’t tell me the original succubus is afraid of a little light voyeurism,” Garrett teased.
“Alice probably watches us all the time,” added Kate.
“Shit, do you reckon she’s watching right now?” wondered Garrett, looking around as if she might be lurking in the rafters. “Hello, Alice! Tell Whitlock I said ‘nice technique!’”
His phone rang a half second later, making all three of them jump.
“Fuck,” said Tanya.
“It’s her,” hissed Kate. “Now you’ve done it!”
Tanya’s awestruck “She really was watching” was drowned out by Garrett’s indignant “I’ve done it? And I suppose you were an innocent bystander in all of this!”
Kate answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Kindly turn that off,” growled the voice on the other end. Tanya would never have imagined that a little thing like Alice could sound so menacing.
The three of them looked at each other in turn. Behind Tanya’s head, the two figures on the security feed changed positions.
“Turn what off?” said Garrett. Tanya had to admire the man’s sheer balls. Kate reached around her and hit the spacebar with a sharp tap.
“All the way off,” commanded Alice. “And then delete it.”
“Awww, c’mon, Brandon,” Garrett teased. “Don’t tell me the hero who killed Maria is embarrassed. There’s no shame in a little good old-fashioned exhibitionism.”
“It was not exhibitionism,” Alice insisted. “Now delete it.”
“Are you sure about that?” piped up Kate. “You certain you don’t want to keep it for personal use? Take my advice, you could really make Whitlock’s decade with—”
“Ha. I think she’s already made his decade, Katy,” snickered Garrett. “But you raise a good point—let’s not be hasty, now. A cinematic masterpiece like this could come in quite handy. Why delete it when we could—”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll have you court-martialed,” snarled Alice.
Garrett and Kate looked at Tanya. Can she really do that? Kate mouthed. Tanya had no desire to find out.
“You know I can see you, right?” came the voice from the phone.
“Guess that makes us even,” murmured Tanya.
“Fine,” said Alice. “I don’t have to have you court-martialed. You’re going to delete that footage right now because if you don’t, I’ll tell Jasper.”
Garrett and Kate looked at Tanya again. It might have been her imagination, but they looked even paler than usual.
“Now, now,” said Tanya, forcing a light laugh. “There’s no need for such drastic measures.” She took a last, appraising look at the screen before switching off the monitor. “I’m deleting it,” she announced. Garrett and Kate sighed in unison.
“Thank you,” said Alice.
“Of course,” warned Tanya, “there’s no deleting a vampire’s memory—absent company excluded.”
Garrett grinned at the phone. “It’s okay, Tanya—Brandon’s cool! She won’t tell the old grouch. This’ll just be our little secret, then, eh, Half-Pint?”
And so it remained. Tanya had to hand it to Alice—she had hit upon a threat greater than being court-martialed. The three of them kept their mouths shut, even though Tanya was simply dying to tell Irina.
Of course, some of them were better at discretion than others. Poor Jasper, Tanya reflected. If Alice had her way, that scary sonofabitch was going to spend eternity deeply confused as to why Garrett insisted on slapping him on the back and wolf-whistling every time they met.
.
you’re welcome shannon 🤠
disclaimer: technically this is (I’m guessing) set after WiTD, but I actually don’t know how the james confrontation will play out so that much is 100% just my own assumptions that they’ll probably live through it. no actual spoilers past what shannon has posted, I promise.
Hi! Could you do Charles/Carlos 50. putting a hand over the other's mouth to shut them up and 9. first kisses, where Carlos can't stop watching Charles's lips ;)
Oh anon, here you go. I may have made Charles a shameless flirt but hey, if the shoe fits ;)
Charles/Carlos - Not What I Expected
Carlos had expected a lot of things when he had joined Ferrari.
He knew that joining a new team was always an adjustment, for the driver and the staff. After years of working together, you got into comfortable routines and patterns, but switching teams meant adjustments for everyone. It meant forging new work friendships and alliances, learning how a different team operated and adapting to their framework while negotiating in things you wanted to carry with you from experience.
For Carlos, that meant spending more time with the Ferrari staff than some of them were used to. Charles often only filling his required sim hours and check ins, preferring to treat his team to dinners and lunches after debriefs than stay around learning how things ticked. Sebastian had spent longer with his team, but a lot them had been poached by other teams, meaning they had to adjust to Carlos’s hands on approach to his job.
“Your husband is IMPOSSIBLE!” Johnny yelled before storming off to his room and shutting his door with a loud SLAM.
“Oh boy...” Stiles muttered. He looked at Derek and silently asked if he had any idea what this was about. Derek only shrugged.
“Honey, we’re home~” Peter sang too happily.
Stiles narrowed his eyes in suspicion but replied just as sweetly. “We’re in the kitchen honey-bear.”
As soon as Peter came into view, Stiles now got a good idea of what upset Johnny.
“Sweet pea sugarplum, apple of my eye...with all the sincerity I can possibly muster, and remember that I love you, but...what the actual fuck?”
Peter was rocking a pink unicorn onesy, hair gelled and styled in a mohawk while wearing those sunglasses with blinds across the frame and a too big hip hop chain around his neck, and glow stick rings around his neck and wrists.
“Oh my god...” Derek laughed. He actually laughed at seeing his uncle like this.
“Before, I used to be so worried about appearing cool but now that parenthood apparently makes it disappear I realized how liberating it actually is,” Peter said with a shit eating grin.
“This is all because of yesterday?” Stiles asked.
“HE SANG ON THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS TO I LIKE BIG BUTTS! I AM TAKING THE BUS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!” Johnny yelled from his room.
“’It’s adorable he thinks this is the peek...there’s more to come,” Peter said evilly. Then he looks in the direction of Johnny’s room, “It’s gonna get MORE epic until someone ADMITS I AM THE KING OF COOL!” Then he turns to smile at Stiles, “What’s for dinner?”
“Stir fry. Derek’s apple crumble for dessert.” Stiles replied.
“Oh yum, Talia’s recipe. I’m gonna go get some ice cream to go with it.” Peter said before heading out again.
“Are you gonna talk to either of them?” Derek asked.
“No. I kinda wanna see where this goes.” Stiles answered.
This is a fanfic of a fanfic that I did! I love the fic and i thought to myself, what if he couldn't love her? What if he had no choice, or he refused? So this is my very short contribution! I hope...
by CaptainKingBog
It had been hotter than usual on the base that day. The sun beat down on them the way bullets did on the Specialist’s shield: never-ending and heavy-handed. Medic himself had briefly thought of going without his precious jacket out on the field, but he knew better and suffered each moment that he stood out on the field.
Scout took this opportunity to be as loud and annoying as possible, and it made no one feel any better. Medic had threatened him with an unnecessary surgery just to get him to shut up, (although had anyone asked if he was serious they wouldn’t have been too surprised to find out that Medic would have reviled in
